Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Release: Optimal Weave (P1): A Prototype Cohabitive Game, published by mako yass on August 17, 2024 on LessWrong.
I recently argued for Cohabitive Games, games that are designed for practicing negotiation, or for developing intuitions for applied cooperative bargaining, which is one of the names of preference aggregation.
I offered the assets for P1, my prototype, to whoever was interested. About 20 people asked for them. I told most of them that I wanted to polish the assets up a little bit first, and said that it would be done in about a month. But a little bit of polish turned into a lot, and other things got in the way, and a month turned into ten. I'm genuinely a little bit dismayed about how long it took, however:
P1, now Optimal Weave 0.1, is a lot nicer now.
I think it hangs together pretty well.
You can get it here: Optimal Weave 0.1. (I'm not taking any profit, and will only start to if it runs away and starts selling a lot. (release day sale. get in quick.))
There's also a print and play version if you want it sooner, free, and don't mind playing with paper. (Honestly, if you want to help to progress the genre, you've got to learn to enjoy playing on paper so that you can iterate faster.)
There's also a version that only includes the crisp, flippable land tiles, which you can then supplement with the ability, event and desire cards from the printed version and whatever playing pieces you have at home.
(note: the version you'll receive uses round tiles instead of hex tiles. They don't look as cool, but I anticipate that round tiles will be a little easier to lay out, and easier to flip without nudging their neighbors around (the game involves a lot of tile flipping).
Earlier on, I had some hope that I could support both square layout and hexagonal layout, that's easier with round tiles, though everything's balanced around the higher adjacency of the hexagonal layout so I doubt that'll end up working)
I'll be contacting everyone who reached out immanently (I have a list).
What Happened
Further learnings occurred. I should report them.
I refined the game a fair bit
There were a lot of abilities I didn't like, and a lot of abilities I did like but hadn't taken the time to draw up, so I went through the hundred or so variations of the initial mechanics, cut the lame ones, added more ideas, then balanced everything so that no land-type would get stuck without any conversion pathways.
I also added an event deck, which provides several functions. It simplifies keeping track of when the game ends, removes the up front brain crunch of dropping players straight into a novel political network of interacting powers, by spreading ability reveals out over the first couple of turns.
The event deck also lightly randomizes the exact timing of the end of the game, which introduces a nice bit of tension, hopefully spares people from feeling a need to precisely calculate the timing of their plans, and possibly averts some occurrences of defection by backwards induction (though the contract system is supposed to deal with that kind of thing, for reasons that are beyond me, people seem to want to try playing without the contract system so, here, this might be important).
I found a nicer low-volume prototyping service
The Game Crafter. Their prices are better, uploads are easier to automate, and they offer thick card tile pieces, as well as various figures. I think some of those figures are pretty funky little guys. Those are the ones you'll be receiving.
Their print alignment is also pretty bad. They warn you, so I'm not mad or anything, I just find it baffling. It's especially bad with the cardboard tile pieces. Oh well, everything looks good enough, I'm happy overall, although I do notice that no big popular board game that I've ever heard of decided to publish through this se...

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