Re: [piecepack] Re: Rehi, congrats, thanks, apologies, miscellanea

[Porter235 <porter235@...>]

Welcom Matt,
I can't speak for the maintainers of the piecepack.org site, so I won't. But 
what I can do is point you to resources that are available on the wiki.

A list of lists showing games grouped by some large basic game types and 
themes. Find a game like Pachisi.
http://www.ludism.org/ppwiki/TaxonomyOfPiecepackGames

A list of lists showing games grouped by required equipment. Find a game that 
requires pyramids (IceHouse) or dominoes.
http://www.ludism.org/ppwiki/RequiredEquipment

A list of lists showing games grouped by mechanics. Find a game that uses a 
Random Board setup. (Still very new and incomplete, but it will grow.)
http://www.ludism.org/ppwiki/GameMechanics

A list of lists showing games grouped by Number of players that can play. Find 
a game for 3 players.
http://www.ludism.org/ppwiki/NumberOfPlayers

A list of lists showing games grouped bye length of time needed to play. (Find 
a game to play that be played in under half an hour.
http://www.ludism.org/ppwiki/TimeToPlay

A list of competition winners. Find an award winning game.
http://www.ludism.org/ppwiki/CompetitionWinners

A list of recommended games. Find a game suggested by others.
http://www.ludism.org/ppwiki/RecommendedGames

A list of games not recommended. Find a game you might not want to play.
http://www.ludism.org/ppwiki/NotRecommendedGames

A list of games that need play testing and feedback. Find a game that could 
use your help.
http://www.ludism.org/ppwiki/CategoryNeedsTesting

A list of lists of games grouped by Ratings that have been applied. Another 
way to find a game that people like enough to have added a rating to.
http://www.ludism.org/ppwiki/Ratings/Summaries

A page detailing how to add your own rating markers to a game. Rate the games 
you have played to help others find games you like.
http://www.ludism.org/ppwiki/Ratings

A wiki may not be an ideal environment to build the listed functionality 
because there isn't the ability to do complex cross referencing (A 
recommended 3 player game that takes less than 1 hour to play and requires no 
extra equipment), but it is very flexible and all of this work has been done 
using the out of the box functionality that comes with the wiki software. Not 
to mention that all of this work has been done by members of this community 
without having to appeal to a higher power (web master) before implementing 
and anyone can add additional functionality. 

That said, there is no reason why you couldn't implement your own rating site 
with all of the features you mention. You would not need to host the PDF game 
files, simply link to them on piecepack.org as the wiki does. Once it is up, 
I'm sure that piecepack.org and the wiki would link to you. No reason why we 
couldn't have a forth resource (piecepack.org, the wiki, the yahoo group, 
your rating site) 

As for the listing of "broken" games on piecepack.org, I personally have no 
problem with it. Maybe a disclaimer on the page is in order to inform the 
world that these are all of the games that have been submitted to them and 
that the quality or content of the games are the responisbility of the 
creators not the maintainers. It seems that it is not a bad thing that this 
page contains ALL games that people have said are ready to go. This also 
avoids hurt feelings and politics.

Possibly instead of removing "broken" games, simply marking the competition 
winners and possibly the honourable mentions on the page with different 
colour or a star or something that will draw people visiting the list to 
these games. This should give people enough "proven" games to get them 
interested and hardened should they then later decide to try other games and 
get a lemon.


On Wednesday 10 November 2004 8:19 pm, Matt Campbell wrote:
> My $0.02, take with grain o' salt since I'm still quite new to the
> piecepack community.
>
> I'd like to see a user-based rating system, preferably on piecepack.org.
>   I found the rating/comments pages on the piecepack wiki but a wiki
> doesn't really lend itself to what I was hoping to find, which was a way
> to search for games based on number of players and popularity.  Imagine
> something in the vein of Amazon's user ranking system for books or (the
> system that really inspired the idea) Recipezaar.com's system for
> ranking recipes.  Registered users could enter comments about their
> experience with the game and give the game a "star" rating; in the
> piecepack tradition, the ranking would be from Null through 5 - and
> perhaps Crowns would be more appropriate than stars, come to think of it
> ;).  In such a system, I would imagine the "broken" games would have
> naturally low rankings.  The games where broken-ness was a difference of
> opinion would probably float to the middle, and really good games would
> tend to float to the top.
>
> The ideal finished product would allow somebody to look for a game based
> on available equipment (does it need an expansion?  playing cards?
> pyramids?), number of players, perhaps playing time as well.  The
> results could then be sorted by user ranking to "float" popular (and by
> assumption, fun) games to the top.  The idea came to me two weekends ago
> when I had just completed construction of my own piecepack and my
> father-in-law was visiting and I was trying to find a fun game for 3
> players and one piecepack so we could try out this "new" system (not to
> mention have some fun while we were at it).  I wound up choosing PDFs to
> download and print more or less at random; my choices tended to be
> influenced more by equipment and the actual name of the game, which is a
> not-so-reliable indicator of game quality.  It took us to the end of the
> night to stumble across The Assassination Game Le, and after losing one
> player to bedtime we had to improvise a peculiar two-player variant to
> finish up the night.
>
> Being a software developer by profession (which doesn't seem uncommon
> among piecepackers) and also having some experience at web and database
> programming, I'd even offer to help develop the system if I knew where
> the thing could be hosted.  (My personal website doesn't have the disk
> space for all the rules documents...)