Shared Pieces Game Design Competition - I Won?

I reckon that's the least I can do. My very first thought about the competition was to take "shared pieces" and boil it down to the minimalist "shared piece." So I started ruminating about two players struggling for control over a single piece. My first incarnation was the sublimely ridiculous: two scientists vying for control over a deep-sea mining drone. Ugh! Fortunately, the idea of the magical golem eventually bubbled up from the subconscious. (I'm surprised it didn't come to me first, since my principal hobby is D&D.) Even for an abstract game, I found that having some backstory helped me crystallize some ideas and come up with some of the mechanics. The bidding concept for control of the golem came to me first, and I never really considered other possibilities for that mechanic.

Just for the curious, the changes I've made from the winning version are generally: (1) more studied distrubtion between the values of the charms and curses, (2) reduction to 12 allocation units (to increase the incidence of ties), (3) elimination of the void district mechanic (unnecessary and confusing), (4) addition of board management rules to remove fully harvested rows or columns, (5) addition of special district rules, i.e, some districts with special effects when they are harvested.

I did get an e-mail this morning. It nearly knocked me out of my chair (for the reasons stated in my first post).

I think the issue of theme vs. abstract is an interesting one. Even chess has something of a "theme." FYI, I submitted another entry that was utterly abstract--on the order of othello. And as a technical matter--although Abstract Games magazine was one of the sponsors--it was not an abstract game design contest.

Thanks for all the kind words.

I think it speaks volumes about the collection of game design talent on these boards that so many finalists frequent them. Kudos to all the finalists.

ah so now I know who designed that game. Problem with volunteering to be a judge is that you have all these great games but no names. You keep wondering, do I know who did this? Finally nice to be able to identify who did what.

Your game was great. All the finalist and heck, all entries for that matter, were great.

Well deserved victory. It was a tough theme this year, I couldnt even think of a good workable one so kudos to those who did.

Whitey
Back to being quiet in the background.

My entry was a finalist again this year (House of Doors). How it happened is a modestly interesting story.

I was working on a shared-pieces variant on Hex, so I typed up the rules and sent it to a game designer friend for comments. Less than a week later I get an email from Richard's PBeM server, announcing a new game called Chameleon, which was exactly the same as my game, right down to the tie breaker!

At first I was very annoyed, because it was nearing the contest deadline and I didn't feel like I could enter that game anymore. I scoured my design notebooks looking for inspiration when I saw some notes I made about how to move "doors" around on the edges of grid lines. I toyed around with that concept until I had what I considered to be a workable game, but not one that I was particularly excited about, and I entered it. Honestly, I was shocked when I saw that I was a finalist.

I ended up writing to Cameron Browne, the person who implemented my Hex variant for Richard's server (he named it "Chameleon"), to share about my independent invention of the game, and I forwarded him the message with the rules that I sent to my friend. Turns out that my email was dated a couple of days before Cameron's friend Bill came up with the same idea (also trying to come up with a shared pieces contest entry), so Cameron declared us co-discoverers of the game, and I will be credited as such in Cameron's upcoming book.

I'm not sure if Bill entered Chameleon in the contest, but seeing that Chameleon wasn't a finalist and House of Doors was, I am happy with the result, even if I was annoyed at first.

Erik doesn't have the House of Doors rules posted on About Boardgames yet, so if you're interested in playing it, you can get the rules from my website: www.cox-tv.com/games

Rules for Chameleon are on Richard's server: www.gamerz.net/pbmserv/chameleon.html

--Randy Cox (the Younger)