Book Report: Kobold Guide to Board Game Design

Professional game designers write essays on topics in Board Game Design. Along the way, they get into project management, prototyping, usability, playtesting, and other good stuff. As a professional technical writer, especially appreciated the article "Writing Precise Rules" by Mike Selinker. He talks about the usual suspects: consistent-and-simple wording, etc. But his examples are different. E.g., when talking about using icons as a mnemonic for concepts,

See also the great game Race for the Galaxy, where my friend Wei-Hwa Huang laid out the cards in bizarre symbols I'm sure he completely understood. This does not mean that I do. That said, I have not asked him whether he understands Gloria Mundi's symbols.

This example is especially salient if, say, Wei-Hwa has kicked your butt at Race for the Galaxy. It tells you why you wouldn't bother asking if Wei-Hwa understands your game's symbols (since he does, of course, even if he had to reverse-engineer their meaning by learning everything else about the game first).

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Pencil Bandolier: the new configuration

Before:		After:

I tested out the pencil bandolier at the Real Escape Game. You ask: How did it go? I say: That's why we test. Perhaps the bandolier's boldest feature were the colored carpenter pencils. Carpenter pencils are extra-wide in one dimension. Painted different colors, they stood out. Just gorgeous. Well, for some dorkishly nerdy variation on the meaning of "gorgeous".

I'd tested this configuration by sort of gallumphing around my apartment. I was worried that I'd be playing some van game, have to perhaps jog a quarter-mile along a walkway over some swampland to pick up a puzzle... and have pencils falling off the bandolier as they got jerked around. So I gallumphed around the apartment, saw that the pencils stayed attached and figured all was good.

But last night, I tried more common puzzling activity: sitting down and hunching over a puzzle. Then looking up to talk to teammates. Then hunching over to look at the puzzle again. You know, sitting. You'd think that would be much less bouncy than gallumphing. But when I sat, my legs pushed against those carpenter pencils from below—gently pushed them up and off the bandolier. You may recall that I had got some carpenter pencil clips to keep those pencils on the bandolier; those clips probably work pretty well at keeping a pencil in your pocket. But the clips weren't designed with the expectation that something would push the pencils up from below.

So I ended up with a lapful of loose pencils. And this morning, I re-arranged the remaining pencils on the bandolier. The colored carpenter pencils will stay off; I can't figure out a good way to make them stay on that doesn't involve, uhm, more adhesives than I really want to deal with. It's too bad; they were mostly decorative, but wow, really decorative. I'll settle for the understated dignity of regular-width colored pencils instead.

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Pencil Bandolier progress is as difficult as you make it

Look, ma, no pins!

You may recall a few months back I'd attached an over-heavy counterweight to the pencil bandolier with vague intent of letting some of the extra lead weight. Today, I got around to that. I ripped out some stitches on the cloth diving weight I'm using as a counterweight. I poured out some shot until the weight was balanced OK with the pencils & lights clipped to the front of the bandolier (occasionally looking over to check Twitter for realtime news of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament).

Getting the balance right was tricky. If I were a chemist, drug dealer, or postal clerk, I might have a balance scale handy in my apartment. Alas, I have none. Fortunately, I didn't need to get the balance super-perfect. I jut needed it close enough so that the bandolier's strap wouldn't want to slide when it was draped over my shoulder. So I could just drape it over something else, tug it a bit and see if it was stable. So I draped it over a finger... and quickly figured out that my fingers are higher-friction than my shirt-covered shoulder. (Please don't call me "sticky fingers".) I needed something else to drape the strap over for testing. I'm embarrassed to admit that I looked around for far too long: this chair back was too pointy, that box was too light... Finally, I looked back at the bandolier itself... and the pencils clipped to it. Nice, smooth pencils. I unclipped a pencil and draped the strap over it, and that worked great. Soon I had the balance right.

I think this thing's ready to try out at a live event. (I wore it at the Doctor When team audition, but I didn't get a chance to use it then. Just as well, since it was still being counterbalanced by an uncomfortable padlock then.)

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Book Report: Glued to Games

It's a book about the psychology of games. Why do we enjoy them? It's all very well to say that "Games are fun." You could say "Paper clips are fun," but then folks would tell you that you need to be more specific. What are the parts of games that appeal to us? What are the parts of us that games draw in? The authors of this book have studied gamers for a while; they've come up with some ideas.

Games let us feel competent. Whether you've mastered a difficult game or are just killing time on Bejeweled, sometimes it's nice to think Here's a situation in which I know what to do.
Games let us feel free, like our choices have consequences. In real life, if you don't take care of that thingy, probably someone else will. In a game, you drive the story.
Games let us interact with each other and the world. You could stop playing... but you'd be letting the guild down, and nobody wants that.

The authors also looked for evidence of bugaboos of computer game politics: addiction and violence.

They figure that games aren't themselves addicted. But if you've got someone whose had a rough life, they might be drawn into games way more than is healthy. So... games aren't addictive, but that's only if you use a very correct definition of "addictive". Folks who in past generations would have been "creepy shut-in neighbors" are now "addicted to games".

Violence in games turns out not to be compelling. But blood and guts can make games very usable. If a game wants to tell you that your plumber missed that previous jump and lost 42 health, it might display a red "42" over your plumber's head. And your brain would eventually process that. Or the game could draw a big splash of blood, and your brain is wired to understand that immediately. So it's tempting to use blood and guts to display that kind of information. If you're a game designer it's especially tempting to use blood and guts when all of these ignoramuses tell you it's a bad idea. If ignoramuses tell you something's a bad idea, that means it's a good idea, right? Well... it's not the only possible good idea. Other splashy graphics could work just as well, and might not be so creepy.

A quick, interesting read.

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Book Report: Crossworld

You'd think that I'd like to read a book about competitive crossword-puzzle solving featuring a first-hand report on playing in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Crossworld is such a book, from the blurb it sounded like it was going to be like Word Freak only for competitive crossword solving instead of for Scrabble. I liked Word Freak a bunch. So I picked up Crossworld. Unfortunately, the writer (Marc Romano) isn't funny, but keeps trying. He seems to understand that he isn't funny. In the book, he tells Will Shortz a story, and notices that Shortz gives him a pitying look instead of a guffaw. He wrote about this, he understands that Shortz doesn't think he's funny... Maybe he thinks this tells us something about Shortz instead of something about his own sense of humor? There were some nice anecdotes from the Tournament in there, but there was a lot of not-so-interesting stuff to slog through along the way; if you've already got some background on crosswords and the Tournament, you'll find slim pickings here. (And if you don't already have that background, there are happier ways to pick it up.)

The good news is that the book is short. You can get most of the way through it on a long bus ride if you, say, picked up the book thinking it might be good and didn't, say, think to bring along another book in case this one turned out to be bad.

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More Tyro Crossword Construction ramblings

Some days ago, I posted some noobish thoughts about crossoword construction. I'd figured out that Nutrimatic's default word lists were good for Nutrimatic's use case, but not so great for a list of candidate words for an automatic crossword grid-filler program. I got comments from some smart people on that post.

Tinhorn pointed me at the Collaborative Word List Project. This is a big word list that's maintained by a bunch of puzzle creators. Once I heard about this, I knew it was going to be an awesome thing. I sent off for it right away. It took a while for me to get it, though. This list is "collaborative," and to collaborate, puzzle designers need to run a program on their computers. The download page had Mac, Windows versions... and of course, I'm still a lunkhead Linux user so I had to go and ask what to do. Fortunately, the programmer, Alex Boisvert, was a smartie and had designed the system well enough such that he was able to figure out a solution for me. But it took a while for my questions to go back and forth.

Meanwhile, I was working on Dan Egnor's ideas on how to get "clueable" words and phrases from Nutrimatic's data. (You recall that Nutrimatic uses Wikipedia: it finds common phrases, article titles, and link "anchor text".) Dan suggested concentrating on article titles and link anchor text. That would get more phrases like "Hank Aaron" but fewer like "from his". I tried that and it helped a lot! Which then ran me into the next hurdle: rodr. Nutrimatic thinks that "rodr" is a word. It doesn't think it's a great word, but it thinks rodr is OK. But rodr looks funny in a crossword grid, or at least I was surprised to find it there when I tried using a revised Nutri-clueables list with Crossword Constructor. And there were some other weird things in there, too. It turned out that these were artifacts of, uhm, international text. Text like "Rodríguez". Nutrimatic is set up for English; when it sees "Rodríguez" it does its best and interprets the text as two words "rodr guez". And again, for Nutrimatic's use case, that's fine. But now I was trying to figure out how to tweak Nutrimatic to be more careful with these förêígn letters. So I'm digging around, trying to find out which software library is dropping this stuff and what other software library I might replace it with. And it's taking me a while because every time I think I've figured something out the next step is "OK, now that it's working, run this program over all of Wikipedia... and come back tomorrow when it's done." So when things weren't working as well as I thought... uhm, yeah.

Meanwhile, Mr Boisvert had set me up with his software. So I finally got a copy of the heralded Collaborative Word List. And since I don't want to be just a parasite, I figure I should, y'know contribute something. So I write a little program to look at Nutrimatic's highly-rated phrases+words and compare them to what was already in the C.W.L. I figured that out of Nutrimatic's top 50K words, there would probably be 100 worth adding to the C.W.L. And... there was "Eurovision." Yup, that was about it. "Eurovision" was popular in Nutrimatic, but not in the C.W.L. (But probably the C.W.L. people had considered "Eurovision" seeing as how their list had "EUROVISIONSONGCONTEST".) Wow, one word was... less than 100. So I looked over the C.W.L.

If you get a list of "good" words out of Nutrimatic, you're looking at about 50 thousand words. There are more words than that in Wikipedia... but if you go for more than the most "popular" 50,000, you're kind of in the dregs. There are about 100 thousand "good" phrases, including things like "from his". The C.W.L. has 400 thousand entries. Hand-crafted. This thing is a cultural treasure. I just kind of took all the tinkering I was doing to re-jigger Nutrimatic and Wikipedia and nudged it aside. Nutrimatic is good at doing what Nutrimatic is good at; I don't need to try to force it to do something else.

Now I've got a pretty good crossword construction word list. Now when I make a crossword puzzle, I'm not complaining about the fill. Now I'm complaining about the crappy clues I write. That's progress, right?

Bones of Contention

Across
1. K-12
5. Sailboat with lateen sails
12. Rapper known for "Shawty"
17. Island territory
18. Sixty minutes from now
20. Cost
21. Star near Sol
23. Prefix with graphic
24. Dr House: "It's not ___"
25. ___ Paulo, Brazil
26. Actress Myrna
27. Actress Sophia
28. Sang "Orinoco Flow"
30. Pilgrim portrayer
31. Retinal researchers' org.
32. Divine disagreement topic
38. Hoosegow
39. Early anesthetic
40. Term for a long-handled gardening tool
41. Suffix with chlor-
42. Skater Harding
44. Longtime congressman from New Jersey
47. Excavating machine
49. "Hulk" director Lee
50. Fingerrpinting dept.
52. Asian capital
54. Advanced teaching deg.
55. Fierce fight, contained
59. Flightless flock
62. New York mayor during blackout of '77
63. Southern school, home of Mike the Tiger
64. ___ Victor
67. Shakespearean setting
69. Actress Nastassja
72. Breakfast, lunch and dinner
74. Fla. neighbor
75. Flowery verse
77. River in eastern France
79. Sporty car roof
80. Chromatic cause of arguments
85. Snare, for example
86. Humorist Lebowitz
87. Castle part
88. They make water filters
89. A as in Austria
90. Online vocational sch. teaching Mold Awareness and more
93. "Sunflowers" setting
96. "Bolero" composer
97. Signal of understatement
100. Less than a Manwich
101. Raised
102. A chip, maybe
103. Toadlike
104. Opposite of dowry?
105. Future atty.'s exam

Down
1. Alike: Fr.
2. Humdinger
3. Flashmob, for example
4. Richard Wright's complaint to his mother.
5. Taiwanese manufacturer of motherboards
6. Hydrocarbon suffixes
7. Superboy's girlfriend
8. Golden rule word
9. Half a dance
10. Grand ___ Dam
11. Sky lights
12. Anti-abortionist
13. The rose, to Ramon
14. Comic book with slogan "Mad scientsists are a disease. Meet the cure."
15. Singer Melissa
16. Anon
19. Mideast capital
22. "__ __ sow, so..."
29. Bar order
30. Skywalker portrayer
32. Amenhotep IV's god
33. Pool ball type
34. Cry of surprise
35. Actor Beatty
36. Lots
37. Lack
38. "Come ___?" (Italian greeting)
43. Air hero
45. Alumna bio word
46. South Africa's ___ Paul Kruger
48. Ambulance V.I.P.
51. ___ Gigante: Univision show
53. Talks to sattelites
55. Military leader known for chicken
56. Furniture wood
57. "I wish you hadn't told me that."
58. Total
59. Emptying a place of ppl.
60. Movie with exaggerated emotions
61. Kazakhstan riparian feature
64. Hardest thing to learn about mobile phones
65. Blockhead
66. Cleopatra biter
68. In the ordinary way
70. Mumbai TV station
71. Carp
73. Light
76. Decadent
78. Comics shriek
81. What Takeru Kobayashi can do
82. Wind instrument with a keyboard
83. Gretel's brother
84. Close, as an envelope
88. Dressed in a fine or showy manner.
90. IMHO
91. ___ von Bismarck
92. Consequently
94. "¿Como ___ usted?"
95. Editor's mark
98. Wrote "Nothing But The Truth"
99. Dreyer, east of the Rocky Mountains

(No gimmick in this puzzle. The Os don't make the Big Dipper or anything.)

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Crossword Compiler Noob Diary

Unsurprisingly, creating mediocre crossword puzzles is easy but creating good crossword puzzles is hard. Mind you, I don't feel pressured to create great crossword puzzles. For puzzlehunts, I only need to create acceptable gimmicky crossword puzzles. Solvers might roll their eyes when they see a puzzle that uses both TSAR and CZAR, but maybe they'll forget all about that when they notice that the Os form the shape of the Big Dipper or whatever. But so far, I'm not even making acceptable puzzles.

I think my next hurdle is compiling a good word list. Crossword Compiler comes with a pretty darned good set of lists! But it seems like it could be better. It doesn't know about Hank Aaron. Hank Aaron's kind of a big deal, right? I don't know baseball, but I've heard of Hank Aaron. I tried throwing in the Nutrimatic 100k phrases list. As you recall, Nutrimatic is a smart word-finding tool that normally uses a big pile of data from wikipedia. That knows about Hank Aaron. Unfortunately for this purpose, it also knows about phrases like "of this" and "from his" and "category list of left handed accordionists". OK, I made that last one up. I think. I'm not sure what exactly would happen if I made a crossword puzzle full of stuff like "of this" and "from his", but I suspect it involves Tyler Hinman bringing back the #badpuzzles Twitter hashtag.

I took one step in a good direction. I went back to Nutrimatic's wikipedia data. I cranked out a bunch of Nutrimatic-ranked phrases, but then filtered that list to only things that were titles of wikipedia articles. Although "of this" appears many many times in Wikipedia, there's no article about the phrase (yet). So that's a step in a good direction... but it's just a step. Kind of a stumbling, gimpy step. Consider that Wikipedia has information about John R. Adler, John R. Bolton, John R. Allen, John R. Commons, John R. Lynch, John R. Brinkley,... Uhm, you get the idea. It also has an article about a I-hadn't-heard-of-him D.J. named "John R." My system sees all of those John R. This and John R That and happily thinks "John R" is a common phrase, so it enthusiastically suggests that "John R." is a good phrase for crossword puzzles. And it's perhaps overfond of mononymous Bollywood stars. And it makes other... questionable choices.

This seems work-aroundable. I bet there are good word lists out there. I don't know where to find them. I can find Scrabble cheat-lists aplenty. I can find lists of many obscure words... words about as much fun to solve as "from his". But I bet I can eventuallyfind good word lists. Meanwhile, my tinkerer's heart enjoys an excuse to tweak better words out of Nutrimatic. Meanwhile, I jot down a blog entry so I can remember what it was like to get started. This is today, as the saying goes.

Insecure

Across
1. Dermis
5. Household expenditure part of GDP
8. Nooteboom's first name
12. Open-source file and directory integrity checker
13. Ambience
14. Heavy metal sculptor
15. Sicilian town
16. Security's biggest obstacle
17. Story about Trojans
18. Not deciduous
20. MLB postseason game
21. Bridges in movies
22. ___ Claire, Wis.
23. Adobe Flash ___ is full of zero-days
26. IPv4 security check recommended on April 1, 2003
30. Angkor ___
31. Character
34. Left tributary of the Aller
35. In Milan, she co-starred with Sunil
37. Cryptography that fails to prevent piracy
38. City of North Sinai
39. Actor Estrada
40. Computer language for switches
42. Alumna bio word
43. Wrote about Nickleby, Chuzzlewit, and Copperfield
45. City of canals
47. Neither Rep. nor Dem
48. Makers of "Freedom" IPTV boxes
50. Em, to Dorothy
52. Tenth novel by 43 Across
56. French economist org.
57. Prefix with dextrous
58. ___ Pagoda, a Burmese stupa
59. R&B DJ
60. Star Wars sister
61. Ping is the ___ of networks
62. They make motorcycle helmets
63. A little bit of work
64. Knee/ankle connector

Down
1. Air-defense computer in the 60s and 70s
2. Ukraine's capital
3. Like some threats
4. Almost
5. Edward Bouverie _____, English theologian
6. Christian rock band
7. Bring home the bacon
8. Mobile, for phones
9. Security researcher Byres
10. Ages
11. Dejected
13. McAfee's name for 2009 hacks on Google, others
14. Egyptian peninsula
19. Early astronaut from Ohio
22. She wants to spy on Alice and Bob
23. r00tzorrd
24. Frontman of The Rasmus
25. Loft (not l0pht)
26. Columnist Bombeck
27. Pancakes from RBN-land
28. Ways to keep packets safe
29. Titter
32. The first was launched on STS-6
33. http://ccc.de/en/, e.g.
36. Telugu film star ___ Nageswara Rao
38. Fed
40. ___ point security: each device is responsible for itself
41. Makers of the ActiveArmor firewall
44. Middle Earth password system: "Speak, friend, and _____"
46. ___ Off: stage play about a stage play
48. Last British resident in Guantanmo Bay
49. Boris and Natasha's boss
50. Commune in the Nord department in northern France
51. Ancient city in Galilee
52. Their pet doors are rated highest in ensuring protection against bugs
53. Greatly
54. K-12
55. World's #1 supplier of mobile video surveillance for the bus and coach industry
56. Jongleurs' org

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Crossword Compiler is a Windows application. The last time I tried running it on Linux, a few years back, it didn't work. But today it works. Kinda. Far enough to fill in a grid with words, which is what I need. (If I ask it to lay out a page with a grid and clues, it tries to lay out an infinite number of blank pages. But that's OK, I can lay out a page by hand. But I can't fill in a grid by hand. Not a dense grid, anyhow. So it runs well enough, hooray.) I don't know whether that means that WINE (the standard Windows emulator for Linux) got better meanwhile or whether Crossword Compiler does fewer tricky-to-emulate Windowsy things. I just know I'm pretty stoked to be able to run this piece of software.

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Comics Report: Torso, Goldfish

It was a good holiday season. My cousin-once-removed Paul was in town, and once again wanted a treasure-hunt game. And once again, he wanted to be on Game Control, not just playing. So he and his dad made up some puzzles (mostly rhymes that riddle-ishly described locations around my parents' house) and then some of us grown-ups went into a solving frenzy.

Also, Bryan the mathematician told me about a recent topic of inquiry: pizza apportionment. No, really, people got a paper out of this. Suppose there's a round pizza cut into random-sized wedges. You and an opponent are grabbing slices of pizza, taking turns grabbing one slice. You want the most pizza, but there are rules about which slice you can grab. If you're first, you can grab any slice you like. But after that first slice is gone, you can only grab one of the two slices that are adjacent to the gap. So you can find some interesting questions around this situation: if you know this about the wedges, how can you maximize your pizza-grabbing?

Bryan explained how if there's an even number of slices and you pick first, you can guarantee you'll get at least half of the pizza. Paint half the slices of pizza blue and half of them red, alternating. Which has the larger total area, red or blue? Suppose it's blue. When you go first, choose a blue slice. Your opponent must take a red slice, exposing another blue slice which you can take. And so on around the pizza. It wasn't clear to me why I'd still want so much pizza after I'd slopped paint all over it. I guess it's because these mathematicians have spent so long as starving grad students that they're not so picky anymore. Anyhow.

What? Oh right, I'm supposed to be talking about comics. Torso and Goldfish are Cleveland crime comics by Brian Michael Bendis. Goldfish is fiction, the story of a con man in Cleveland who's in the struggle of his life and must fast-talk like never before if he is to... Uhm, it was OK. Torso is the story of Elliot Ness after he was done being an untouchable. He tried to clean up Cleveland. But in Cleveland, he didn't have untouchables. He had a bunch of touchables; the local government was even better at blocking him than he was at fighting crime.

Better he should have become a mathematician. Abstract pizza is much safer to deal with than serial killers.

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Dr Who's Martians as Puzzle Designers #badpuzzles Cramming for the Doctor When game, I watch Doctor Who. The Pyramids of Mars arc aims at being puzzle-huntish... kind of... Towards the end, there's a Martian stronghold guarding a treasure chamber; ...