Someone Else
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Ever since reading the book 'Glory Season', by David Brin, I've wanted to try to make an actual competitive version of Conway's Game of Life. However, because of the difficulty of predicting what will happen even a few moves in advance, a simple 'set up your area and see who has more life in theirs at the end' just doesn't work. To that end, I have developed an idea for how the game would work:

It needs n players. I've come up with setups for 4 and 8, but more will probably work.
Each player is given a starting region. They may put life throughout that region however they like, with one exception: There is a 2x2 square at one point within the region. This is henceforth called their "Life Block". If at any point in the game one of those cells does not have life in it, they lose. A player may place their Life Block anywhere within the space they control, but may not move it.

Each round of the game, a number of generations pass, following all of the rules of Conway's Game of Life. However, in order to represent it with a finitely sized board, cells cannot come to life outside of the board. This DOES mean that gliders, for instance, will not continue endlessly outward but instead die on the edge (they degenerate into blocks, but that's not really relevant). The number of generations that pass is initially 10, but increase either with each turn (+1) or when players lose the game (+5), or both. Both is my preference, but that's open to discussion.
Because a number of generations pass each turn, it may be that a player's Life Block dies but regrows during the turn. That player is still out of the game.

This is how most of the game is played:
After each turn, each player may place one living cell in their area. They may do this once for every 10 generations that passed during the previous turn. Players may choose not to place any cells during one turn, storing them up for future turns. Fractions are not stored. Note that only dead cells may be made alive, not visa verso.

When players lose, the players adjacent to them have their space expand. This makes it preferential to take out your enemies, as then you have more space which you can influence.

Example board (4 players):

An 8 player board would likely be an octogon, and numbers in between... I don't know. I'll work something out.

Anyone in?

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[Last edited by Someone Else at 03-03-2012 03:10 AM]

Sillyman
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Sure, why not.

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The spitemaster
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I will play.

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I met a man that wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish that man would stay away

JayMcLife
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Someone Else wrote:
Ever since reading the book 'Glory Season', by David Brin, I've wanted to try to make an actual competitive version of Conway's Game of Life.
...
Anyone in?

LOL - coming from the exact same place :-)
And it's been only 7 years since the last post, so... anybody built it?

If not - let's do it!
IMHO this would make a great fit for the iPad.

Cheers,
Jay

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[Last edited by JayMcLife at 02-09-2019 01:02 PM : typos]

Someone Else
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Well, I was planning on playing it out first rather than building it first, because there are lots of things to tweak, and there wasn't a ton of interest. But now that I think about it... it shouldn't be hard to build a 2 player version of this.

I think I'd relax the requirement that the Life Block stay alive at all times to 3/4 cells need to be alive at all times (so the Life Block could, for instance, be part of a beacon). Were I doing a 2-player version of this, I think I'd want it to be live, 2-second turns or something. Maybe that's a good idea?

Oh, and stick around for DROD - it's awesome!

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[Last edited by Someone Else at 02-09-2019 01:55 PM]

JayMcLife
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Someone Else wrote:
Well, I was planning on playing it out first rather than building it first, because there are lots of things to tweak

Lots of room for tweaking, definitely.
As any non-trivial game I suppose it takes a while to get the hang of it so I'd suggest getting a prototype up and running to get a better feel of what works and what doesn't.

Could be as simple as a competitive, two-player version of Conway's GoL with two colors.

Someone Else wrote:
Were I doing a 2-player version of this, I think I'd want it to be live, 2-second turns

..place an additional cell (or store it for future use) every n cycles after initial setup?


Cheers,
Jay