Tweaking Ancient Games

I have decided to have a look at tweaking and making iterations to Tablut. After playing it for a while one thing that got a bit annoying was when people started to try and block the escape tiles when I was playing as the white pieces. This was annoying as I had no way of winning the game. To try and fix this I've decided to try playing it with more escape points so that its harder to block them all off  or making it so that you can't place pieces around the escape points. I'm hoping that after trying these iterations it will make the game much better.

Tablut

Tablut is an ancient Tafl game where the black player has to try and capture the white players king, while the white player has to get their king to safety by getting him to the corner of the board. Players can move their pieces as many squares as they want providing they don't jump over a current piece. To capture an enemy piece you must have two of your pieces on either side of an opposing piece. One exception to this is to capture the king you must surround it on all four sides.

After playing several games of Tablut I quite enjoyed it. However one downside that I did find with the game was that the black player could block of the escape points and were in a position where they couldn't be captured. This means that nobody could win the game.

Caillois’s Terminology

We looked at how you can categorise different video games depending on things like rules and what the player does when playing the game.

We started by looking at how Newman, J, said we categorise games depending on if you play the game for pleasure or are limited by rules and have an outcome they need to achieve to continue. He did this by looking at Roger Caillois terminology. These are known as:

  Paidia: Play for pleasure.
  Ludus: Limited by rules with a clear outcome to achieve.

 Newman then continued to show more ways that we can categorize out games by looking at Caillois's adaption of Huizinga's four terms. These were:

Agon(Competition):Sports and Racing.
Alea(Chance):Betting and Roulette.
Ilinx(Vertigo):Mountain Climbing and Skiing.
Mimicry(Simulation):Theater and Cinema.

From looking at these different categories we discussed how games we know and play fit into each category or with most games into multiple categories. I decided to pick a game I play and see how they fit into these categories.

FIFA 15: This is a football game and is a ludus game. This is because there are very strict rules that the player has to follow or they would be penalised. FIFA is also an agon game because there is a lot of competition between the two teams to try and win the game.