Hyloe's Book of Games

[kevandotorg]

I occasionally enjoy playing a weird old plastic 1970s abstract boardgame, where the rules take two sides of A4 to explain what could have been said in a paragraph, and you end up having to house rule around a load of ambiguities anyway. It's a nice challenge that both players are trying to work out a game they've never seen before from scratch, and to discover its basic strategies and winning moves (if any), along with whether it's even worth playing the game at all. Since my local boardgame cafe only has a limited number of these types of games to get through, I decided I should write a script to generate rules of a similar calibre. They'd be less likely to actually work, but if you make that into part of the game (any player can pause the game and prove it unwinnable, to win), it might still be worth playing them out.

I never got around to making that script, but considering Nanogenmo this year it struck me that it'd be good to make a 50,000-word book of fictional games in the style of Hoyle or Parlett, with each game having a little introduction and commentary. I might expand the concept to include card and dice games as well.

[kevandotorg]

This is now complete as Hyloe's Book of Games. I ended up being entirely sidetracked by card games, and dropped the abstract grid game idea. This was mostly because generated card games seemed more robust, requiring only a few simple sanity checks to (hopefully) ensure that any given game could be played through to the end. But it's also because European village names proved to be such an unexpectedly perfect corpus for names of card games.

I didn't spend as long as this as I wanted to, I might go back and refine it in the future as a standalone, individual game server. And I still like the idea of generating possibly-impossible grid games to play a metagame with, but I'll save that for another time.

Extract from the first edition, at https://kevan.org/nanogenmo/2019firstedition.html:

Le Temple

Le Temple (or La Bolle) is a classic French trick-taking game for three to five players where the led suit is weaker than the rest. It uses a standard 52 card pack. Remove 7s and 7s. Cards rank A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2.

Setup

Each player is dealt six cards.

Turn the top card of the deck to determine trump suit.

Play

The player to the dealer's left starts by leading any card. If the card led is not a trump, its suit is the small suit for the trick. Players need not follow suit.

The trick is won by the highest trump, or if it contains no trump by the highest card not in the small suit (with the earliest card played breaking ties), or the highest small card if all cards were small. The winner of the trick leads the next trick.

Scoring

When all six tricks have been played each player loses 1 point per heart taken in tricks and loses an additional 9 if they took the 6 of clubs. Taking the 6 of diamonds doubles that player's score for the hand.

When a player's score reaches -40 or lower the player with the highest score wins the game. If tied, the tied player who won a round latest in the game wins.

[hugovk]

Using village names for the game names works really well!

(Direct link to source: https://github.com/kevandotorg/nanogenmo-2019)