Easy Slider (was: Design Contest Winner Announcement)

[Ron Hale-Evans <rwhe@...>]

On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 08:39:59AM -0800, Michael Schoessow wrote:
> Ron Hale-Evans wrote:
>
> > I would be interested in your opinions and those of the other
> > playtesters about Easy Slider, critiqued either publicly on the list,
> > or privately, as you see fit. 
>  
> We liked the game fine. As you said, its ancestry from the game, 15 is
> obvious and I think everyone reading this must be familiar with that little
> solitaire game (my own first exposure to it was when I was 4 years old and
> my dad gave me one to play with in church to keep me quiet). Easy Slider has
> a replayability advantage over 15 however because a completely random new
> board configuration can rapidly be achieved, and because it supports
> multi-player games. My own opinion is that the replayability improvement is
> a bigger advantage than the multi-player innovation because I intend to add
> it to my stable of solitaire games that I actually play (my other favorites
> are One Man: Thrag, plus some card games).

Now *that's* a recommendation. Thanks, Mike.  Marty says she is glad
you found the setup quick and easy; she was worried it was too
complicated.

You forgot another advantage of the game: if it ever becomes popular
in its multi-player form, it will necessarily sell a lot of
piecepacks! :-)

> One suggestion for the rules is that you should point out that the
> tile array should be constructed with a little space (we used about
> 1/4 inch) between adjacent tiles...
>
> The rules for Easy Slider, as written, make it into a fast-thinking,
> logical reasoning, dexterity game because of the speed
> aspect. During play-testing it was realized that an interesting
> variant is to take away the dexterity aspect and some portion of the
> fast thinking aspect by preventing the various players from seeing
> each other's boards and then having the caller announce "slide" at
> equal time intervals, at which times each player MUST immediately
> slide a tile. Sliding at other times is not allowed. Thus, at the
> moment one player wins, all players will have made an identical
> number of moves. With short intervals the fast thinking aspect is
> still there but the pressure isn't quite so high and there's more
> time for deeper planning.  The character of the game changes because
> mistakes are more damaging but there's also more time to think
> before moving. It also somehow *feels* like there's more player
> interaction.

We will incorporate both the "leave space between tiles" warning and
the "Slide!" variant into the revised rules, which we hope to upload
within the next day or two.  We will give appropriate credit for the
variant, of course.  Good catch about the spacing thing, and it does
sound like an interesting variant.

> As you pointed out, this is a game in the same class as Take It
> Easy, a game I own but seldom pull out on game nights. We found no
> problems with the rules or game play, and the play-testers were
> ambivalent about the game; a definite personal preference thing
> here.

Hmm... Take It Easy is close to a 10 out of 10 on my personal rating
scale.  I am virtually always willing to play it.  However, I am
definitely aware that personal preferences vary for both sliding-block
puzzles like 15 and "multi-player solitaires".  Some people love them
and some people hate them.  I maintain that one reason people don't
like sliding-block puzzles is because they never got the hang of them
and consequently find them "impossible", just as many people can't
"do" a Rubik's Cube.  Reading a couple of the web pages we linked to
at the end of the rules can help someone who finds sliding-block
puzzles "impossible" get the knack of them in just a few minutes; I
considered writing a brief tutorial at the end of our rules, but there
just wasn't time to produce the necessary diagrams.

As for your finding themed games "fun" but abstract games merely
"satisfying": wow!  I wish I had known that.  Your own Alien City is
practically a pure abstract strategy game with just a thin theme,
IMHO.  We had another BYOP (Bring Your Own Piecepack) game that was
heavily themed and probably a lot more "fun" in your sense, but it was
so silly that it had "Ron and Marty" fingerprints all over it.  We
figured Easy Slider was the stronger game, and if we submitted our
other game, the BYOP trail would lead back to Easy Slider.  We didn't
want to bias the judge and playtesters either way, so we just
submitted what we thought was the stronger game, and the one most
unlike our previous efforts.  (We also mislaid some of our playtesting
notes on the other game, so it may be a while before it sees the light
of day.)

Thanks again to everyone involved with the contest...

Ron H-E

-- 
       Ron Hale-Evans ... rwhe@... & rwhe@...
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