Thought Palace

Call the roller of big dice,
The long-haired one, and bid him whip
On kitchen tables consecutive 18’s.
Let the fighters dawdle in such armor
As they are used to wear, and let the mages swap
Delicious spells from last month’s Dragon.
Let a fumble be finale of its caster:
The only emperor is the dungeon master.

Take from the manual of monsters
Painted with three crude beasts, that sheet
On which I enumerated his stats once,
And spread it so as to cover his face.
If his bag remains, rifle his hoard
To see who gets his precious +6 sword.
Light the lamp to run away faster.
The only emperor is the dungeon master.

{ after Wallace Stevens }

iPhone playing cards by Meninos:

The GameKit framework in iPhone OS 3.0 is very interesting to a Bonjour / P2P head like yrs truly. It basically provides a very easy-to-use API for ad-hoc group formation and many-to-many messaging on a local network. Great for games, of course, but also for many other types of social apps. (I just saw a report on a dev forum that somebody had whipped up a basic chat app in about 15 minutes.)

GameKit uses BlueTooth networking; that lets it work where there’s no WiFi, but it also limits the range. BlueTooth covers just a few meters, whereas a WiFi network connected to an Ethernet subnet can easily cover a whole floor of a building.

My MYNetwork framework seems like a good way to bridge that gap. The TCP connection classes provide the Bonjour discovery and makes point-to-point connections, and the BLIP protocol lets you send data blobs over those connections.

It should be pretty straightforward to build some classes that are plug-compatible with the GameKit network classes but use MYNetwork. Then iPhone apps could easily support both protocols, and compatible Mac apps could be developed. Anyone want to try it?

[Note: I’m only referring to information that was publicly discussed at Apple’s press [...]

My plea for more iPhone board games is really getting results! Now there’s a Go game with an AI, so I can get my butt spanked in privacy without the humiliation of losing to an actual human (such as my son).

iGo is pretty good, for $2.99. It supports board sizes from 7×7 to 19×9, and several levels of AI strength in addition to a customizable handicap. There’s even Undo, so I can back-pedal on my lamest moves and try again.

The only things I can say against it are:

For some reason its hit-detection is too high, so it places a stone on the space above the one tapped.
You don’t get a chance to confirm your move, so if you tapped the wrong space [see above] the AI immediately replies, so you have to open the drawer and press the Undo button.
When starting a new game, the first thing it does is make you type in a name for it. I have no idea what I’d call a particular Go game, so I go “Duhhh…” and type in something random. It could at least fill this in with the date and time, by default.

(Also, totally off the topic of games, I love [...]

A great iPhone board game that isn’t Attax!
Can you and your friends survive an hour on a tiny sinking cardboard submarine that’s running out of air and vodka?
New developments with the coolest deck of cards no one’s heard of!
And the return of Rogue, last seen (by me) on a VAX 11/750!

Hexy

I’m happy to say there’s now an excellent implementation of Hex for the iPhone, named Hexy. I’m sure my recent call for more diversity in iPhone board games was entirely responsible for this, even though the authors claim it’s been in development for months.

Hex dates from the 1940s. Two players alternate playing stones on a diamond-shaped grid of hexagons; one is trying to build a connection between the left and right edges, the other between the top and bottom. That’s it. Despite the trivial rules, the gameplay is fun and interesting. You’ll quickly discover basic principles like “bridges” and “ladders”, but there’s a lot more strategy to learn.

(An interesting factoid about Hex is that it was proved early on that there is an infallible winning strategy for the first player; but the proof says nothing about what that strategy is! Small board sizes have been solved, but at the sizes [...]

I like board games, and I’d like to play some against my iPhone. (My secret shame is that I’m actually rather bad at board games, but the silver lining is that it doesn’t take much of an AI to provide me with a challenge!) The Board Games sub-category of the iPhone App Store has over 300 offerings. But if you filter out the ones that are really single-player puzzles, or that only let humans play each other, or that implement chess or checkers [neither of which I like] … there aren’t many left.

Especially if you then filter out the many duplicates. For example, I’m surprised at how many versions of Ataxx there are. Ataxx is a fairly obscure game (at least I thought it was!) but there are at least four different clones of it on the store, including a new one called Spoilage that just showed up. Why is that? Don’t get me wrong, Ataxx is a really good game, with simple but unusual mechanics, and good tactical difficulty despite its short play time. I’ve played it online and I have iBacteria on my iPhone.

But why are so many developers picking the same game? With a better-known game like [...]

I hung out with Ricci this afternoon. I brought along my Decktet, and we tried some of the games, then decided to make up one of our own. I suggested adapting Crazy Eights to this weird double-suited deck; a direct adaptation didn’t do too well on its own (it was too easy to get rid of cards), but Ricci had an idea that worked brilliantly, of incurring penalties for repeating suits.

Then I came home and wrote down the rules … Give it a try! (Don’t believe a word of the historical background, though! I just made it up, and stole the great nonsense word “quäsenbö” from an old Roz Chast cartoon.)

My Decktet is a thing of beauty. I even printed & assembled the box (an activity that took me back to my happy childhood days of making paper polyhedra models.)

The only problem is that the cards still have a faint sickly-sweet stink of toluene and acetone (from the plastic coating) even after I left them spread out on the floor for a few days. It’s quite unpleasant, not like the nice smell of new books, cars or boardgames.

Is this the papercraft equivalent of Code Smell?

Sometimes it’s nice to make physical objects. It’s usually messier and more time-consuming than doing it on the computer, but in the end you have something you can actually touch.

Ever since I saw P. D. Magnus’s Decktet—a whimsical yet mysterious deck of cards for games or divination—I wanted one of my own. However, the Decktet is currently only available as a PDF, so any physical manifestation has to be of a DIY nature.

The deck has 36 cards (plus the optional “The Excuse”), of six suits, and its most unusual feature is that the number cards each have two suits. (There are also single-suited Aces and Kings.) This obviously adds a lot of interesting possibilities for games.

Magnus has given each suit a symbolic meaning, as well as a color, and done a good job integrating them into each card. For example, the Penitent (see above) combines the green color and violent connotations of the Wyrms suit with the orange and “decisive action and clarity of purpose” of Suns; while the Market combines Wood’s “gift of the earth … raw materials and food products” with Knots’ “craft, skill … commerce and money”.

(I should add that I am not a believer in [...]

I need a few brave people to test a pre-beta app for me. No, this is not Cloudy; it’s another app I’ve been working on in parallel. It’s called Your Move, and it’s the expanded version of my GeekGameBoard sample code. It lets you play board games against a human opponent; either at the same machine, over a local network, or by sending moves via email or iChat.

Obviously this would make a great iPhone app, and now that I have my iPhone developer certification I’ll start working on that. But for now it’s Mac-only.

To test Your Move you need to

Have Mac OS X 10.5.
Enjoy playing board games … in particular, Go and/or American checkers, as those are the main games it knows so far.
Have at least one friend who will play board games with you (I’ll do in a pinch, but I don’t have time to play against everyone. Plus, ironically, I suck at Go and checkers.)
Be willing to tolerate bugs, and committed to sending in bug reports, crash logs and such.

If you’re interested, please

Register an account on the Mooseyard projects website ; then
Email me at “jens” c/o this domain and tell me your username, so I can give you [...]