Comments on PassTheFood

# 7 Comments. # Looks good, as I said on Facebook.

I haven't played it yet, so I could be way off, but could the scoring be made more strategic? For example, multiply the values of the coins and tiles?

Consider grouping the two tables together in the text for clarity, so readers/players don't have to keep flipping back and forth.

Consider writing passages like this: "Suns threw coins on 1 Null, 1 Two, and 2 Three tiles and 2 Suns and 2 Crowns tiles" like this instead: "Suns threw coins on one Null, one 2, and two 3 tiles, and two Suns and two Crowns tiles". It's more standard and less confusing for the reader.

Can this game really be said to fall into the NonboardDexterityCategory? Isn't the 6x4 array of tiles you're tossing coins onto a board?

-- RonHaleEvans 2021-01-14 06:15 UTC

Thanks for the feedback! :-)

1. Coin x Tile seems like it would mainly come down to how lucky/skilled your ace/five coins throws were (in my playtesting I was experiencing a non-trivial bounce/roll out rate). Right now the scoring system incentivizes spreading one's coins across both columns and rows with an incentive towards the trickier throws (the side columns and far rows). Also since part of your score is zeroed out if you land on a row/column too often a player is incentivized not to try to stay in their comfort zone (row/column-wise). So in order to get the highest scores one must be able to land coins all over the board including the toughest throws; towards the end this probably means landing on just a couple targeted tiles on their last couple throws (depending where there earlier throws landed). In the multi-player version there is also the possibility of hitting and moving other players' coins although landing coins on a particular targeted spot with laser accuracy on demand was quite tricky in my playtests. You must be both accurate and soft with your throw (or it risks bouncing or rolling off) especially for the farther tiles. I mainly played with an underhand toss, a frisbee style toss may or may not work better...
2. All the rules/tables/diagrams are on one side of the "pamphlet" and LaTeX was being a bit fussy when I tried to put the tables together in the "sheet". In the past I've played with two-column "sheets" which compresses information a bit more efficiently then the one-column sheets but not sure if I should do that if I also offer three-column "pamphlets" that puts all the important stuff on one side of a piece of paper. Offering 1-column, 2-column, and 3-column layouts in both letter and A4 paper sizes seems like it might be a bit excessive?
3. I'll do this in the next revision!
4. I've eliminated that category from the page, I guess there currently isn't any existing Dexterity category that the game falls into but I guess the game belongs in the MechanicRectangularBoardCategory?

-- TrevorLDavis 2021-01-14 08:14 UTC

Thanks for taking my feedback in the spirit offered! I'd expect no less. 🙂

1. OK, this is why I said I might be missing something. You've obviously thought the scoring out far more than I have. Therefore, I have a new suggestion. Even if you let some of the scoring mechanics and strategies remain emergent, maybe it would be a good idea to have a strategy tips section to make at least some of the strategy more apparent to the player. Example: I was thinking independently that making the outer columns score higher would be a good idea, but the fact that you had already done that wasn't obvious to me.
2. I sympathize. I've worked a lot with LaTeX and know how fussy it can be; it's the flip side of its beautiful output. I agree that such a scheme would be excessive. There may be some other workaround, such as generating a high quality image of both tables grouped together, then including it in the overall document on a later pass. I feel pretty strongly about grouping the tables for usability's sake, so I'd actually suggest only offering a pamphlet if necessary. Who knows? You might start a fad. 🙂
3. Yay!
4. The problem here (which is not with your game) is that we have a lot of conjoined categories and not a lot of atomic categories on the wiki for some reason. I don't know why the system was set up this way; I guess we'd have to ask Mark Biggar or whomever did the original work. In this case, I think it would be better to have MechanicDexterityCategory and MechanicNonboardCategory separately instead of the conflated NonboardDexterityCategory.

-- RonHaleEvans 2021-01-14 17:14 UTC

FYI, there are nine games in NonboardDexterityCategory and Mark Biggar wrote more than half of them. He really likes flicking games.

-- RonHaleEvans 2021-01-14 22:03 UTC

0.3 looks good. Like the strategy section; appreciate your using "one 2" language instead of "1 two". Note that the letter sheet PDF is still v0.1, not 0.3.

-- RonHaleEvans 2021-01-16 21:13 UTC

Thanks!

> {Note that the letter sheet PDF is still v0.1, not 0.3.}

Please try again (it shows up as v0.3 when I click on the link). Maybe it got downloaded as pass_the_food(1).pdf?

-- TrevorLDavis 2021-01-17 17:16 UTC

I finally got it to work. I had to load the letter sheet PDF in my browser, then Ctrl-Shift-R. I didn't have this issue with any of the other PDFs.

-- RonHaleEvans 2021-01-17 18:38 UTC