Announcing a new game: Majorities

Steve,

There are no lines with an even number of (playable) hexes. After deleting the "holes", the longest line has 7 hexes. Therefore, majority means more than half. So, as far as I'm aware, the holes aren't anything to do with strong wins, etc., they're there to ensure that you can't "share" a line.

I suspect that placing 2 stones each turn is a balancing thing. On the first move, the first player only places 1 stone. Thereafter it's 2 per turn. That means that the players alternate in terms of which player has more on the board.

Probably worth looking at the sample game I linked to on the Tiltyard.  Hopefully that should make things even clearer than looking at the GDL.

Andrew

Richard,

"input" is to "legal" what "base" is to regular props. In particular, input ought to cover anything that can ever be legal. If there are games without, I would claim that they're bugged. On the other hand, in any given state, it isn't necessary for all inputs to be legal - indeed it would be pretty unusual if every player could play every possible move in every state.

I agree that it's a bit dubious to have an "input" that can't actually ever be "legal" (as indeed I have done in this game), but I don't think it's wrong per se.

Finally, there was a time when base/input wasn't a requirement. (You still see many examples around the place that don't have input/base.) However, I believe that Sam removed all such games from Tiltyard rotation at the point that base/input became a requirement. Before that rule was in place, game players had to infer the set of possible propositions & inputs (if they wanted to). ggp-base is capable of doing so. (I have a hunch that, theoretically at least, it might be possible to design a game where you can't correctly do the inference - and that's the reason for the rule - but most games are just fine.)

Hopefully that gives some background.

I don't suppose it would be tricky to fix up this game so that the all the "input"s are legal at some point, although if it isn't causing you an immediate problem, I probably won't bother.

Andrew

It's pretty common for 'noop' to be legal, but have no corresponding input (in an optimized propnet anyway)

Breakthrough for example.

No rules stem from the 'noop' input, so an optimized propnet can simply strip it out, since it is an unconnected component. However, (legal noop) is important. Essentially anything that is defined by (the grounded set of) 'input' clauses in the GDL which is not referenced by the (grounded) rules is a meaningless component. In some games (forget which ones - amazons maybe?) there can be huge numbers of these 'dead' components, and propnet sizes reduce significantly by trimming them. The resulting (trimmed) propnet will then have legals with no corresponding input.