Working on Strategy Puzzles

[Gantry]

Just wanted to give folks a heads-up.  Been working on the layout for my strategy puzzles, it's kind of a work in progress.  The reason I'm posting this is only because Matt & I have been saying that we'll have puzzles, and most of you probably don't have any idea what that means!

I thought this up in January, hopefully it will work out.  While Natasha and I were playing one evening, it was her turn and she picked a tile and was thinking over where to place it.  I knew there would be a couple of different places that she might want to put it, but it really depended on her overall strategy.  I thought to myself, wouldn't it be cool if I could make something that would show:

- a partially-completed board layout, including meeples
- whose turn it is
- what tile they just pulled
- how many meeples they and their opponent have left

and give members an opportunity to look it over and give their suggestions as to what the best move is.  Maybe "puzzle" isn't the right word, as there would be no right and wrong, but from the multitude of moves, what would be the "best" move?

I'm working on a way to create these right now, and have settled on using MS Publisher (yuck) because I can create a board template and layout to use for each puzzle, each game tile and meeple can be turned into an easy-to-paste Clipart object and rotated perfectly.  Finally when the puzzle is done, I can just save the darn thing to a .jpg and post it in this forum!

For members to comment, there also needs to be a way for you to reference where the piece would go, and rotated to what degree.  So every spot is numbered, and each of the 4 sides of the drawn tile is labelled with a letter A,B,C and D.  Then it's just a matter of saying "I think D19 would be the spot because..."

So stay tuned, I'm working on a simple test puzzle for your feedback.

 

[Gantry]

Okay here's an example: Test #1

Does this seem workable for discussions?  Anything I'm missing besides graphic design skills  : ?
In the "Special Points of Interest" box, the "Futher options" is there in case of an additional move, like a builder or dragon for example.

[Tobias]

Okay here's an example: Test #1

Does this seem workable for discussions?  Anything I'm missing besides graphic design skills  : ?
In the "Special Points of Interest" box, the "Futher options" is there in case of an additional move, like a builder or dragon for example.

I like the idea, but I have a few questions:

In your example - since yellow only got three meeples left, there has to be a bigger picture, tiles already placed. Is it early, middle or late in the game, whara are they placed etc? It'll get complex pretty soon.

The alternative is to just make strictly hypotetical "puzzels" (pretty much like your example), and don't care about the "what should be"-picture.

If this was your ambition all along, and you just wanted to post an example - then I must say it looks like it'll be fun.

Well, a late night comment - I hope you understand me

[Gantry]

I like the idea, but I have a few questions:

In your example - since yellow only got three meeples left, there has to be a bigger picture, tiles already placed. Is it early, middle or late in the game, whara are they placed etc? It'll get complex pretty soon.

The fact that yellow only has 3 meeples left was actually an editing mistake on my part.  I corrected it on my test sheet by saying yellow has all their meeples left, but forgot to re-upload that corrected jpg to the server, good job catching it!

I thought about the consideration about how far along in the game the puzzle takes place, and what I think only matters is specifically what variants are being used (if any) and how many tiles are left in the bag.  The puzzle will always show how many are on the table, so its going to be up to the reader to determine how many and what tiles are left in the bag, if they feel that is important.

The alternative is to just make strictly hypotetical "puzzels" (pretty much like your example), and don't care about the "what should be"-picture.

If this was your ambition all along, and you just wanted to post an example - then I must say it looks like it'll be fun.

Well, a late night comment - I hope you understand me

Yes, it's just for fun, a little brain exercise if you will, but it will help people who may not be so good at strategy learn from those who are.  They key is that people participate (and me getting off my duff and create some puzzles!)  Also there won't be a single, right answer - there will likely be many possible solutions, but only a few will be "best" solutions.

[Deep Stuff]

Gantry,
As a noobie to the game and to this forum, I think it would be a great idea. It would help not only with learning strategy, but with understanding the rules of the game as you see them played out and discussed. Also it should lead to some interesting dialog.

Your graphics, numbering/lettering system looks fine and I'm glad that you'll be showing all of the tiles on the table each time you present a "puzzle".

[Gantry]

a quick update: i'm working on this again (homework was getting in the way for a bit)

[stevediceman56]

I think that is a fantastic idea. I used to love studying positions in a chess game, or go game and the like. also maybe, can there be a way of annotating the game as you play so that you can play it through later and analyse, especially to note a key position and send to this forum for expert comments?