Summerpalooza 2022 Stories and Results

Review: Suit Scoot In-hand Solitaire

Card solitaires aren't known for being compact, in face solitaires differentiate each other by the shape of its setup, which can range from square inches to hectares. Attempts have been made to create compact solitaires that do not require a surface, but it seems inherent for playing cards to be played on a surface. Here's a cute little attempt at a handheld solitaire.

More of a puzzle, the game only requires 13 cards of a suit, or even just one of each rank. The cards are shuffled and then fanned out. The sequence lies in a circle so when played in hand one should remember that the sequence wraps around. Cards are moved one at a time. Number cards move exactly the same number of spaces (between cards) as their rank. Court cards move the same number of moves as either card beside it. You cannot move a card twice in a row. The goal is to arrange the cards into an ascending order.

The game's main feature is the wild nature of the court cards. As is, the cards can simply cycle through all the spaces, thus making the ordeal trivial if not for the court cards adding something extra by strategizing placements. As a puzzle it's simple to pick up and play, the simplicity coming more from its linearity.

New Domino Solitaires Book: Selected Reviews

John Burton is crafting new domino solitaires. With domino games in general already being unusual creatures, solitaires may even be a rarer breed. Split into adaptations and ground-up invented games, one can glean the interesting ways of working around and with the limitations of a set of dominoes. I am also constrained to reviewing games that only need a single set (of double six to double nine) so the choice of games to review is affected by this.

Beleaguered Castle:

Burton's adaptation of Beleaguered Castle uses the same layout as the original, but uses both numbers as basis for building, the advantage of limiting what domino can be played onto another has a downside of foundation-building becoming a trivial cascade. Another move that makes the game easier is the ability to build any domino of the same suit over a double. Doubles are roadblocks until moved to a valid empty space, though once there are enough empty spaces the puzzle solves itself.

Doubles Up:

This version of Aces Up uses a suit system to determine how to remove dominoes from the line, which suit a domino is being interchangeable for each discard. The goal is to finish the game with only four doubles remaining, and if you pay attention this means that the endgame will consist of some maneuvering to remove some low doubles while noting that any double counts as they do not have any special properties are are simply the nth-ranked domino of suit n.

Hanoi and Double Hanoi:

There is not much to say for the first other than to note the interesting move of using random initial position for a Tower of Hanoi puzzle. Double Hanoi is a tougher ordeal whichever ending condition you'd go for, though it's way easier than Panex.

 

slifty: the Settlers of Katana - 17 pts
Gregonzola: Dr. McNinja fans pregaming for a pub crawl - 2 pts
Not Me Yet: "just another day in the ninja gangsta club" - 2 pts
Judias Iscariot: "It's New Yorker Ninja Night!" - 7 pts
Gawea: For his directorial debut, Ronald decided to kick up the danger factor of West Side Story. - 10 pts
Nessrocker: "Blade 2022: The New Batch" - 6 pts
heddd: How To Start a Revolution, Bra! By: The Frat Community - 3 pts
blaisenwolf: "No, MINE'S bigger." - 6 pts
Khlaharah: Anime? God? We don't need those to study the blade! - 1 pt

	2	3	2		1	3	3	3		17
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1	1				3		2			7
3	3		1		2		1			10
2				3		1				6
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			3	2				1		6
		1								1

Fargblabble: "Introductory Griddle Flipping at Macdonald's University" - 12 pts
heddd: You know its fucking serious when the blind kid starts FLIPPING pancakes and the paralysed kid starts to STAND. - 4 pts
BigLebowski1: McDs was outta muh breakfast combo dis mornin' dawg! - 1 pt
The_Revolving_Fan: "When you've lost any hope of passing the class and start working on other alternatives" - 16 pts
Gumpalf: "Danial, when I said to use something to help you find the radius, I didn't mean that" - 7 pts
Not Me Yet: hmmmm. i wonder what the thing like a 700 foot long flying turtle was. - 0 pts
Christakitty: Steven didn't have time for breakfast before school, so he brought his personal chef with him.... - 10 pts
Judias Iscariot: "Flipping US world history? Screw that i'm flipping flap jacks" - 6 pts, 0 3's
Soxfan196o: I didn't eat breakfast - 3 pts
teres Minor: Abracadabra, watch me cook pancakes in class-a - 1 pt
blockhead77: Dude where are the sausages? - 6 pts, 1 3

	1	3		1	3		2	1	1				12
		1							3				4
1													1
3				3		3	3	2	2				16
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Chess Piece Essay: Hoppers

We now enter a realm almost solely within the world of generalized chess. A class of chess pieces unknown to those familiar only with the usual chess pieces.

Hoppers are the name given to a class of chess pieces that require another piece to move and set the direction of movement. A piece a hopper uses to hop is called a hurdle. This means that a pure hopper cannot move alone on an otherwise empty board.

In this piece I will cover linear hoppers, mainly sorted by its action before and after hopping. Long hoppers ride after their hop, while short hoppers stop after landing on its destination square. Leaper hoppers can only start their hop with a single leap, while rider hoppers can ride before they jump. 

Conditional hoppers require a specific hurdle or require a hurdle to fulfill a different task, the latter form usually used in hybrids. The hurdle can remain unscathed or may change state after a hop, the latter making the hopper a hurdle-changing one.

Some Starting Examples

Since the concept of a hopper is relatively alien to anyone not into chess variants, let's start with the quintessential hopper, the grasshopper. A short directional hopper, it jumps over any piece moving as a queen, landing at the square just after the piece and stopping there.

Chinese cannons are pieces in Xiangqi that take a rook's move but needs to hop on a third piece to capture (thus making this a hybrid). Korean cannon hops are long as they need to hop onto a piece before moving continuously, thus making them akin to long grasshoppers.

For a more general approach, the line a hopper takes need not be constrained by rook and bishop lines. The simplest example is the Equihopper, whose hop consists of a leap over a hurdle and landing the same distance. 

Capturing the Gist of It

Hoppers generally capture the (first) piece beyond the hurdle within its range, but some hopper types might put this into question.

In most cases hoppers takes as they move, whether long or short, through replacement. A long hopper stops on the square where it captures. 

Now if a piece has to land on the square before a hurdle, can it capture? This is more a question of how chess spaces work.

It Takes Three to Tangle

Two-hurdle hoppers are very specialist and used usually to prove a point. The obvious development from this is making a hopper jump over exactly two pieces.

A piece that needs to move between two pieces still counts as a hopper, though how this would work is beyond this essay's capabilities.

Let's Make Weird Things Happen

Hoppers can give rise to unusual situations in generalized chess geometry. The requirement that a hopper have something to hop leads to cases where a piece cannot move to a square as it would be check, what is usually called an anti-pin. Anti-pins also happen when a check cannot be responded by a recapture as the recapturing piece will become a hurdle enabling a hopper to capture the royal piece.

It's assumed that the hurdle doesn't change when it is hopped upon, in order to spare many a headache. Hurdle-changing hoppers affect the hurdle, independent of replacement capture capabilities. How the piece changes can range from a simple transformative cycle to a progressive one (i.e. there's a point the hurdle stops changing). What a piece can change into may even depend on the direction of the hop. This classification also counts capturing hurdles as a hurdle change.

Legality of a hop of this kind depends on whether the change in the hurdle creates a legal position, this is independent of the legality of the hop as a move.

Chess Piece Essay: Leapers and Riders

This is the first part of a possibly continuous series of pieces on, well, chess pieces. Future posts might also deal with other aspects of chess variants or generalized chess, but all these will simply attempt to create a taxonomy and/or set definitions regarding some concepts of generalized chess.

For this first essay on pieces, we will look at a basic kind of piece, the Leaper. A leaper is a piece that moves from one space (its origin) to another space a set distance and direction away (its destination). The move is instantaneous and is not impeded by intervening pieces.

Leap Distances

There are two ways to define the distance of a piece's move: destination coordinates and length of leap. Coordinates measure a (x,y) distance from origin to destination on a lattice grid. The simplest way to put it is to imagine the piece leaping x squares in one direction then y squares perpendicular. Length of leap measures the straight line drawn from the origin to the destination in this lattice grid (On a chessboard the points will be the centers of the squares).

Leapers are either simple or composite based on how many unique coordinates it has.

For example, a (1,1) leaper has a leap distance of square root of 2, while a (1, 2) leaper, a knight, has a leap distance of square root of 5. Compounding coordinates and lengths will give more types of leapers. These distance systems do not take into account direction and therefore cannot define leapers with distance constraints.

A well-known piece named from its leap distance is the root-fifty leaper, whose leap distance of sqrt-50 has two coordinates (5,5) and (1,7)

Leap Directions

While the methods of the previous section help with defining the distance of a leap, pieces can also be restrained by direction. Directions of limited leapers are defined relative to the perspective of the mover.

Shogi variants are peppered with examples of limited hoppers, usually relative to a king's movement, e.g. gold and silver general.

Sometimes this leads to a piece that can only move in one direction and might require some extra provisions exclusive to them lest they become deadweight.

Board Range

A chess knight can visit all 64 squares of a chess board once, but other leapers are limited in where they can go. A way for me to gauge a piece's range is to start with a piece on a random square on the board and color the squares based on the least number of leaps needed to reach a square. The board will either be filled with color or contain untouched spots. 

Whether a piece should have full range or not is within the decision of the designer, but the utility of pieces that cannot traverse the whole board is a topic usually glossed over. For these series, pieces that have full board range are "free-moving", otherwise they are "constrained."

Constraints

The most common piece constraint is that of colorboundedness, the state of a piece that can only traverse one color on a checkered board. For the purposes of this essay any piece more constrained than this is seen as heavily constrained. 

From one color to another

A chess knight can only leap to squares that are not the same as the square it is on, while a king can move to a square of either color. While the consequences of the properties of these moves are sometimes mentioned in chess study (e.g. the knight can never lose tempo), I am yet to see any further talk in regards to chess variants (geometries involved in these sorts of leaps may be nontrivial).

This alternating leaping is different from a colorbound one only in the sense of destination squares, as colorbound leapers practically move on a board of their own and can be subject to the same tempo issues.

The question then, if a leaper can always go to either color square, can it always lose tempo?

The Rider

Riders are pieces that move continuously through unoccupied squares. A rider is blocked by a friendly piece and stops moving when it captures. The rider is constructed as making successive hops, with pieces in their trajectory able to intervene. A rook and a bishop are prime examples of simple riders, the queen a compound rider. 

To make sense of a rider being made of successive hops, let our example be the knightrider, which makes continuous knight hops. Just like an actual knight it hops over pieces not within its ride, i. e. only pieces on squares within a successive line of knight hops will matter in its trajectory.

If a piece can be blocked on its way to a square it can go to by virtue of a piece getting in the way of its path, it's a rider. A leaper can only be blocked by friendly pieces on its destination squares. 

Riders long and short

A long rider can travel to its full extent in any direction it goes, blocked only by friendly pieces, captures and the edge of the board. All orthodox chess riders ride long. A short rider has a finite range, i.e. riders with any limited velocity are short may it be constant or maximum. 

In Chess with Different Armies, one of the armies features a short rook, in this case a rook that can only move up to four squares when it moves. 

A change of trajectory

A rider is bent if it requires that in the middle of its move it has to change direction. Bent riders are rarely long, although notable are riders that can diagonally bounce against walls. 

A short bent rider has a finite ride that cannot be extended and must traverse through all the squares or else it is blocked. The knight in Chinese chess is short and bent in this regard. Long bent riders are possible in practice by requiring every step of the ride to bend a certain way, either making the ride a zigzag or a loop. Other regular patterns can also be done

As a more general extension of the short bent rider concept, let's look at a piece called the Sissa. The sissa moves by first riding a set number of squares as either a bishop or a rook, then changing direction and moving the same number of squares in a non-orthogonal direction. If a piece is in the way of the sissa that cannot be captured, that move is blocked.

To give an example on the necessity of limiting long bent riders, consider a piece that can make multiple knight moves in succession, regardless of direction as long as it doesn't eventually land on the same square and it captures at the end of its turn. Considering that a knight can visit an entire chessboard, how different is thus souped-up knight from a piece that is defined by leaping to any other arbitrary square?

Quick review: Canfield

If you know one solitaire, chances are it's Klondike, but you're more likely to call it the Solitaire. Thanks to Microsoft, this form of solitaire has made itself the de facto standard, and to many it's the only form they know. As to why this piece starts this way, by virtue of this amount of familiarity Klondike is also the go-to solitaire for many, which as also the case for me, but with an expansion of solitaire knowledge comes a change in preferred defaults. Whenever I decide to play solitaire nowadays I tend to default to Canfield.

Generally seen as a casino-type game thanks to the popular origin story, Canfield is played with a single deck of cards. Deal one 13-card reserve, then a starting card for the foundations then below it a row of four cards for the starting tableau. Three cards are dealt from the stock  every time. Cards are built down on the tableau in alternating color while foundations are built upward by suit, wrapping around from king to ace if need be. If a column of the tableau clears the top card from the reserve fills it, otherwise the top card from the waste pile. You win if all cards are placed on the foundations.

Don't expect to get every card in every time. Heck, don't expect to get that many cards in whenever you play this. The success rate of Canfield is terribly low and there is little sense of progress during play. Most of your time playing will be reshuffling the deck for a new session, a more likely scenario than a complete game.

But why would I keep playing an infuriating game where frustration happens more often than fun? Why would I choose this game as the thing I'd play on my own whenever I pick up a deck of cards? It's small. The layout at the start takes up only a few square feet and is smaller than Klondike. The small layout size also allows for a fast start, fitting for the equally fast end you'll get most of the time.

Quick Review: Baker's Dozen

A deck has 52 cards in it, which factors at 2 x 2 x 13, leaving little room for any even rectangles when making a solitaire. Tableaus of unusual shapes inevitably pop up thanks to this arbitrary restriction, but people have been trying to make rectangular layouts happen anyway. 

A classic example of a game with a perfectly rectangular layout is Baker's Dozen. It is an open-information foundation-building solitaire, like Freecell or Beleaguered Castle. Cards are laid down in a tableau consisting of thirteen columns of four cards, with the goal of building up the foundations upwards by suit. Cards on the tableau are built downward regardless of suit, and no cards can be played on empty tableau space (kings are shifted to the bottom before play to avoid obvious lockouts).

Once you move a card you can no longer return it to its previous position unless it's also legal, making this game a matter of deep sequencing. One wrong move and you risk walling important cards, so expect a lot of finessing for the sake of digging out an ace or a two. Thanks to the amount of consequences reverberating from a past action, expect a decent amount of failed plays, though once you unlock everything and stack everything properly the cards will indeed fall into place.

The main issue with this relative brain burner is the space it takes, but as a solitaire, it's a great brain-burner, this can also be generalized into other decks as long as you start with columns four tall.

10 years of Shibumi (Draft)

In an attempt to conceptualize his studies on distilling game rules and using computers to synthesize them, Cameron Browne designed a fully-defined game system that is compact enough for computers to handle spatially but with enough complexity to be interesting. These efforts gave birth to a 4x4 board with stackable balls: Shibumi.

As a physical set, one only needs a board consisting of sixteen cavities in an evenly-spaced 4x4 arrangement and balls of the same size in three different colors: black, white and red. A possible fourth color, yellow, has been floated as a possible addition. Visually, the set is peak minimalism, even if you play with various balls and boards it still stands on its own, the spheres commanding its aesthetic. Its main feature though is its inherent depth: All of its 30 points are not fully available at once, these points are only available under conditions inherent to the physical set.

Add a precise glossary of terms and a the Shibumi system is ready for play. Keeping things simple, these features are inherent in the physical nature of the set and come intuitively in play. True to its abstract nature, nothing is left to chance and only moves with one certain outcome are legal, though games with randomness have utilized other factors instead.

To give the new system more bang for its buck, a contest was held to collect an initial set of rules made by humans, not only to seed the algorithms but to give the fledgling set a bunch of games for people to play with on the get-go. While Shibumi may be simple enough for someone to rediscover its concepts by scratch, a starting corpus of games is a necessity the same way you need to know at least one card game to get any use from a deck of cards.

The contest was a success, the resulting creations both stretched the capabilities of the system but also the imaginations of designers, who have to deal with reductions in size and abstraction. That various genres and goals can come out of a small playing area and color set is a conceptual marvel not only of the set but of abstracts in general. To compare, stone-placement games based on the Go set are either connection games or area games.

Sadly, after this competition, only a handful of new games popped up on BGG, and the synthesized games are yet to appear; the project itself put on hold. Fortunately, with the launch of Browne's project Ludii, new games may be on its way, and maybe, just maybe, we will see what machine-generated innovations will appear.

In 2020, Emil Danielsen presented nine new games of his own making for the set, after a lull of four years. Not restricting himself merely to abstract fare, Danielsen also approaches the set as a physical object and adds a dexterity game and a game that doesn't even require the board. It might annoy some that such games be included (although one Challenge entry is also a dexterity game, that one focused on ball-rolling and needed a slope), but thinking beyond the system's limits is something humans have excelled in doing; computers can only work within the rules they are given.

Clever yet underlooked, the Shibumi set was made to challenge computers, but it's yet to complete its first task of challenging us.

Game Review: Card Capture

Dungeon crawls need not be complicated. Card Capture uses simple mechanics to create a thematic fight without the thematic complications. Its small layout also means less space needed to play it and fewer tabs to keep track of.

The layout consist of a draw pile representing the enemies, queued up four at a time at most. At the end of the line is the enemy's discard pile and the goal is to survive through waves of enemies without letting an ace, king, queen or jack reach it. 

Your starting arsenal is pretty weak, luckily your method of attack involves capturing cards that you can also use for further attacking. Cards of a suit can capture an equal or lower card of another suit, and jokers take on the same value as another card in your hand.

After the enemies fill their positions, you draw until your hand has four cards (after choosing to discard some or none) and either capture one card, let one card of yours be captured (discarding it and the rightmost enemy card to the enemy) or sacrifice two cards to bring any card on the line to the bottom of the enemy draw pile. Aces, kings, queen and jacks cannot be sacrificed as a consequence.

Going well with the theme, the game starts with your small force matching horribly against the enemies, in some cases forcing you to choose which of your cards will have to perish. You would prefer not to lack too much of a specific suit or you'll find yourself swamped on one front that you cannot fight in any way. Jokers are powerful; it's ability of doubling the amount of a card in your hand should not be underestimated, though you might have to rely on it more often than you want.

Once you manage to gather enough cards the rest of the game is just a matter of having enough right cards at the right time; the only thing stopping you from being OP is having four cards. Any damages taken at this point may get risky and can even cost you the game. A good sense of managing losses will go a long way.

A simple game with an adventurous sense of progress, a rougelike with a deck of cards, Card Capture will do more than that, and if you're done with your adventure, just shuffle yourself another one.

Review: Gee-Haw

A nice play on the Shut the Box mechanism, David McCord's little solitaire game Gee-Haw adds additional light strategy to an already light game.

The board has three columns of ten each from left to right, black, white and red. The pegs start in the middle white column and the goal is to put all of them on the same side column, whether red or black, before the deck runs out. A deck of cards, shuffled and drawn one-by-one determine what pegs can move where.

Pegs that total a face card's number must be moved the direction based on its color. Black means move a peg leftward, if the peg is already in the black it must move right, while red goes rightward with a peg in red moving left. The full total of the card must be played, and a peg of a value can only move at most once. Kings and queens allow you to move any one peg and jacks let you move two.

As mentioned, the game is similar to Shut the Box in that the goal is to align counters entirely from one state to another, which counters can move determined by the total of a dice roll in a finite number of moves. The main differences are that in Shut the Box lowered counters cannot revert, there is only one goal state and a roll that cannot be played in full is rendered null. This latter state is important as in Gee-Haw no turn can be skipped.

But how much strategy does Shut the Box need? 

One skill can be used for Gee-Haw: card counting. Unlike Shut the Box, you can reasonably anticipate what sorts of cards will appear that you can use to your favor. The skill/luck balance involved is less biased to the latter and thus gameplay is not as finicky.

McCord plans to retail Gee-Haw as a peg game, but what's stopping anyone from using switches?

 

KoL Miners Daughter: We are beheaded to the ball! - 9 pts
MathEquals5: Mannequin and Womannequin - 8 pts
Unameme: Taking the genre of mindless romance to the next level - 16 pts
Kemistry: Looks like we're both getting head tonight - 6 pts, 2 vts
lil jimbo: me (a mannequin) going to the royal ball with my wife (who is also a mannequin) [we forgot our heads] - 0 pts
Soxfan196o: the headless horseman and his bride - 0 pts
Gawea: This is what happens when you let your wealth go to your head. - 6 pts, 4 vts
ChristopherG: Headless Horseman's Wedding - 0 pts
Cookie Sneak: "Just a little off the top" - 5 pts
Harlequins Dance: "They're close; neck and neck." - 6 pts, 3 vts
Kill3rQu33n: "There was a moment of silence when the groom was told he may now kiss the bride" - 10 pts

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3	2		3	1		2		3		2			16
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		1		2				2		1			6
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1		3					2						6
2	3		1		1	1		1	1				10

(Original, edited by Dragon)