Re: Another Glossotechnia playtesting report

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 3:52 PM, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:

>  I'm looking forward to finally getting to play my first game of
>  Glossotechnia, now that Jim is driving the many . . . . tens . . . of
>  miles to my place of work, since I never managed to get off my sitter
>  and drive to his place.
It was one of the best Glossotechnia games ever, I think; certainly
the game-language we made was the most morphologically complex
yet, even more so than the Saturday night game at LCC2.  I think
the charades and pictures were less wild and hilarious than those
in some other games, though.

For the playtesting records, the game lasted about 36 turns and
about 2.5 hours; we translated three challenge sentences, besides
composing several simpler sentences to illustrate the use of
new affixes and words.  Alex translated the group challenge,
"Five sleepy owls can't find their keys", and later won with his own
sentence, "Tell every woman to be quiet"; right after that I translated
my "The boat-builder's girlfriend got lost while driving".  Mark wound up
with a more complex sentence and was still a couple of morphemes
short of translating "Ask the well-dressed gambler why it's so cold."
I need to work more on making the Subjects and Predicates all
about equally difficult.

Several recently-added cards were used for the first time;
Mark drew and played both of the "Rotate Challenges" cards
early on, for instance.  I started with "Tell the well-dressed gambler
to be quiet", for instance, and Mark, I think, started with
"Every woman got lost while driving".  Alex used the "Discard Anything"
card to good effect, eliminating /Z/ and giving the affected
syllables low tone, and I drew and played a "Chain Shift"
(O > 9_o > y > 1) which, after all the scribbled revisions to the
lexicon from the previous four or five sound changes,
required the whole lexicon to be rewritten from scratch
to be readable.  (While I was pondering my next word and
how to charade it, someone guessed "Playing an evil
chain shift!")   Also, the Agglutinative typology card
(which while in play allows anybody to coin an affix
instead of a word on their turn), which I created back
last July, was played for  the first time, resulting in a
more complex language (14 affixes for 19 content words
and one pronoun).

We resorted to English for defining a couple of grammatical
affixes, but most of them, too, we defined with charades,
pictures and example sentences, including a construct
state suffix, an inceptive suffix, and a subject-nominalizer prefix.

I'm going to revise the Glossotechnia Deck web page a bit
sometime soon, adding the Syncope and Back-Formation
cards we came up with last night but didn't wind up getting drawn
and played, and moving some other cards from the "Cards to be
playtested" section to the main section.

>  It would be nice if it were playable online, but you would lose the
>  charades aspect.  Could use video conferencing, maybe, or allow image
>  URL's on the condition that the text (URL itself, ALT tag, surrounding
>  on the page, etc.) is no help...
On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 5:40 PM, Arthaey Angosii <arthaey@...> wrote:
>  You could always turn the charades aspect into a pictionary aspect,
>  which works much better online...
That would be cool.  We should suggest that on the ZBB
thread where people were talking about playing online:

http://www.spinnoff.com/zbb/viewtopic.php?t=26997&highlight=glossotechnia

and

http://www.spinnoff.com/zbb/viewtopic.php?t=25799&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=25

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/review/log.htm