Re: Simultaneous moves in PBM games

From: dagibbs@quantum.on.ca (David Gibbs)

Date: Mon, 01 Jun 1992 01:08:28 +0000

In article <1992May30.175241.24099@cs.brown.edu> rjm@cs.brown.edu (Ralph Marshall) writes:
>Has anybody out there found a reasonable way to handle game systems
>which involve simultaneous moves in a PBM setting (either surface or
>electronic mail) ?  I've played several board-based wargames by email,
>which works quite well for what I've tried so far, but doesn't seem to
>allow any of the "both sides write the next move secretly and then
>reveal them when finished" systems.  [I'd like to try AH's Wooden Ship
>& Iron Men this way]  So, any suggestions, whether or not you've
>actually tried them?

These are (often) the best type of games to run PBM, in fact the game
that is most played by email (here on the net) is Diplomacy, and it is
a everyone submit orders and then perform them simultaneously game.  The
best way to do this is for an n-player game, have n+1 people involved,
with one person collecting all the orders, then figuring out what happened
and broadcasting the results to the other players.  Of course, for two
player games, this overhead is a bit high, but if you can find somebody
who would be willing to be a forwarder rather than arbiter and forwarder,
this could still work.  All players mail their orders to the forwarder,
once he has orders from all the players, he mails the complete set of
orders to each player.  He doesn't have to do any parsing or figuring
out of what to do, he justs checks to see if orders have come in, counts
them.  This would be minimally time consuming, and it shouldn't be too
difficult to find a friend who would be willing to do this.

You could also try trusting each other, each sends the other orders, but
doesn't look at the others till they've done their own.

Another possibility would be an encryption scheme of some sort where you
don't send out the keys until you have received all orders needed.

To support my comment that simultaneous games are good one to run
PBM - Consider first that just about every professional PBM game is
a simultaneous orders type game.  This of course really applies to
multi-player rather than two-player games, but for multiple players,
the reasoning is: with sequenced turns, you will have to wait through
n-1 other peoples turns (each multiplied by email delays) before each of
your turns, while with simultaneous games, you are participating every
turn.  Of course for two player games, the wait isn't particularly bad
so it doesn't cause very much problem.

-David Gibbs
(dagibbs@quantum.on.ca)

References

Simultaneous moves in PBM games
rjm@cs.brown.edu (Ralph Marshall)
Sat, 30 May 1992 17:52:41 +0000