Post by Steve Draper on Jan 18, 2014 14:27:22 GMT -8
It seems to me that a potentially interesting category of games we're missing currently (in the repositories in general, and on Tiltyard in particular) are team games.
By 'team games' I mean multiplayer games wherein the goals of disjoint sets of roles are strongly correlated (canonically all team members have the same goal value for any terminal state). The nearest we currently come is the rather awkward 'Three player connect4' where you score 50 for the role which plays after you winning - although this is a correlation it fails to partition the roles into disjoint sets (teams) and is only a 0.5 correlation.
It would be fairly trivial to convert some existing games to a team variant (with no change to visualization and only very small changes to the GDL). For example - 4 player free for all, with the goals changed so that the roles whose spawn positions are opposite one another score the sum (or average if we need normalization) of the capture counts of those two roles.
Some more interesting variants are possible with slightly larger changes - for example, a variant of hex with 4 roles, with alternating players divided into 2 teams to place that team's tile markers. Better yet (but a lot more work), it is probably possible to have a hex variant on an octagonal play field where each of 4 players have to connect opposite sides (a pair of sides for each role) and where tiles of either player of a team constitute connections for both that player and their team-mate (which is actually logically equivalent to them both placing the same tile type, but might be more interesting visually)
Has any though ever been given to games featuring pairwise cooperation like these? At least the 4 player free for all variant would be super-trivial to set up.
By 'team games' I mean multiplayer games wherein the goals of disjoint sets of roles are strongly correlated (canonically all team members have the same goal value for any terminal state). The nearest we currently come is the rather awkward 'Three player connect4' where you score 50 for the role which plays after you winning - although this is a correlation it fails to partition the roles into disjoint sets (teams) and is only a 0.5 correlation.
It would be fairly trivial to convert some existing games to a team variant (with no change to visualization and only very small changes to the GDL). For example - 4 player free for all, with the goals changed so that the roles whose spawn positions are opposite one another score the sum (or average if we need normalization) of the capture counts of those two roles.
Some more interesting variants are possible with slightly larger changes - for example, a variant of hex with 4 roles, with alternating players divided into 2 teams to place that team's tile markers. Better yet (but a lot more work), it is probably possible to have a hex variant on an octagonal play field where each of 4 players have to connect opposite sides (a pair of sides for each role) and where tiles of either player of a team constitute connections for both that player and their team-mate (which is actually logically equivalent to them both placing the same tile type, but might be more interesting visually)
Has any though ever been given to games featuring pairwise cooperation like these? At least the 4 player free for all variant would be super-trivial to set up.
