Re: [piecepack] ANNOUNCING THE 7th PIECEPACK GAME DESIGN COMPETITION: Good Portsmanship

[Doug Orleans <dougorleans@...>]

Ron Hale-Evans writes:
 > 4. The port may not be trivial: there must be some intrinsic challenge
 >    to porting the game. For example, given the existence of the
 >    Playing Cards Expansion, some (but not all) card games would be
 >    very easy to port to the piecepack; these would not "score" very
 >    highly with respect to this criterion.

How about in the other direction: how far away can a game get from its
inspiration before it's no longer a "port"?  E.g. could Alien City be
considered a port of Fresh Fish, since it has a similar distance
measure?

Also, what happens if two people independently come up with the same
game?  Perhaps the "piecepack must add value" rule will make this less
likely, but I wonder if there's some game out there that has an
obvious but interesting port that might be independently discovered.

Maybe the answer to both of these situations is just that the Judge is
not likely to reward them.  But I thought I'd mention them as issues
anyway.

--dougorleans@...