Re: piecepack design workshop #2: Stations v1.2 by Michael Schoessow

["Matt Worden" <Matt.Worden@...>]

I had a chance to play the game during my lunch break today.  
Overall, it's a neat game that fits the piecepack very nicely.  It 
seems like a game that not only will reveal more/deeper strategy and 
effective tactics the more you play, but will change a good deal 
depending on who you play with.

However, I'm a bit unclear yet as to how paths are defined.  This 
seems to be what the whole game revolves around ... so being able 
to "dummy proof" the definitions into something as clear as possible 
will help.  I've formed a couple of questions that might help 
illustrate where/how I'm confused:

1> What is the distance travelled between two building sites that 
are "directly across the street" from each other (the initial half-
tile gap is between them)?  My gut would tell me it's 1, since you 
have to "cross the street" ... but, as Phillip mentioned in his 
reply, middle example in the "Examples of Counting ..." diagram 
seems to suggest that it might be zero instead.

2> Do paths only exist along the edges of the tiles, so that once 2 
tiles get more than a distance of a half-tile apart they no longer 
have pathways between them (no "open space" paths)?

I also have a couple additional variant ideas:

1> Allow players to rotate a tile instead of (or in addition to) 
sliding it

2> Players start with a "random queue" of their coins (shuffled 
facedown and stacked) ... they can only look at the value of the 
next one that will be placed

-Matt