Re: Directional Pawns?

[rmundsc@...]

Hi,

I am still in favor of directional pawns.  I know that they won't be 
used for a lot of games, but that same arguement could be 
made for just about every element of the piecepack.   

I would like to propose 2 additions to the current pieceoack 
specification for pawns.

1.  The pawn should have a directional indicator to  clearly 
indicate the facing of the pawn to an angular resolution of 45 
degrees ( = 8 distinct facings).
2.  Each pawn should have 2 distinct states: Upright & Inverted.

Point 1 is nothing new.
Point 2, however, is a new idea. 

There are many ways to implement such a pawn
1. As regular polyhedral prism with a notch or mark on the 
directional side located 1/4 to 1/3 along the hieght of the pawn.   
Flipping the pawn the mark indicates whether the pawn is 
Inverted or Upright. 
2. A a regular polyhedral prism with one end painted white to 
indicate the Upright/Inverted state.
3. Pawns that can't be physically inverted can be given a 
hat/ring/flag to wear to indicate the Inverted state.

Why do I want the Upright/Inverted binary state addition?
1.  Its easy to add to the piecpack, as shown above it can be 
done without increasing the piece count.  
2.  The Inverted state is very handy to indicate metaphors in 
game mechanics like:
- Who has the "ball".
- Damage.
- Promotion
- Voting Yes or No.
- Any binary state!
I already have a game drafted where I would like to be able to 
have both the directional capability and 2-state switch ability on 
piecepack pawns.    In the game the pawns represent the 
player's mothership (coins are fighters).  The direction ability 
would allow me to make the mother ship less manuverable than 
the fighters (logical) and the inverted state would allow the 
mothership to be damaged once before it is destroyed (adds 
depth).  I think the game would be much improved with these 
mechanisms added.
This is just one example.

As for people who have already purchased piecepacks.  It 
doesn't matter much.  Now is the best time to update the 
specification, before mass distribution begins.  People owning 
older piecepacks simply can't play a very small subset of the 
newest games until they upgrade.  No big deal.   

The REAL danger is that if the piecepack specification is not 
allowed to change in this early formative time to add these rather 
abilities to the piecepack, then I fear that companies that 
produce the piecepack may add these additional mechanisms 
themselves in different ways and create grossly divergent 
piecepacks that are conformant to the base spec but 
incompatible each others additional mechanisms.  I would like 
to see the most obvious and useful additions to the specification 
be worked out now and get released into the public domain 
spec.

In summary I would like to push for a change to the specification 
that the pawns be made directional and Invertable (i.e., have 2 
distinct states).  

Regards,
Rob Mundschau


--- In piecepack@y..., jdroscha@g... wrote:
> All,
> 
>    How do you feel about the possibility of changing the 
> piecepack components specification to require the four pawns 
to 
> indicate direction?  I strongly considered this when developing 
> the piecepack, and Rob suggested it a couple weeks ago.  I 
> always figured that a ruleset could call for directional player 
> tokens and players could provide them from other games, but 
if 
> you're travelling with a piecepack, it would be nice not to have 
to 
> rely on other game parts for as many games as possible.  Any 
> opinions one way or the other?
> 
> Game On,
> James