R0 has recently been deluged by spam comments. I have just switched to the following moderation system:

• You must have a previously approved comment or your comment will be sent to moderation.
• Any comment with more than one link is sent to moderation.

Hopefully this will let people link to their personal websites without incident but keep us from getting spammed. And if your post doesn’t show up, don’t fear, I will get to it as soon as possible, and in the future you should have no worries as long as you keep the same handle.

Another riddle for today. If you’re more interested in the board games than the riddles, my apologies. I haven’t been able to do much board gaming lately due to various irritating life factors. Following GenCon I hope to change that around.

In many ways this is the opposite of the Rope Riddle yesterday. The rope riddle has a very elusive solution, but the solution is crystal clear once you have it. By contrast, the solution to this one is pretty easy to get, but almost paradoxical in its nature. You may have seen a version of this riddle before. It’s the lead-up to a new riddle Thursday, invented by intrepid reader and riddler John Rhoadhouse. (Thursday’s is fierce and even more paradoxical than this one!)
On a certain island live 100 logicians. Some of the logicians have brown eyes and some blue. There are no mirrors or other reflective surfaces, and the logicians never discuss one another’s eye color. Thus, every logician knows the color of everyone’s eyes but his own.

Every night at midnight, a ferry comes to the island. Any logician who knows his eye color gets onto this ferry, leaving forever for the logicians’ paradise. The other logicians will wake up to find them gone. However, because of the lack of mirrors, this has never happened as far as the logicians know.
One day, in a crash of lightning, a stone tablet from The Powers Of Truth lands on the island. Its inscription: “At least one of you has blue eyes.”

Question 1: Who leaves the island, and on what day?

Question 2: The tablet doesn’t say anything that the logicians didn’t already know. How, then, does it help them to leave the island?

P.S. Without loss of generality, in the case where none of the logicians have blue eyes, the tablet says “At least one of you has brown eyes.”

GenCon Indy is next weekend, and I’m going. Due to work considerations I’m driving down either Friday after work or Saturday.

This one kind of sneaks up on you. I’d read it three or four times and never had an answer. Then reader John Rhoadhouse posed it to me the other day, and somehow I got a solution in only a couple of minutes; in another minute, he had a different, more elegant solution that I suspect is actually the intended one.

So here you go. Consider a certain kind of rope. It has the following characteristics: If you light one end, it will burn up in exactly one hour. But the rate of burning may vary unpredictably; for instance, the first half of the rope may burn in 10 minutes and the second half take 50; or it may be divided into many different areas; and there’s no way to tell. The upshot of this is that you can’t measure and cut the rope to measure a fraction of an hour.

Given two of these ropes, how can you measure 45 minutes?

I’m really impressed at the quality of the articles available at the now-mothballed Games Journal. I take solace only in the fact that it took about 12 skilled writers (and some game industry professionals) five years to get that body of work together. But what a collection it is!

Reader John Rhoadhouse described an RPG system he was considering, but decided not to run with. (This is what I got out of the 15-minute afternoon break we had to chat, so if it sounds underdeveloped, it’s probably due to a limitation in my understanding.) It was based on the Tarot; each character had a suit aspect, was better at using cards of that suit in combat, and could use any card as if it were their own suit. (The suits corresponded to offense, defense, magic/debilitating effects, and healing.) For instance, a Swords character could play a Cups card for offense. Trumps could be used for a potent amount of any suit.

Characters also were able to train the trumps like “skills” in other RPGs. Each trump could always be played for a specific effect; and with enough skill, it would be likely to have an additional effect as well. For instance, the World card might have a movement effect whenever you play it, but a teleportation or other mystical movement effect if you have enough skill in it.

One of the things that frustrates me about Tarot mythology is that the trumps (or Major Arcana) don’t seem to fill any kind of cycle. What kind of parallelism do “The Emperor,” “Strength,” and “The Moon,” and “The Tower” have? Answer: None. On the other hand, the suits do correspond nicely to the four classical elements, and the trumps can fill the role of a “fifth element” that seems to pop up in many places, whether you want to call it Void, Spirit, Ether, Mana, Mind, or whatever.

As a result, I think someone who was so inclined could put together a pretty interesting RPG based on giving a character five “affinities,” one for each of the suits plus one for trumps. At some interval, based on level, situation, or GM whim, a character would gain access to cards from the deck. They would be played to help with various feats, and the stronger that character’s affinity for a given card, the more it would help. For example, a character with a strong Wands affinity could expend a Wands card to, say, compose a song, Wands being a suit associated with creativity. A character with poorer Wands affinity wouldn’t be able to compose as good of a song, or would need access to extra Wands cards.

Trumps, of course, have strong symbolism (Death! Lovers! The Devil! The Fool!) and would have great power, perhaps even supernatural power in the game. The corresponding disadvantage is that they are much more specialized. For example, a Swords card could be used in a fight, or an argument, to solve a puzzle, or to take any bold or brash action; but the Wheel of Fortune card is never going to be good for anything but influencing your luck in some matter that would otherwise be left to chance. So if you have good trumps affinity and that card, you’ll have to work to manufacture a situation where you can put it to good use.

I already have enough RPG ideas running around my head that I’m never going to take Tarotmancer anywhere, and John feels the same way. It’s sad, but perhaps it will give you something to think about.

Rule 0 is now #1 on a Google search for Rule 0. I’m so proud… hey, I gotta start somewhere.

When I design card games, I design them with one particular constraint in my mind when I go in: 50 cards. This number is convenient for a couple of reasons. First, 50 is exactly half of a pack of the card sleeves (KMC brand) that I use to prototype games. Second, 50 is very close to the common number of cards people are used to working with, which is of course 52. It’s also similar to the number of cards in your typical CCG deck, and I can be confident that nobody will not know how to shuffle 50 cards.

When I pitched Mock the Vote and Satori at Origins, I was asked why I stuck with this restriction. After all, wouldn’t it be better to choose the perfect number of cards for the game in question? I responded somewhat lamely that it turned out to be a good, close number for both games. And indeed it is; but upon reflection, I have a better answer.

Designing a game is in many ways an artistic process, like writing a poem. There are so many variables, so many things to change, that it helps to have a structure to fit your work into. It gives you a place to start, a place to end, and a clear look at every part of it . For instance, a sonnet is 14 lines long and has a particular meter and rhyme scheme (iambic pentameter and ABABCDCDEFEFGG, if you don’t remember from English class.).

Speaking of English class, in A Wrinkle in Time Mrs. Whatsit also brings up the form of a sonnet as being liberating, rather than restricting, although in that context it is used as an analogy to a person’s life, not game design!

So why did all of Shakespeare’s sonnets have 14 lines? Is there not one that could have been improved by adding or removing a couplet? Is there something magical about the number 14? Of course not; but by choosing this particular framework to work within, he was able to focus on the rest of the poem, the imagery and wordplay and metaphor, and make it the best it could be. Without that structure, how could he ever know it was done?

Note, of course, that I’m not so bold as to claim my games are as good as Shakespeare’s sonnets! And, alas, they certainly haven’t been as effective at picking up lovers.

So why do Bridge, Poker, Hearts, Spades, Oh Hell, Cribbage, Skat, and a host of other games all use a deck of 52 cards? Is it because 52 cards is the perfect number of cards for each of those games? Not necessarily. But it works fine as a structure that they’re all designed under. Now, some games need fewer cards, like Euchre, or a different deck, like Pinochle. When you play trick-taking games three-handed you need to leave a card out. Likewise, sometimes a line of a poem works better if you fudge the rhyme or meter.

So, 50 cards? It’s convenient, it’s familiar, and because I like it I’m using it for my form and structure. Someday I’ll probably end up with a game that just won’t be right without more cards, or fewer, and then I’ll certainly switch; but I’ll know I have a good reason to fudge the form or choose a different one entirely.