On Mon, 5 Mar 2007 11:32:41 -0500, Jim Henry <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Sunday, I playtested the first version of my conlang card game
>Glossotechnia with my brother and four other friends.  (See
>http://archives.conlang.info/qa/gelkhia/zhiatueduan.html for my first
>post about it, back when I was started to design the deck and rules.)
[...]

An interesting session report; thanks for writing it up.

>I obviously need to work on coming up with a balanced translation
>challenge deck where all the sentences are of roughly similar
>difficulty.

I still like the idea of player-created translation challenges to, well,
offer more variety than a fixed deck of cards can.  I wonder whether there's
any way to get non-linguistically-oriented players to generate sentences of
reasonably balanced difficulty -- perhaps to ask for sentences of some fixed
number of English words?  

Alternatively, it might be possible to write some computer program to
generate sentences of uniform difficulty.  Even if you don't want it to be
necessary to call on a computer for every game, you could have it generate
you a new deck of sentences once the players have grown too familiar with
their current one.  

>The playtesters had a few suggestions for improving the game, including:
>
>- starting out with some random phonemes and syllable cards already
>  face down, so players can start coining words on the very first turn

Good.  Or have a very fast first round where each player is constrained to
put down a phoneme or syllable card?

>- modular translation challenges with mix-and-match subject and
>  predicate cards

Kind of a less extreme version of complete dynamic generation by computer.  

Would every predicate, and every subject, have the same complexity? 
Otherwise, what's to stop you from drawing a more-difficult subject with a
more-difficult predicate?

>- action cards that let one player place requirements on what another
>  player can do on their next turn; e.g., must coin a word of a
>  specific part of speech, or must use their new word in a sentence
>  immediately
>
>- action cards to let players retrieve cards from the discard pile, as
>  in Chrononauts

I like these two, and they look implementable without breaking anything else.  

>- having two-stage missions, with players drawing an "easy"
>  translation challenge card at the beginning of the game and then
>  drawing a "hard" translation challenge card after they have
>  translated their first sentence

That would make for a really long game, wouldn't it?

>- add more incentives to express sentences in the gamelang, besides
>  the basic game-winning goal of translating your challenge card

Hmm, how?

>- the translation challenge sentences should have significant lexical
>  overlap, so once players get familiar with the deck, they can't
>  guess what sentence someone else has by the first few words
>  they coin.

There's a tradeoff here: the less lexical variety there is in a given deck,
the easier it is for players familiar with it to guess what word someone's
trying to define.  

>I also noted that I probably need to have a slightly higher proportion
>of syllable cards to phoneme cards, to get word-coining play started
>as soon as possible in the early rounds, and need a higher proportion
>of grammar change cards in the deck.  After the game was over we
>talked about how the number of phoneme and syllable cards in play
>tended to grow without limit and that there should be some mechanism
>for limiting the number of either in play at a given time.  I'm not
>sure what would be the best way to do that -- maybe add several cards
>setting a maximum phoneme inventory limit (10, 15, 20, 30...)?
>Or roll dice at the beginning of the game to set the initial limit,
>and add action cards that allow a player to increase or decrease the
>limit by an amount given on a new die roll...?  What do y'all think?

Would it help to treat the phonotactics cards more like the syntactic cards?
 So instead of having a card for each syllable structure, you'd have e.g.
coda cards 'no codas', '(N)', '(C)', '(C)(C)', etc., and separate onset
cards.  The problem then is that it's not clear what to do about replacing a
card with a more restrictive one when there are already words with the less
restrictive phonotactics: force a sound change?  

In fact, the same problem seems to manifest itself however you try to
decrease the limit: what happens if there are 18 Cs in play and then someone
plays the 'upper bound 10 Cs' card?

Here's an approach that makes sound change more important: set a hard limit
on the phonology via dice at the beginning of the game, and perhaps have a
couple infrequent action cards that increase or decrease it.  But then allow
phoneme splits (and any other sound changes that introduce a new phone?) to
disregard the limit.  

>In the unlikely event that I manage to come to the conlangs conference
>this year, I'll certainly bring the Glossotechnia deck.  Other people
>are welcome to make their own decks based on my so far vagueish
>descriptions, or email me asking for a detailed list of the cards in
>my deck if you're interested.  I'm considering making an Esperanto
>version for the next couple of E-o conventions I go to; depends on how
>much free time I have before them.

Yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing the list of cards.  (Send it to 000024 at gmail
if you want to do so offlist.)

Alex