Monday, September 06

Geek

From The Cities FAQ

Q: If I draw a Clock and a 13 of Entropy, can I play the Clock to loop the Entropy?  Will this actually net me negative entropy on regular challenges?

A: Yes.

Since cards group, and Flux cards force inversion on adjacent lower-order Fluxes of the same suit, there is no unmodified hand that can result in negative entropy.  With a looped E13, however, the two Entropy cards match and no inversion is forced, for a net benefit of 26, which means a net negative entropy on regular challenges during Books 1 and 2.

The downside is that all looped hands are classed as Temporal Anomalies and draw Paradox cards to your deck.  This means your hand will be stable for at most 13 turns before a forced discard.  (Looped teams are TAs too, but are stable until a Paradox specifically breaks the team.)

To truly mess things up, though, you need to draw a Time card and the 13 of Chaos to a Book 3 hand, loop the Chaos, and perform an Inverse World Foul.  Done correctly, this will leave every Book 1 and 2 player outside your own state trapped in a Negentropic Paradox Loop until the end of the current cycle.

I'm working on a design for an online game.  Think of it as Contract Bridge crossed with Go crossed with Mornington Crescent.  It's called Cities.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:35 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 ...in your copious spare time, eh?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Monday, September 06 2010 04:18 AM (+rSRq)

2 Exactly.

Well, it's something to do when I'm too tired to work and too stressed out to sleep.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 06 2010 04:41 AM (PiXy!)

3 Any chance of a look at the draft design for Cities? I'm especially intrigued by the go...

Posted by: ahd at Monday, September 06 2010 08:13 AM (fkl65)

4 I can certainly post some more details.

The mid-game (what I called Book 2 above) is largely involved with forming contiguous territories on the world map - and preventing other groups of players from doing the same.  That's where the similarity to Go comes in.

However (a) it's played on a hex grid that actually expands over the course of the game, (b) the largest territory any single player can build by themselves is only three tiles, so it's all about co-operation, (c) you need the players in Book 1 (the Mornington Crescent part) to provide you with the potential to make any moves, (d) the players in Book 3 (the Contract Bridge part) can change the nature of the lower game levels from one day to the next, (e) there are computer players coming in from the six sides of the map to mess things up, and (f) there's time travel involved.

So it's not exactly like Go.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 06 2010 12:31 PM (PiXy!)

5 If you're even half serious about this, sign me up for the beta.

Posted by: Artee at Tuesday, September 07 2010 04:47 PM (+J3Nt)

6 My motto here is Not beta, just broken.  We're going to launch straight into the game, and if anything goes wrong, I'll blame it on those rascally Book 3 players.

Soon as I find a decent graph database to run the transit network.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 07 2010 11:32 PM (PiXy!)

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