/hob/ - Hobbies

You sound very intelligent, a lot of people play a specific board game, like chess, as a hobby.
Designing board games itself is like on a higher level of reasoning.

>>70930
I don't know what suggested I am "very intelligent" here. Designing games (and by extension expecting people to abide by their rules) is mostly a matter of audacity, not intelligence. However I try to mitigate the audacity factor by designing games to be theoretically decisive. I wasn't the first to come up with this methodology, that would be John Nash strictly speaking, and then Mark Steere who brought the concept into vogue, creating the first finite mechanisms with his games Tanbo and Oust.

Finite mechanisms have become sort of a fixed idea for me and when I find a new one I like to see if I can shoehorn it into some sort of game. For instance, pic related is my chess variant Chiron. In this chess variant the trick is each piece doesn't just move forward, like many other games before, but rather there is an asymmetric movement pattern allowing retreats and this pattern fits into a <180 degree radius. The result is each piece is always advancing towards some corner of the board or is otherwise capturing. The pieces have some of this asymmetry ameliorated by having "capture only" movement which reflects the green "basic" movement (move or capture). And the symmetry is also improved by having lefthanded and righthanded versions of each asymmetric piece. Then there are some other shenanigans with the phoenix where it can exclusively capture on any cell behind it. The king must eventually pass the enemy phoenix and be captured.

So I happen to be somewhat intelligent but if you look at some games, there is no apparent sign of intelligence, just a lot of audacity.

>>70933
I guess I sufficiently doxxed myself, so I'll just post the rules

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/429155/chiron

>>70926
I also like to make games and rules for them since I was a kid too. card games are the one I prefer

>>70938
like a TCG? Or just ones with a standard French deck?

>>70940
tcgs

>>70944
Out of curiosty do you play a TCG without blind-packs?

>>70946
I don't understand how anything but a large company can facilitate a trading card game.

>>70945
no I don't

>>70948
I mean how do you facilitate the "collectable" aspect when you don't have distribution networks?

Personally, the AI aspect of this is more fascinating. It seems that AI will beat humanity at any conceivable task, and this includes board games.
In 1997, Deep Blue, a chess computer designed by IBM, beat Garry Kasparov, marking the first time an AI beat a world chess champion. To some, this task appears trivial for AI, since chess is a very logical game. However, such a task was once thought unthinkable. It was reasoned that due to chess's exponential complexity in regards to the number of possible game states within a finite count of turns, raw computational power could never beat human ingenuity. In fact, when Deep Blue defeated the undefeated world champion, Kasparov accused IBM of cheating… by hiding a human grandmaster. As beautiful as this notion might be, I don't think that my iPhone is secretly hiding a human opponent within. This notion is absurdly backwards from the perspective of today. The history of chess automaton dates all the way back to the 19th-century, starting with the "Mechanical Turk." However, this AI actually was cheating by concealing a human player. I recently watched this documentary, which I've linked below for those interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwF229U2ba8
In response to this, the board game, now known as "Arimaa," was developed to be simple for humans to understand & play while also being difficult for machines. A $10,000 prize was announced for anyone who develops an AI which beats the world champions. The prize was claimed in 2015.
There's also the ancient board game popular in the Eastern world, known as "go," which was thought to have been impossible for AI to play professionally. This notion was maintained until 2016, where a grandmaster was defeated 4-1, a shocking upset. It's easy to forget that this outcome was completely unexpected to the go community at that time. (The aforementioned grandmaster feared a 4-1 outcome, since even a single victory might glamorize such a puny AI opponent. He was hopeful for a 5-0 outcome.)
I sometimes daydream of some sort of board game where AI actually can't win. Even a card game would be adequate. I don't know, maybe poker is humanity's last stand?

>>70949
I don't think about it. its more of a LCG than a TCG

>>70950
>don't do anything because ai can do it
>don't go up Everest because a plane can take you higher up (actually I agree with this to an extent, go up Mount St Elias in Alaska instead for a longer base to summit elevation and not dying in an embarrassing queue)
> oh and don't compose music, Mozart and Stravinsky already existed. Don't paint because we have Vermeer and Picasso

ai bros are the worst

>>70951
What does the L stand for?

>>70953
Living Card Game

>>70950
The only people who think AI is "better" at anything (creative that is) have absolutely zero taste and fundamentally misunderstand art. The AI cannot "be better" at art because it's about human expression; the human gets better at art because his skill is a tangible expression of his inner development. The machine putting lines in an image a certain way is not better. It's soulless, in the literal sense, because the machine cannot reason, it isn't aware, it has no clue what its doing; you assign skill and intent and human attributes to a math equation.

>>70926
Not a board game but I am designing a pen and paper rpg. Gonzo scifi, mostly just stuff I think is cool or funny, but development basically stopped at 3/4ths since I started doing other things.

>>70956
I respect the viewpoint presented here but I am not even taking it that far. I am just saying there is a personal journey in creating art that is satisfying to be a part of. We never used to say "all these other guys did [discipline] better so don't bother making your own" but now that ai has come along we've completely lost the plot; the objective is to be better than whatever ai can create. Who is buying this nonsense?

>>70952
No-one is saying that.
>>70955
What do you think about this? https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wLuLTgimkpk

>>70958
If no one is saying that (or looks like that) then why even bring up ai in the first place? Its a nonsequitur at best.

>>70959
>I sometimes daydream of some sort of board game where AI actually can't win. Even a card game would be adequate. I don't know, maybe poker is humanity's last stand?
>don't do anything because ai can do it
How is this not a non-sequitur?

>>70960
Oh, I thought it was just generally understood that ai can easily cream any human at any board game. I thought what you were saying was people shouldn't bother playing games because ai will beat them. But yeah, I hate to have to say it but no such game exists, mastering strategy games is just the kind of thing ai is best at.

>>70933
>I don't know what suggested I am "very intelligent" here.
playing board games is always thinking within some fixed rules and if it's something popular like chess there's already a mountain of knowledge and approaches to it
designing board games itself forces you to think how rules themselves come together to create the game, this also requires creativity as you are thinking up new games
I don't think you'll find a lot about how rules come together outside maybe some mathematics papers

>>70966
like I say, making games is 1% inspiration and 99% pretension. Look at something like Boop. Anyone could have come up with it and its one of the most popular abstract games. I do make it more of a cerebral exercise but its not necessary. Anyway thank you for the kind words.

Chess, but it's cute White angel loli against big boob succubi in black bikinis

>>70979
you can't avoid thinking on a higher level and there isn't much available already existing work, playing a specific game like chess over and over again you can just learn the already most effective ways of playing and you're always thinking inside the rules of the game
>>71052
Chess is based, mental hobbies are always superior to physical ones like soccer

>>70926

cool thread, i am hoping the future will be full of people like you who get to have the ability to stray from mass production and give the people taylor-made options preventing the mistake of mass culture producing identical people from ever repeating.

>Feel free to ask

what's the first thing you usually decide when you think up a game?

how'd you make a 2-player game for people who get bored after ~4 minutes so one round has to be shorter then that.

what's the longest game you think people would enjoyably play together because there has to be a number of hours at which it becomes a chore to stay awake even though tiredness sets in.

how'd you make a complicated game that can be played while walking in the woods (so no table, hardly any place to put something like a discard pile unless you wear cute little hard-holding or piece-storing backpacks/fannypacks, potentially only dimly lit)

how'd you approach making an easy game to be played while walking (drunk or high).

>>70950
>I sometimes daydream of some sort of board game where AI actually can't win.

the computer will win in everything that can be expressed in math consciously where the victory conditions are known which allow it to run permutations. there is however the unconscious, unquantifiable, unknowable which is where i would look for advantages that humans have over machines.

>>70961
>I thought what you were saying was people shouldn't bother playing games because ai will beat them

your thoughts remind me of something i am currently noticing: a distinct new type of ai-fueled nihilism and depression in which people are convinced nothing is worth doing because machines can do it better. this narrative might be the loud dramatic deathrattle of competitive people as they finally understood their breed (and soldiers have literally been bred though people get nervous when this is discussed) will be made obsolete by machines.

My problem with a lot of these "designed" boardgames is that a lot of them are just "chess but the pieces move different". Now I'm not huge into the boardgame design scene, so I'm sure there's some innovation, but that's sort of my impression as a dilettante. Another thing is that there's often times no digital versions of these games which makes trying them out nearly impossible. So, it reduces the game to an intellectual curiosity rather than a proper game you can actually play and invest your time in.

>>71072
>no digital versions of these games which makes trying them out nearly impossible

i'm trying to think which widely available program could be use to play them. something like a simple mspaint/kolourpaint might be too crude since there is only one layer of paint so moving pieces would include moving the background the pieces are on as well.

there is a tabletop simulator on steam, this might work, i have been waiting for it for 10 years for it to be cheaper during a sale, no luck so far.

i guess powerpoint/LibreOfficeImpress should work, you could use paint to cut out pieces and paste them into powerpoint, each remaining a individual, clickable, moveable image you can drag around with the mouse

>>70950
>I sometimes daydream of some sort of board game where AI actually can't win.

this is probably the guy to talk about the dream lol

>>71075
You're learning to use Python. It's what primary school students are taught so they can create small programming projects, like little games.

>>71080
99% of people on earth alive right now have no idea what even "coding" is.