Board Game Studies Colloquium VIII

Abstracts

Dr. John Rankin and Mr. H Seera

SELECTABLE RULE BASED GAMES

These games don't take into consideration the fact that some players may not like the choice of rules and so may find even fixed-rule multiplayer games boring because players don't agree with the rules. We propose that board games should give a list of all possible rules for the game, and allow the players to choose what rule set they wish to have. Furthermore we have designed a game architecture and prototype to show that it is possible to create games of this type. In this architecture the system searches for matches between players with similar rule set choices.

These kinds of games have more benefits than the current fixed rule set games. For example players can show creativity in improving the rule set for a game, players are automatically associated with others of similar interests, new board games can evolve based on rule set popularity and a generic game can be constructed in generalization of the wide variety of traditional board games. We believe that flexible rule set games can be more interesting.