Tonight a few friends and I got together at Mission Creek Cafe for our semi-weekly Game Theory night. GT is when where we get together to think/talk/review/create/and play games of all types. Tonight’s most interesting topic was a card game called Light Speed by CheapAss Games, that emulates real time strategy space games (like StarCraft). I won’t try to explain it too much (see the review on OgreCave.com for that) because you really have to play it to get it, but the general idea is that there are two phases to the game. In the first phase, everybody tries to put down all of their ships on the table, then the next phase is the scoring phase where you determine who’s lasers shoot who. I thought the game was a blast, it helps to have one person who has played it before, but I think it could be easy to figure out on your own. I’ve never played a game like this before, it’s very unusual, but not in an abstract strategy game.
We also bumped around a ton of ideas including some Twitter based games. I have two ideas that I think would make for cool Twitter games, one that would be a twitter based MUD game (like a text based role playing game). The other idea I had was a manners game, which would be more of just a simple API I guess. The idea is that you can enter in your Twitter name, then the programs follows reads your tweets and gives you a score to determine how polite you are. You’d get points for saying things like “thank you” or “please” but would lose points for words like “fuck” or “gimme”. The idea of the game is a reaction to most twitter games, which might encourage players to type tons of tweets or irrelavant posts that annoy their followers. Instead, the game rewards (what it sees as) good behavior, without affecting the tweet to noise ratio of a persons posts.
We also played a new iPhone game app called iPac3d. iPac3D is a 3D homebrew version of the classic pac-man game. Think Castle Wolfenstien with pellets. It’s great to see the iPhone rendering 3D worlds, but the real fun/challenge comes from using the iPhones built in accelerometer to control the game.
If you are interested in attending the next Game Theory get together, next monday, you can read the details on this upcoming page. We might move the meeting space though, so feel free to contact me if you are coming and I’ll keep you in the loop.
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