Life - it gets everywhere

Back in the 1980s I designed a few simple boardgames for Discovery, an educational partwork magazine for children published by Marshall Cavendish. This game, "Survival of the Fittest", was included in their Charles Darwin issue.

I don't make any great claims for this. I designed it in a day or two and it was only ever intended as a fun play-around with the concept of evolution. Judging by the illustrations on the counters (not included here) the editors seem to have assumed the player was taking the part of a species. In fact you are playing different biological domains (if not entirely different DNA codes) although on any given turn you are playing a species within that domain. Easy enough to survive in warm tropical oceans, but can you make it all the way to the South Pole? If you do you'll probably be lichen, but at least you'll be the winning lichen.

If you want to try it out, you can download the game board and attribute cards here. The rules are below. And happy Christmas!

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

A game of natural selection for 2 to 5 players

OVERVIEW

The track on the board represents different habitats across the globe. Players start in the OCEAN DEEPS and try to reach the POLAR ICE CAP. In doing so, they move through different habitats, and have to mutate (that is, change by developing new characteristics) in order to survive in new surroundings. The species most able to adapt to its surroundings – not necessarily the most complex – will be the one most likely to survive.

SETTING UP

Cut out the cards. (Do not cut along the diagonals – that is, each card should be rectangular.) You will also need dice and a counter to represent each player.

Each card shows two characteristics. All players must begin with a Swimming or Slithering characteristic, so put the seven cards with these characteristics face down. Each player takes one, and all the remaining cards are then put face-down beside the board. This is the Gene Pool.

HOW TO PLAY

Each player chooses a playing piece and places it on the OCEAN DEEPS space. Roll the dice to see who will go first. When each player has finished a turn, play passes clockwise to the next person.

Each turn, you can do one of three things:

1. Migrate
2. Mutate
3. Roll for a Global Change

Migrating allows you to move your playing piece to the next space on the track. Look at this space to see if it lists any of the characteristics shown on your card(s) as advantages (+1) or disadvantages (-1). If you have neither, you have to roll 4, 5 or 6 to move on. Add 1 to the number you roll for each advantageous characteristic you possess; subtract 1 for each disadvantageous characteristic. If you roll a 6, you can have another go straight away. In assessing your advantages and disadvantages, you must also take into account any Special Characteristics (see below ).

Example

A player has the Camouflage/Slithering and Pack Hunting/Courtship cards. This describes their organism’s current attributes. They are on the TIDAL FLATS space and want to migrate to the EVERGLADES space, and are lucky enough to have two characteristics listed as advantages (+1) for EVERGLADES. If the player rolls a 2 or more, they can  move to this space.

Mutating gives you a chance to change the characteristics of your organism. You use your turn to take a random card from the Gene Pool. If neither of the colours on the new card matches one you already have. you must return the card to the Gene Pool. If the new card matches, you can keep it and discard the old one if you wish. Whether or not you keep the new card, play then passes to the next player.

You can never retain more than two cards (listing a maximum of four characteristics) at any one time. You begin the game with a single card which represents a simple organism. You can increase this to two cards (representing a complex organism) when you take and retain a card from the Gene Pool. If you choose to become a complex organism (by retaining two cards) then you cannot return to being a simple organism except through a Global Change.

Cards are kept face up in front of you at all times. You do not have to show other players a card you have drawn from the Gene Pool unless you decide to keep it.

Rolling for a Global Change allows you to check to see if drastic environmental effects are happening to the whole planet. You roll the dice and consult the Global Change Table below. Global Changes affect all players regardless of habitat. Most are fairly extreme, doing no good to any player, but they can be useful for slowing up a player who is on the verge of winning.

SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS

Some characteristics have special effects, so keep a sharp eye on your card(s) to see if you have ones that help or hinder your survival. The game gradually shows you how organisms react to each other and their habitats in the battle to survive.

■ Sexual Reproduction This is incompatible with the characteristics Hermaphroditic and Parthenogenesis (both methods of reproduction which do not require a partner), and so if you have a card with either characteristic, you cannot keep Sexual Reproduction unless you discard the other card in the same turn. Sexual Reproduction counts as a disadvantage (-1) in all habitats. However, when you have this characteristic and opt to Mutate, you can draw two cards from the Gene Pool. (Remember you can only hold a maximum of two cards at a time.)

■ Sharp Claws counts as an advantage (+1) in all habitats, but only for a complex organism (2 cards).

■ Thick Hide counts as an advantage (+1) in all habitats. However you cannot hold this card at the same time as Climbing or Flight. If you already have Thick Hide, you cannot keep a card with Climbing or Flight unless you discard Thick Hide in the same turn.

■ Shell always counts as an advantage (+1), but does not go with Flight, Running, Climbing and Leaping, so if you have cards with any of these characteristics, you cannot keep Shell unless you discard the other card.

■ Intelligence is useless in isolation, but allows you to add 1 to any other advantage you possess when Migrating.

■ Symbiosis can be used when you are on the same space as another player who also has Symbiosis. You combine your advantages and disadvantages with those of the other player when rolling to Migrate. If this roll is successful, both players move to the next space.

■ Parasitic only works when you are one space behind another player. You can Migrate automatically to the other player's space without rolling the dice.

■ Parthenogenesis is an advantage (+1) in all habitats but only for a simple organism (one card).

GLOBAL CHANGE TABLE

1. Environmental catastrophe threatens extinction. Each player takes one card from the Gene Pool. If one of the colours on the card matches a colour you already have, discard your current card(s) and play on with the one you have just drawn. If none of the colours match, you become extinct and start again in OCEAN DEEPS with a new species.
2. Loss of ozone layer wipes out higher life-forms. Every player is reduced to a simple organism (one card). Players who previously had two cards miss a go, but can choose which of their two cards they will discard. Players with only one card play on.
3. Ice Age. All players with complex organisms (two cards) move backwards three spaces to avoid the spreading glaciation. For each of the following characteristics that you possess, move back one less space: Fur, Fat and Hibernation.
4. Solar activity promotes genetic changes. Every player puts a card back into the Gene Pool and replaces it with a new one drawn at random.
5. A fierce new predator develops. Any player who does not currently have a red- and/or green-coloured characteristic must move back four spaces.
6. Disease ravages whole populations. Any player who does not currently have a blue-coloured characteristic must move back a number of spaces determined by rolling the dice.

If you enjoy this simple boardgame about evolution, try the much more comprehensive and informative Cell to Singularity game.

All I want for Christmas

Seems a bit cheeky to ask, but I reckon Santa knows I've been nice. If I can have one wish, what would really make a big difference to the future of Fabled Lands Publishing as a whole would be to get more reviews on Amazon.

Reviews are what Amazon's search engine notices and flags up for other potential readers. The best book in the world with two or three reviews will languish in obscurity. But even real stinker with 50+ reviews (yeah, I'm looking at you, Dan Brown) is the rolling snowball that will get bigger and bigger until all you can see are little feet and heads poking out like the cover of Coils of Hate.

If everybody who regularly reads this blog could find the time to review a single gamebook on Amazon right now, that would bring gamebooks back into the spotlight overnight. If just one person in ten who's reading this went and wrote a quick review of, say, The Court of Hidden Faces then we'd break the 50+ barrier in time for Christmas.

I know a lot of people still enjoy gamebooks - and not just the folks who were there in the '80s and '90s, but a whole new generation too. But as long as the hobby stays in the shadows, publishers will continue to ignore it. A slew of reviews on Amazon would crash through their bubble of complacency like that Titantic-shaped starship on that episode of Doctor Who.

So if you ever got pleasure from one of my or Jamie's or Oliver's gamebooks - or anyone else's, come to that; I've included a few notable ones in the list below - and you can find a couple of minutes just to write one or two sentences as an Amazon review, you could make our Christmas wish come true. You don't even have to buy a copy. Here are a few suggestions - just pick one of these titles, or choose another favourite gamebook if you prefer. No turkeys in this lot, I guarantee it.

Tune in on Christmas Eve for the seasonal FL freebie. And in the meantime, rest you merry.

Time out

I'm sure nobody wants a reading list for the weekend. Oh, you do? Well, you're in luck. Below I've listed some of the top alternate history stories of the last decade or two.

In a nutshell, alt-fic is about that Sliding Doors moment when a choice turns out to be a keystone event: making a new friend or losing an old one, a betrayal that can't be forgiven or a good deed that will never be forgotten. Or apes taking over the planet. (Well, of course, they did that either way. But that's a detail.)

In a sense all these stories are about time travel, but time is just the setting for the stuff that really matters, which are those moments where "two roads diverge in a yellow wood". It could be Roman legions in airships, astronauts flipping up their visors to reveal lizard snouts - cool stuff like that. But those foreground alt-realities won't bite unless they resonate with the deeper character themes. Brian Cox (no, not that one) says it best in this rant from Adaptation. Ignore the book links below if you must, but you have to watch that. Trust me. It's less than two minutes.

As Cox/McKee says, all stories are about that. In a TV show that works, the central theme is seamlessly woven through the story world: Buffy, Elementary, The Shield, The Sopranos. Other shows (naming no names), it feels like they picked the setting because it was cool and then nailed the themes on afterwards.

And then there's Doctor Who. Is there a single theme running through the whole thing, or is the strength of the show not in the fact that they can rejuvenate the lead every few years, but in being able to refocus and tell a completely fresh story every time they bring in a new companion?

Food for thought. And while mulling that over, if you really really want, here are those alt-reality sources. Lots of "if the Nazis had won" stories here, strangely enough. I suppose in a hundred years it will be ISIS:

BOOKS


TV/MOVIES

What would Weegee do?

You know what’s wrong with violence? It’s too easy. Sure, violence solves problems. But not in an interesting way.

Hobby boardgames are a great source of game design ideas. That’s because you can see just how the rules fit together to create interesting gameplay. And the very best hobby boardgames come out of Germany – classics like Adel Verpflichtet (rivalry and theft in the antique-collecting world), Intrigue (Renaissance courtiers) and Settlers of Catan (colonists).

What these great games have in common, apart from the meticulous logic of the Teutonic mind, is that none of them is based on violence.

There’s a good reason for that, of course. Modern Germans are not as a rule very fond of games of war. Consequently, designers of hobby boardgames in Germany have been denied the easy solution of violence. So they have been forced to make their gameplay really good instead.

Think about how that might work in computer games design. First-person shooters, say. There have been plenty of excellent, innovative FPSs, but the core factor in almost all is still violence. You run around and you aim to snipe away the other guy’s hit points without losing your own. But what if you had to design a first-person shooter without the shooting? There are plenty of themes to choose from. Let’s think about a Swinging Sixties paparazzi FPS where you have to scoot around town getting snapshots of all the celebrities.

In the absence of violence, we’d need to find other factors to make the game interesting. What are the resources? You can’t be everywhere at once, so time is an obvious one. Another is film. Maybe I need to get my scoop in for the late edition in order to pick up another roll of film. So do I go back for another roll, or delay until I get one more shot? Should I develop my film (pre-digital, remember) in a back alley, risking sabotage from other paparazzi, or do I take it safely to the lab?

Okay, I don’t doubt you can come up with a dozen better ideas than this. The point is that, if you can’t fall back on violence, whether in a videogame or a gamebook, you will be devising choices that have to be really rewarding in their own right. Afterwards, if you like, you can plug the violence back in. But not because you need it for easy gameplay, only because it’s fun.

Jack of all trades vs the one-trick pony

Cast your mind back to the start of the year, and a discussion we had about how digital interactive fiction is breaking out of the gamebook ghetto by using maps, comics, animations and audio instead of prose. Or as well as prose, anyway. Among many good points he made in the comments, Emanuil Tomov said this:

"There's a useful tension, even a moral one, in reconciling minmaxing with possible unsalutary effects this could have on the narrative. Imagine a system where you can either spend or hoard XP, spending being linked to short-term benefits, hoarding being linked to 'advancement' through a richer background for the character, learning skills through interesting narrative that deepens your understanding of the character, forming certain bonds with powerful allies, etc. XP literally represents your experience in the world. Now imagine a PC who spends all their XP short-term and they're really, really, really good in a pinch; but they're completely flat, a competent, one-trick bit player in a story where they could've been much more. It's an interesting trade-off both on the minmaxing and the narrative front.

This point about the value of versatility reminded me of a section in Game Architecture and Design, which I co-wrote with Andrew Rollings to get the horrors of working in the trenches at Eidos out of my system.


The book is twelve years old now, and games have sure moved on, so don't feel you have to run out and buy it. By the time I was working at Elixir Studios, only a few years on from the Eidos of the late '90s, software development for games had been completely revolutionized, and that made my job as designer a pure pleasure. But I digress; we were talking about versatility...

Versatility in gameplay
A useful rule-of-thumb for anticipating gameplay is to ask what is the best and worst thing about each of the player’s options. For instance:

• This maneuver does the most damage, but it's the slowest
• This maneuver is the fastest, but it leaves me defenseless
• This maneuver gives the best defense, but it does little damage

And then there's a unique kind of choice:

• This maneuver is never the best or the worst, but it's the most versatile

So a useful question to ask yourself when designing a weapon or strategy for your game is "When, if ever, is this the best option for the player?" Most choices that you put into the game should be the best in some way. And one of these can be the choice that works only moderately well, but in many different ways: the jack of all trades option.

The more unpredictable the game environment, the bigger the payoff for having versatility of choice. Beginners in particular will benefit from versatile options in a game, as it means there's something they can do while working their way up the learning curve. But versatile options are handy for expert players too. When fighting an expert opponent, you must expect the unexpected, and choosing the versatile maneuver or unit may buy time to put together a more considered response.

One obvious kind of versatility is speed. The fast moving character or unit can quickly go where it's needed. So, normally, you won't want the fastest units to also be the best in other ways.

Also, the value of a fast-moving unit depends on the game environment. On the battlefields of the 14th century, a knight was deemed to be worth 100 foot soldiers. That wasn't because knights were each individually as tough as 100 men, but rather because, in a terrain of hedgerows, ditches, ploughed fields and heathland, the knight had more chance of being at the right place at the right time.

There are many other ways to make an option versatile. If a beam weapon can be used to mine asteroids as well as to destroy incoming nuclear missiles, then that versatility can make up for a disadvantage elsewhere. Of course, if there is no compensating disadvantage, there's no interesting choice. Be careful not to make the versatile choice dominant over all others. Also, be aware that the versatility of a choice may not be obvious even to you as designer. In the last chapter, we saw how the designer of the fantasy game Arena hadn't originally anticipated the way players might use the fireball spells.

You can measure versatility by looking at the switching costs in the game. This is how much it costs a player to change his mind about the strategy he's using. An example in an espionage game might be if you recruit a spy and later realize you need an assassin instead. The switching cost is however much you wasted on the wrong character, assuming for the sake of argument that the spy is not usable elsewhere. So, say that both cost $1 million. When deciding which to buy, at first you'd think, "If I buy the spy and I need the assassin, I'll end up paying $2 million. If I choose right, it costs me just the $1 million. On the other hand, suppose I buy both now. I only need one, so I'll have definitely wasted $1 million."

Now suppose there is another character, the ninja, who can function as either spy or assassin. How much should the ninja cost? It depends how unpredictable the game is. In this example, if the game were completely predictable, the player would know in advance which character to recruit and so versatility is of no value - the ninja should cost $1 million just like the others. In a completely unpredictable environment, the average cost would be $1.5 million ($1 million if I choose right, $2 million if I choose wrong), which is what a good gambler would pay you for the ninja. Since the truth will lie between those extremes, the versatile unit should cost more than $1 million but less than $1.5 million.

Versatility is more prized in an uncertain environment. No multiplayer game is completely predictable, since you can never know what the other player(s) will do. Even in a relatively predictable game, some levels are more uncertain than others. All of which makes the choice between specialization or versatility an interesting one because it all depends on the circumstances.

Making a list, checking it twice

Sorry, I'm going to mention the C-word. Or should that be the Ch-word? Anyway, the excuse is that it's just a month away and so you might want to start ordering some presents. If so I have a few recommendations, which in the absence of any objective criteria I am basing on cronyism. So here are the books my friends and associates have ready to fill that esurient stocking.

To begin with, Oliver Johnson's classic Lightbringer Trilogy, recently re-released by Gollancz as ebooks. For the virtual stocking, then:



Seriously, how many fantasy epics do you know of that adhere to Aristotle's unity of time? Next up, how about James Wallis's justly award-winning parlour game meets RPG, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen?



It's hard to describe, but here's the official version:

"Can you keep up with Baron Munchausen's extraordinary adventures as he travels to the Moon and the Sun, rides cannon-balls, defeats armies single-handed, meets the gods, and escapes from bandits on half a horse? The stories of the legendary nobleman come to life as players battle to outdo each other's fantastic feats and amazing accomplishments. It's a role-playing story-telling game of outrageous originality and swashbuckling exaggeration, stretching the bounds of truth until they twang. How is this possible? If Baron Munchausen is involved, anything is possible. The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen contains full rules, more than two hundred adventures ready to be played, mechanics that replace dice and pencils with money and fine wine, and many insults against the inhabitants of various nations, but principally the French. This expanded edition is a facsimile of a suppressed volume originally published in 1808. It contains additional rules for playing in an Arabian style and a complete supplementary game, 'My Uncle the Baron', designed for children, the inbred, and those who are very drunk."

Moving on, those of a more serious disposition may prefer the writings of Tim Harford. All of his books are elegant, entertaining and eludicatory, but for my money none is better than The Undercover Economist. It's that rare animal, the informative work that actually makes you feel smarter, not dumber:



Hang on now, Christmas is for children, right? What gift would I suggest for them? Well, if they're older kids then there's no reason why they wouldn't eagerly devour The Undercover Economist or play the alcohol-free variants of Baron Munchausen. But for the younger ones, 6-8 years or so, what about a subscription to The Phoenix comic, which includes the Dirk Lloyd strip by our very own Jamie Thomson?

I also highly recommend the Dark Lord audiobooks, read with spellbinding brilliance (and barely audible flatulence) by Jamie himself - but I can't find the links to those - so if anyone knows where they can be got, please leave that info in the comments below!

As another gift for the little 'uns, take a gander at Martin McKenna's very original picture book The Octopuppy:

"Edgar wanted a dog. Instead, he got an octopus named Jarvis. Jarvis is brilliant and does his best to act like the dog Edgar wants, but nothing he does is good enough to please Edgar. Ultimately, Edgar recognizes that while Jarvis might not be the dog he wanted, he is special in his own endearing way."

Talking of Martin, middle-graders, teens and adults alike should enjoy the Mirabilis graphic novels that I created with him (on covers) and Leo Hartas (on interior art). You know the premise by now:

"A mysterious green comet grows bigger in the sky. In the comet’s glow, miracles multiply like orchids under a tropical sun. Myth, magic and marvels are in the very air. Everything you can possibly imagine is now part of everyday life."

And the first book, Winter, is so perfect a fit for the festive season that I know of at least one person who read it on the night train out of Moscow on Christmas Eve! So maybe you'll forgive this lapse into self-promotion:



Since Mirabilis is a creative group effort, Leo deserves to have a place on this list all his own - so let me steer you towards his website, where you can contact him to buy original artwork that will make you the envy of fantasy geeks everywhere. As well as his maps for Fighting Fantasy, Leo has lately been colouring his illustrations for my first ever gamebook, Crypt of the Vampire - and doing a bang-up job of it, too, as you can see from the image at the head of this post.

Christmas is also a time for telling scary stories. Not all of John Whitbourn's unforgettable Binscombe Tales are about ghosts, or even strictly fit into the category of horror, but all are weird and wonderful, and manage to be both icily disturbing and warmly funny:



Having started on the precipitous slope of cronyism, I may as well fling myself right over into the chasm of nepotism by mentioning my wife, Roz Morris's, latest novel Lifeform Three. This is literary SF in the tradition of Bradbury and Ballard, perhaps with a dash of Pixar and Pinocchio. In a future where mankind have lost their souls to commercialism, an artificial "bod", built only to serve, starts to question his place in the universe as a result of forging a relationship with a quite unlikely pet.



Anything else? Oh yes -- happy Thanksgiving!

Vivian Stanshall and the Telstars

‘We need a writer for an animated TV show. It’s from a concept by Viv Stanshall – ’

I was off like a shot. Viv Stanshall? The Bonzos. Do Not Adjust Your Set. Sir Henry Rawlinson and Cumberpatch the gardener – not to mention Old Scrotum the wrinkled retainer. Work on something cooked up in that great rambling, fecund greenhouse of a mind? You bet.

Well, even the best of us fires a blank from time to time. Viv’s “concept” was of a bunch of kid tadpoles living in a canal. The leader’s name was Walthamstow. That was the first red flag. It was where Viv grew up, but dammit, I don’t call any of my characters Stoke Poges, do I? The first gag in the script was a pun on Henry Ford’s comment that “history is bunk”. In a show for 7-10 year olds. A writer, they said they needed? I had to explain I’m not qualified to administer the Last Rites.

Other characters in the original pitch were Taddy Boy, complete with frock coat and Chris Isaak quiff, and a frog called the Wise Old One. Along with the name of Walthamstow’s gang (the Telstars) that rather stamped an expiry date on the whole package. There was also a Scottish tadpole who wore a Tam O’Shanter and always carried tartan bagpipes. Let’s not even, as they say. To help sell all this there was an animatic for which the production company had somehow managed to rope in Stephen Fry and Neil Innes. (Innes isn’t too big a surprise, admittedly, being Viv’s old mucker and therefore bound to do it for Old Times’ Sake, but what Fry was thinking I don’t know.)

The guys at the production company were excited because they had shown the animatic to a BBC exec and he had expressed a flicker of amusement. I wasn’t there, but I’m familiar with those Matrix-like halls and I’m willing to hazard that it was really just a hiccup after a long lunch. Encouraged as they were by this apparent evidence of approval, the production company nonetheless realized that the whole thing needed to be torn down, sown with salt, and rebuilt in pristine materials.

‘That name Walthamstow…’

‘Yeah. No. That’s shit, obviously. You can get rid of that.’

‘So what do we have to keep?’

‘Well, it’s got to be called Tadpoles.’

That’s what you want in a brief – ie, it actually was. I had just finished working at Elixir Studios, so I was familiar with the canals of Camden Town and liked the idea of dropping an edgy feeling of urban clamour and detritus into the canal – a development that I don’t believe Viv would have objected to.

As it often helps to have a writing partner when you want to spin up the levels of energy needed for comedy and/or animation, I roped in a friend of mine. (She is quite well-known these days, though wasn’t back then, and as I haven’t sought her permission to talk about this, I’ll be a gentleman and leave her name out of it.) We knocked out a script (this is one of several versions) after first changing all the characters:

TADPOLES Aquatis Personae

Finzer – aka (only to himself) "The Finz". Desperately wants to be cool, so the fact he's a tadpole AND a kid really gets him down.

Bino – Finzer's cousin. An albino tad; big and tough (for a tadpole).

Izzy – a wannabe tad. Don't call him a newt to his face.

K8 – pronounced "Kate". She’s sweet on Finzer, although she's in heavy duty denial about that.

Sprat – brainier than the rest and boy does he like them to know it. Sprat is a fish and, brainy as he is, he still can't figure out how come he and Finzer are half-brothers...

Dad Pole – dumb as ditchwater, but doesn't realize it.

Massy – Dad Pole’s girlfriend; the mother-figure of Finzer's household.

Mrs Todpuddle – the gang’s teacher. The longest suffering tadpole in the canal.

Spikey – the local bully/menace. He’s a mean-eyed fish and he’d like to eat you, but not before he’s sold you a dodgy timeshare in the Norfolk Broads. Think Arthur Daley at 78 rpm.

The Frogs – three grand old figures who are only glimpsed at the water’s edge, turned half away in profile like brooding Easter Island statues. Everyone thinks the Frogs are enormously wise and the source of all good fortune, but they never speak to tadpoles and might very well not even know they exist.

What came of Tadpoles? I’m not sure. I was busy with Leo Hartas preparing our comic strip Mirabilis: Year of Wonders to appear in The DFC, as well as developing book concepts with Jamie Thomson such as the Dark Lord series. Meanwhile, my Tadpoles writing partner had projects of her own. And the production company that hired us went out of business with the new animatic only half-finished. So, shrug. You get a lot of things like this to work on if you’re a freelance writer, usually for no money up front, and most of them deserve to be deep sixed. It’s not like it was a project very dear to my heart. The only regret is that it would have been nice to do something in memory of Viv Stanshall. Maybe this show, though, would have done him no favours.