Re: [piecepack] Re: Rehi, congrats, thanks, apologies, miscellanea

[Matt Campbell <mcampbell@...>]

mschoessow wrote:
> On a related subject: in most past competitions (but not in this 
> most recent one seemingly) some of the submitted games were clearly 
> broken, and I don't think it's a good thing for such games to be put 
> up at piecepack.org. That being the case, I don't really like the 
> system of automatically adding all contest games permanently to the 
> games list (or to the rules disk for that matter--having broken 
> games on ther can't be god for Mesomorph). In fact, having broken 
> games posted is not in the interests of any of us. Understand that 
> I'm not talking about cases where there is a difference of opinion; 
> some games are indisputably broken. Perhaps we could implement a 
> proceedure where, after all games are made available in "as is" form 
> following the close of a competition, they are only added to 
> piecepack.org after the author requests this OR the judges of the 
> competition authorizes it (keeping in mind that the games are in the 
> public domain). I realize this may be a touchy subject and I don't 
> want to trample over anybody's sensibilities. Comments?

My $0.02, take with grain o' salt since I'm still quite new to the 
piecepack community.

I'd like to see a user-based rating system, preferably on piecepack.org. 
 I found the rating/comments pages on the piecepack wiki but a wiki 
doesn't really lend itself to what I was hoping to find, which was a way 
to search for games based on number of players and popularity.  Imagine 
something in the vein of Amazon's user ranking system for books or (the 
system that really inspired the idea) Recipezaar.com's system for 
ranking recipes.  Registered users could enter comments about their 
experience with the game and give the game a "star" rating; in the 
piecepack tradition, the ranking would be from Null through 5 - and 
perhaps Crowns would be more appropriate than stars, come to think of it 
;).  In such a system, I would imagine the "broken" games would have 
naturally low rankings.  The games where broken-ness was a difference of 
opinion would probably float to the middle, and really good games would 
tend to float to the top.

The ideal finished product would allow somebody to look for a game based 
on available equipment (does it need an expansion?  playing cards? 
pyramids?), number of players, perhaps playing time as well.  The 
results could then be sorted by user ranking to "float" popular (and by 
assumption, fun) games to the top.  The idea came to me two weekends ago 
when I had just completed construction of my own piecepack and my 
father-in-law was visiting and I was trying to find a fun game for 3 
players and one piecepack so we could try out this "new" system (not to 
mention have some fun while we were at it).  I wound up choosing PDFs to 
download and print more or less at random; my choices tended to be 
influenced more by equipment and the actual name of the game, which is a 
not-so-reliable indicator of game quality.  It took us to the end of the 
night to stumble across The Assassination Game Le, and after losing one 
player to bedtime we had to improvise a peculiar two-player variant to 
finish up the night.

Being a software developer by profession (which doesn't seem uncommon 
among piecepackers) and also having some experience at web and database 
programming, I'd even offer to help develop the system if I knew where 
the thing could be hosted.  (My personal website doesn't have the disk 
space for all the rules documents...)