Reporting on a session

[dranorter]

I got a couple people together to play Glossotechnia last week; in
total 3 people using the cards here http://bellsouthpwp.net/j/i/jimhenry1973/conlang/glossotechnia.html.
(It looks like the two PDF links there actually link to the same file,
so I don't know whether we played the regular or 'simple' version.) We
played with six cards to a hand, though one person accidentally used
English once and got it reduced to five. I was the only one to read
through the rules before we played and as a result it may have seemed
like I was pulling rules out of thin air a little bit. It was not easy
to quickly find the part of the rules webpage I had in mind to double-
check things.

It took us a little while to get any vowels in play so the first word
coined, 'I/my', was a voiceless dental fricative. This wasn't allowed
by syllable structure of course, but I couldn't find what we were
supposed to do before playing any vowels. Needless to say I'm not sure
we followed the rules perfectly. As play proceeded, we got more and
more fricatives in play, and eventually an assortment of high vowels.

There were a couple syllable structure cards played but it took a
while to use them because they required nasals and approximants
respectively.

We made up a list of translation challenge sentences at the beginning
of the game, but people didn't really feel like keeping them simple
and I ended up making mine somewhat complicated too. I think the one
we ended up with as our translation challenge was 'don't bother me
until I've finished my homework'. My sentence was 'The purpose of a
hammer is to drive nails', and the two others were 'Is he doing things
to make you sad?' and 'Their purpose in life is to explode.' (that one
was taken off twitter). We never finished the group translation
challenge and didn't really put to much effort into doing so as it
would have just gotten us behind in our own sentences. We played with
our sentences face up but basically weren't supposed to look at them
during charades except as a last resort, which I think people did do
something like three times.

Our sentences were originally not split into subject and predicate
because we thought they would end up pretty nonsensical if recombined.
However, someone played the rotate predicate card and the results were
'The purpose of a hammer is to explode', 'Is he to drive nails?' and
'Their purpose in life is doing things to make you sad.' We concluded
that any oddities like the oddity of saying 'is he to drive nails'
would just translate to oddities in the game language.

In order to win I used a 'restrict meaning' card to stop someone
else's sentence from being translated. This basically felt like
stealing a turn from both of us because I didn't get to coin a word on
that turn. I think a lot of the cards become less appealing by saying
'instead of coining a word...'. Maybe they shouldn't do that unless
they allow a new meaning to appear in a different way, like 'extend
meaning' does.

So I think we ended up playing three hours before my sentence was
done. Twenty words were coined as well as a few inflections or
agglutinations. (There was a fusional card played early on but then
agglutinative got played and replaced it. Am I correct in thinking
fusional is a lot slower? For example in a fusional language mightn't
it take, say, six turns to conjugate a verb to three persons and two
numbers, versus four in agglutinative?) We weren't sure how sure we
had to be about the grammar in order to translate. So for example we
weren't quite sure how the 'dictionary form' of the verbs could be
used, and waited until enough forms of the words had been coined
before using them, for example waiting until there was a third person
form and we had decisively said singular would be unmarked (and
furthermore plural would be marked only on nouns) before translating
'is'.

I think our game would have gone better if coining new derivational
forms didn't take a whole turn. Maybe coining new words should come
with specifying one of their derivational forms. Has a glossotechnia
game ever resulted in a reasonably sized verb case system?

Oh, I thin the final thing I wanted to note was at one point I tried
to go for describing the word I was coining entirely in the conlang. I
figured I would say some simple phrases which we could already say,
then rephrase them using my new word. The word was 'of', indicating
possession. I ended up trying to repeat and explain myself for quite a
long time (though I said they could cut me off any time they felt they
weren't going to get it), perhaps ten minutes of phrases and gestures,
until someone said it must indicate possession, though he didn't feel
he knew what I meant. So I just told him yes, it indicates possession,
and then took advantage of the 'explain your word further after it's
been guessed' rule to say it was basically the word 'of'.

Maybe all the guessing meanings stuff simply works better with more
players. But really abstract words like 'is' and 'of' are hard to do.

OK, hope my summary is somehow useful, sorry it's long. Next time I
play I hope to either continue the same language, or try and make up a
writing system during the game with the help of some writing system
oriented cards.

[Jim Henry]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 2:12 PM, dranorter <dran...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I got a couple people together to play Glossotechnia last week; in
> total 3 people using the cards here http://bellsouthpwp.net/j/i/jimhenry1973/conlang/glossotechnia.html.
> (It looks like the two PDF links there actually link to the same file,
> so I don't know whether we played the regular or 'simple' version.)

I'll fix that. The other file is here:

http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/glossotechnia_cards_simple.pdf

> It was not easy
> to quickly find the part of the rules webpage I had in mind to double-
> check things.

Do you have any suggestions for improving the organization of the
document? -- more subheadings perhaps?

> It took us a little while to get any vowels in play so the first word
> coined, 'I/my', was a voiceless dental fricative. This wasn't allowed
> by syllable structure of course, but I couldn't find what we were
> supposed to do before playing any vowels.

I almost always use this optional rule:

>>>In quick start mode, one begins a game by shuffling the main deck, going through it and laying out face-up the first two consonants and the first two vowels that appear; then reshuffling the deck before dealing each player their hand. This saves time because players don't have to wait for Phoneme cards to be played before they can start coining words.
<<<

I should probably move that into the main part of the rules document,
out of the "optional rules" section.

> There were a couple syllable structure cards played but it took a
> while to use them because they required nasals and approximants
> respectively.

You used this rule, didn't you?

>>>Words coined must use only the phonemes in play and the syllable forms in play, but a simple single-consonant onset or a simple single-vowel rime is allowed at any time, whether there are any Syllable onset/rime cards in play or not. (Apparently all natural languages have CV syllables, whether or not they allow more complex syllables.)
<<<

> So I think we ended up playing three hours before my sentence was
> done. Twenty words were coined as well as a few inflections or
> agglutinations.

That's a long game relative to the number of words coined, but not
terribly unusual for a group of players just learning.

> (There was a fusional card played early on but then
> agglutinative got played and replaced it. Am I correct in thinking
> fusional is a lot slower? For example in a fusional language mightn't
> it take, say, six turns to conjugate a verb to three persons and two
> numbers, versus four in agglutinative?)

I haven't actually had a chance to playtest the Fusional card much.
It hasn't come up in many games I've played, and when it did it was
soon replaced by another typology card.

> I think our game would have gone better if coining new derivational
> forms didn't take a whole turn. Maybe coining new words should come
> with specifying one of their derivational forms. Has a glossotechnia
> game ever resulted in a reasonably sized verb case system?

Glossotechnia games tend to produce fairly isolating languages.
There've been a few games with a fair number of nominal or verbal
inflections coined, but rarely if ever one with a verb system nearly
as complex as a lot of natlangs have.

My own simplified version (not the same as Tanis Kint's) has some
cards that should allow players to coin more words per turn, or coin
an inflection in addition to a root word; but I haven't had much
opportunity to playtest since adding those cards to my deck.

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

[Daniel Demski]

2009/10/20 Jim Henry <jimhen...@gmail.com>:

>
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 2:12 PM, dranorter <dran...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> It was not easy
>> to quickly find the part of the rules webpage I had in mind to double-
>> check things.
>
> Do you have any suggestions for improving the organization of the
> document? -- more subheadings perhaps?

There are some usual sections which are in most games. A "Game Setup"
section for example, and a "Turn Structure" section. In my case the
problem was that I wasn't sure the paragraph I found contained all the
information on game setup, and in fact what I missed was that optional
rule.

>
>> It took us a little while to get any vowels in play so the first word
>> coined, 'I/my', was a voiceless dental fricative. This wasn't allowed
>> by syllable structure of course, but I couldn't find what we were
>> supposed to do before playing any vowels.
>
> I almost always use this optional rule:
>
>>>>In quick start mode, one begins a game by shuffling the main deck, going through it and laying out face-up the first two consonants and the first two vowels that appear; then reshuffling the deck before dealing each player their hand. This saves time because players don't have to wait for Phoneme cards to be played before they can start coining words.
> <<<
>
> I should probably move that into the main part of the rules document,
> out of the "optional rules" section.

I definitely will use that rule! Maybe though I'll make sure the
initial consonants are at least slightly common, or just allow all the
players to agree on them.

We tried a limited phoneme inventory rule by the way, with the limit
at 25, but didn't reach it.

>> There were a couple syllable structure cards played but it took a
>> while to use them because they required nasals and approximants
>> respectively.
>
> You used this rule, didn't you?
>
>>>>Words coined must use only the phonemes in play and the syllable forms in play, but a simple single-consonant onset or a simple single-vowel rime is allowed at any time, whether there are any Syllable onset/rime cards in play or not. (Apparently all natural languages have CV syllables, whether or not they allow more complex syllables.)
> <<<

Yes. What I meant was that until we got our first approximant we had
nothing but CV syllables.

>> So I think we ended up playing three hours before my sentence was
>> done. Twenty words were coined as well as a few inflections or
>> agglutinations.
>
> That's a long game relative to the number of words coined, but not
> terribly unusual for a group of players just learning.

Yeah, that does seem like very few words to me looking back. There is
a good chance I'm wrong about three hours.

>
>> (There was a fusional card played early on but then
>> agglutinative got played and replaced it. Am I correct in thinking
>> fusional is a lot slower? For example in a fusional language mightn't
>> it take, say, six turns to conjugate a verb to three persons and two
>> numbers, versus four in agglutinative?)
>
> I haven't actually had a chance to playtest the Fusional card much.
> It hasn't come up in many games I've played, and when it did it was
> soon replaced by another typology card.
>

Well I think in the future I'll have people coin two or three
affixes/mutations while 'fusional' is in play, for example they can
decide the language inflects for future tense and then make up many of
the forms for future tense.

>
>> I think our game would have gone better if coining new derivational
>> forms didn't take a whole turn. Maybe coining new words should come
>> with specifying one of their derivational forms. Has a glossotechnia
>> game ever resulted in a reasonably sized verb case system?
>
> Glossotechnia games tend to produce fairly isolating languages.
> There've been a few games with a fair number of nominal or verbal
> inflections coined, but rarely if ever one with a  verb system nearly
> as complex as a lot of natlangs have.
>
> My own simplified version (not the same as Tanis Kint's) has some
> cards that should allow players to coin more words per turn, or coin
> an inflection in addition to a root word; but I haven't had much
> opportunity to playtest since adding those cards to my deck.

I'll definitely be adding cards to my deck, though of course the deck
is really big as it is and adding more cards will make more important
cards less likely to show up. But hand size can always increase to
make up for it. (I just thought of making an odd pair of cards 'remove
part of speech'/'add part of speech', because during play we mainly
coined nouns and verbs and weren't totally sure what the boundary
between nouns and verbs was like or what other parts of speech there
were. But those cards would be hard to use.)

By the way, I let players add any rules they thought of to the
language even when it wasn't their turn, which was how we came up with
the name of the language, 'rerere'. 're' was a common syllable at
first and the word 're' meant 'do, or idiomatically, do homework,
study'. To translate 'the purpose of a hammer is to drive nails' there
were the words 'there' meaning 'drive' and 'rethere' meaning hammer
(the noun), so off-turn someone decided that as a prefix 're'
functioned similarly to the English suffix -er. So 'rere' meant 'doer'
or 'student'. There was also a reduplication of last syllable rule
used to be emphatic or indicate 'the' or the subject of a sentence,
yet we decided somehow 'rerere' meant 'The Study' and was the name of
the language.

In any case, this rule has its problems -- someone could abuse it to
translate their sentence more quickly -- but added to the creativity
of the language several times.

[Daniel Demski]

Hello! I'm hoping this group isn't totally unwatched. I've gotten a bit of a glossotechnia group together and on Wednesday we played for the second time. I hadn't looked back at any of the old playtest notes I posted here so we've just been playing with the advanced deck and not much rule modification.

I missed the first game, but here are the details. Two of the players were professional linguists (not field-oriented linguists though). The game lasted two hours and 23 words were coined. It took almost an hour until a sentence structure was played; they didn't make any sentences until then. The group didn't have any vowels for a while either. Mistakenly they thought translating the group sentence won the game for whoever did it. Hand size was four. It was generally agreed that the game went slowly and should have more people; the hand size and correct starting rules would have helped, but the consensus was that more people was the missing element.

The sentences were translated without any secrecy; everyone knew what was being said, and simply tried to follow whether it was really being said. This was not a deliberate modification, just a result of not reading the rules carefully.

Despite the problems everyone enjoyed this game and all three players came back for our second session.

The second session had five people, still with two linguists. Only one person had never played before. We started out with one vowel, a. Plenty of phonemes were played right away. Later on in the game one or two people got tired of drawing phoneme cards; we didn’t play a whole lot of syntax cards. Also, we ended up letting people display and discard unuseable cards at the end of their turn in exchange for a new draw; mostly phonemes which were already in play. Though I always had an interesting card to play, I’m thinking of allowing people to do this at the end of their turn regardless of what the card is. I don’t see much reason to make someone lose a turn in order to get a new set of cards.

A big element of our session was adding nuance to our words after the charade was guessed. It ended up being a little like playing with the cultural rules. We had “ha”, to follow blindly; “aha”, to console someone blindly (ie, the person you are consoling is blindly following you); several words which could only apply to ‘sentient adults’; and mystical connotations to most sensory words. This was very fun but most or all of these details didn’t affect gameplay. Some people did try to compose interesting example sentences after a cool coining; but we weren’t awarding points for it and it sort of died out. I’m hoping we can try out the sentence scoring rules in the future. Has anyone been playing with them?

The charades element went smoothly with five people; not a single charade went unguessed or dragged on for any length of time. However, once someone played a preposition card we started allowing people to state ahead of time what part of speech they were coining. People had already been latching onto a charades guess once it was pretty much semantically correct, then possibly saying “but as a verb” (followed by any other odd twist they wanted). So saying part of speech didn’t seem to be adding much information, but using this all the time might limit peoples’ thinking.

The way we did the scoring was a bit different, and I can’t say I’m too happy with the alteration. At the beginning of the game I explained that we have to figure out a person’s (English) goal sentence, accepting simple variations, from their game-language sentence. It was pointed out by an especially competitive player that then any one person winning depends on everyone else's cooperation; so we agreed to give a point to a person who translates their goal sentence, a point to the person who first understands it, and just one point for the group challenge sentence. This was nice in that even though most everyone ignored the group challenge sentence, someone who finished a challenge sentence could draw another and everyone would still have something to do. But awarding a whole point for understanding a sentence was too much, and having a race to translate the sentence into English didn't make sense, especially with only one word list to hand around and flip through. (Nobody felt the need at first to keep two lists.) If a significant part of the game consisted of racing to understand game-language sentences people would get in tune with that goal and it could be fun, but as it was there was some side-conversation and not a whole lot of competition to do this.

I’m pretty happy with the way the game ended. The group challenge sentence was “have a cup of tea with me” and we were only missing “me” and a way of dealing with commands. The winning move was to coin one word for both, a pronoun whose meaning was mainly based on gesture and context. This sort of strategizing is much more interesting than trying to create a meaning change or obligatory as-yet-uncoined inflection to hopefully trip up someone's sentence. I also like how it semi-plausibly mimics creation of natural language, since the game language is being pragmatic in a way which helps it meet its goals.

So, this makes me wish that the game had more of that. The charades aspect certainly gives a feeling of people without a current means to communicate trying to create one, but the card portion of the game is more or less artificial. Not that the cards aren't a good mechanic; I think of the cards as a way to help limit players' view so that they're making a choice from a small set rather than staring at a metaphorical blank page (or huge list of options) and trying to create a language.

Maybe I should simply try and tweak my goal sentences collection with an eye toward having those sorts of possible semantic shortcuts/double-coinings be there. Actually, this is something which may be eliminated by replacing goal sentences with a point system; a goal would have to be pretty carefully designed to if it were to allow clever coinings to reach it more quickly.

There was not a whole lot of use of game language in coining new words; I think next time I will remind everyone of the reward of getting a larger hand.

Looking back at my old notes, and thinking of a couple things that happened during this past game, I think I will definitely want to add cards for things like evidentiality, patient/agent, and other interesting contrasts. These would be similar to 'add inflectional category' but give players specific ideas. Those sound like 'advanced' cards but would explain the concept to a non-advanced player. Similarly I'd like to figure out how to make good, specific 'grammatical details' cards to help players add conjunctions, relative clauses, etc., but I'm not sure which ones are needed or how they should look.

I'd love to hear about any other additional cards that might be fun, as I'm not trying to keep to a small deck; and of course any other shifts in the rules that have occurred over the three or four years this list has been silent. :)

[Jim Henry]

On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 3:41 AM, Daniel Demski <dran...@gmail.com> wrote:
> already in play. Though I always had an interesting card to play, I’m
> thinking of allowing people to do this at the end of their turn regardless
> of what the card is. I don’t see much reason to make someone lose a turn in
> order to get a new set of cards.

That probably makes sense.

> sentences after a cool coining; but we weren’t awarding points for it and it
> sort of died out. I’m hoping we can try out the sentence scoring rules in
> the future. Has anyone been playing with them?

I think I used them once, with a group of non-linguist players who had
played once or twice before. I may have reported on that game here,
but I'm not sure. My vague recollection is that we went around the
table, each person devising a goal (not just for themselves but for
anyone) and the other players assigning that goal a point value. Then
we played, most people achieved one or more goals, and when we ran out
of time the winner was the person with the most points. The goals
included things like explaining your new word using the game-language,
translating a recognizable quotation into the game-language, and so
forth, probably in addition to translating sentences from the
challenge deck.

> who finished a challenge sentence could draw another and everyone would
> still have something to do. But awarding a whole point for understanding a
> sentence was too much, and having a race to translate the sentence into
> English didn't make sense, especially with only one word list to hand around

I think it would make sense to award more points for devising a
comprehensible and meaningful sentence than for being the first to
understand said sentence. Exactly what the ratio should be I'm not
sure, but let's try 2:1 and 3:1 in different games, maybe?

> dealing with commands. The winning move was to coin one word for both, a
> pronoun whose meaning was mainly based on gesture and context. This sort of
> strategizing is much more interesting than trying to create a meaning change
> or obligatory as-yet-uncoined inflection to hopefully trip up someone's
> sentence. I also like how it semi-plausibly mimics creation of natural
> language, since the game language is being pragmatic in a way which helps it
> meet its goals.

That sounds good.

> I'd love to hear about any other additional cards that might be fun, as I'm
> not trying to keep to a small deck; and of course any other shifts in the
> rules that have occurred over the three or four years this list has been
> silent. :)

I haven't had a lot of opportunities to play in the last few years; I
think the only time I've played recently was with some cousins at the
family reunion last summer. That was fun, but didn't yield any new
insights for rules changes.

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

http://www.jimhenrymedicaltrust.org

[Tanis]

So, here's an idea. It sounds like phonemes can occasionally cause problems by not arising (though honestly, it's been YEARS since I last played this game). Would it be possibly to have a 'phonemes' deck and a 'mechanics' deck, such that people can choose what to draw from? If they decide the language doesn't have enough sounds, take a draw from the phonemes deck. If they want to add some interesting quirks, though, they could draw from mechanics.

This needs playtesting, but it's hard enough for me to get the people around me to play NORMAL games, much less a game about making a language.

[Daniel Demski]

>I think it would make sense to award more points for devising a
>comprehensible and meaningful sentence than for being the first to
>understand said sentence.  Exactly what the ratio should be I'm not
>sure, but let's try 2:1 and 3:1 in different games, maybe?

I think I'll *maybe* give 1 point to the successful interpreter, and the sentence creator will get points based on number of words used, cool grammatical twists, game goals reached, that sort of thing; so possibly a lot more.

>So, here's an idea. It sounds like phonemes can occasionally cause problems by not arising (though honestly, it's been
>YEARS since I last played this game). Would it be possibly to have a 'phonemes' deck and a 'mechanics' deck, such that
>people can choose what to draw from?

I like this idea. I'd thought about it briefly, but your mentioning it suddenly makes it seem reasonable to me. I mean I could be overestimating the frustration caused by not getting the type of card you wanted, but I didn't like seeing someone who wanted mechanics cards drawing phonemes three times in a row. And the optimal proportion of one to the other changes as the game goes on. I'll try it out, I think with things like phonemic contrasts in amongst the phoneme cards.

I forgot to put the vital statistics in my initial summary: 22 words were coined; 2 individual sentences and the group sentence were translated; I think 14 phonemes were played; and all this in about two hours, which is probably how long we'll be meeting each week.

The game was really fun for everyone. Hopefully as long as I have varied, interesting translation sentences play will be different enough each week that we'll continue having a fresh experience.

[Jim Henry]

On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 2:46 PM, Daniel Demski <dran...@gmail.com> wrote:
> times in a row. And the optimal proportion of one to the other changes as
> the game goes on. I'll try it out, I think with things like phonemic
> contrasts in amongst the phoneme cards.

Hmm... this reminds me of Dominion, which has interesting mechanics
for ensuring that the mix of cards in the decks changes over the
course of the game. But I'm not sure offhand what would be a good way
to adapt those mechanics to Glossotechnia. Dominion is essentially
competitive, and Glossotechnia is supposed to be largely cooperative,
so in any case I think Glossotechnia would have a single working deck
rather than one working deck per player. But maybe we could use some
similar mechanics for taking cards out of separate phoneme, syllable
structure, mechanics etc. decks and combining them to build a working
deck, then "trashing" cards that are no longer needed later in the
game.

I'm not sure how much sense that makes, though; with Dominion there
are a lot of cards that you would want to play several times per game,
and you try to manage the composition of your working deck so it
either stays small or it has multiple copies of the cards you want to
come up often. Whereas with Glossotechnia the majority of cards would
only be useful once, which is why most of them are unique in the deck.

So maybe Tanis' idea of just having two main decks, and letting
players draw from whichever they prefer on their turn, would be
simpler.

[Daniel Demski]

On Sunday, February 17, 2013 5:48:43 PM UTC-5, Jim Henry wrote:

Hmm... this reminds me of Dominion, which has interesting mechanics
for ensuring that the mix of cards in the decks changes over the
course of the game.  But I'm not sure offhand what would be a good way
to adapt those mechanics to Glossotechnia.

That's a really interesting idea. Many of the Glossotechnia cards might not be suitable for it, but what if building up the language's vocabulary were treated this way? I'm picturing something like Scrabble where you've got a set of words instead of a set of letters, and you try to use the words in sentences which score lots of points. Points would be based on number of words used, possibly with two or three points for some words (this would be determined upon coining); points could also be gained by satisfying pre-existing goals like in the regular optional rules. Probably several copies of a word should be added to the "language deck" upon coining; initially the person coining a word gets a copy and the deck gets a copy, which would usually mean the person to their right grabs the card. Once peoples' word-hands filled up they would be adding cards straight to the repository. But then, each person would be playing as many of their word cards as they could each turn and grabbing new ones. Basically once the number of vocab words hit a certain threshhold there would suddenly be an actual draw pile and people would be exchanging vocab cards more.

I'm afraid to try such a drastic alteration with my group. It wouldn't interact well with inflections or who knows what else. But it does sound worth thinking about.

[Alex Fink]

The discussion of possible over-representation of phonology cards
seems like it would be helped by having a leser proportion of the deck
be phonology cards. That could well be satisfied by an idea I've
wanted to try out for a little while, which is not to have phoneme
cards but only contrast cards (sound change cards, phonotactics, etc.
could remain). The contrast cards would include fairly general
things: "add another place of articulation", "... phonation", "...
vowel height", etc.
And you could replace the phoneme limit with a contrast limit: once it
is hit, subsequent contrasts have to be introduced by sound change
(perhaps being initially allophonic) rather than by fiat expansion of
the inventory.

The disadvantage would be less manifestness of the current set of
phonemes. You'd need another frequently-erasable piece of paper to
track it.

At a more general level, perhaps less "high-tech" than Dominion's
card-category management rules (which I only dimly remember now: I've
played Dominion I think twice, over two years ago) would be some sort
of mulligan rule. If your whole hand, or some defined portion of your
hand that counts as too much, consists of phonology cards, or of cards
all of some other defined classes, you can skip the card-playing phase
of your turn to instead discard them all and draw replacements.

On 17 February 2013 22:45, Daniel Demski <dran...@gmail.com> wrote:
> That's a really interesting idea. Many of the Glossotechnia cards might not
> be suitable for it, but what if building up the language's vocabulary were
> treated this way? I'm picturing something like Scrabble where you've got a
> set of words instead of a set of letters, and you try to use the words in
> sentences which score lots of points. Points would be based on number of
> words used, possibly with two or three points for some words (this would be
> determined upon coining); points could also be gained by satisfying
> pre-existing goals like in the regular optional rules. Probably several
> copies of a word should be added to the "language deck" upon coining;
> initially the person coining a word gets a copy and the deck gets a copy,
> which would usually mean the person to their right grabs the card. Once
> peoples' word-hands filled up they would be adding cards straight to the
> repository. But then, each person would be playing as many of their word
> cards as they could each turn and grabbing new ones. Basically once the
> number of vocab words hit a certain threshhold there would suddenly be an
> actual draw pile and people would be exchanging vocab cards more.
>
> I'm afraid to try such a drastic alteration with my group. It wouldn't
> interact well with inflections or who knows what else. But it does sound
> worth thinking about.

Well, for inflections, make it about stems rather than words per se.

Anyway, this does seem like it would be a rather different dynamic.
If you want to translate a particular sentence, you'd be hoarding the
relevant words in your hand. That strikes me as likely to lead to a
pile-up of the resource allocation deadlock sort when working on the
group challenge sentence: everyone would retain any word relevant to
the group challenge that came their way, making it likely no-one could
get the whole set. I suppose there could be various rules providing
extra duplicates of stems to work around this; and regardless of any
such rules, players could work around it by coining synonyms...

Or did you mean to forgo challenge sentences entirely with this rule?
I could see it working nicely without them. For instance, have a
periodic phase of the game where each player constructs a sentence out
of the lexis in their hand, with scoring based on the players voting
on the others' constructed sentences -- which is best formed? most
pragmatically sensible? most culturally sensible? One could add to
this points obtained by scoring against constraints, in the usual way.

Alex

[Alex Fink]

(Hah, most of my ideas here aren't new at all! I should reread the
extant documentation before posting next time.)

[Daniel Demski]

On Monday, February 18, 2013 1:59:53 AM UTC-5, Alex Fink wrote:

Or did you mean to forgo challenge sentences entirely with this rule?
I could see it working nicely without them.  For instance, have a
periodic phase of the game where each player constructs a sentence out
of the lexis in their hand, with scoring based on the players voting
on the others' constructed sentences -- which is best formed? most
pragmatically sensible? most culturally sensible?  One could add to
this points obtained by scoring against constraints, in the usual way.

Alex

Yes, that's roughly what I meant. Play would be basically like the "constraint" version, with agreed-upon challenges such as rhyming or asking a question. No longer would there be any risk of simply 'stealing' someone else's sentence since everyone would be holding different word cards, so there would be no lexical uniqueness rule on the sentences (I think I read 'differ by three words' as a proposed rule?). I would want a number of points (usually 1 or 2) put on a lexical card, possibly a one point bonus for making use of some odd characteristic of the word, agreed upon by the group. "Constraints" like longest sentence which are determined at endgame should be passed around as individuals win them.

Alex, you've played the constraint version several times, haven't you? I'd like to try it next week instead of challenge sentences. Was your approach just like that described in the glossotechnia rules?

Back to the scrabble version, I suppose if someone uses their coining turn to mime altering a vowel or reduplicating a final syllable to express some meaning, it's straightforward to add a card (or two) for that to the vocab deck. But certain coinings, like negation, should be in the draw pile lots of times! I guess that's not a big issue because there aren't goal sentences. But the ratio could be adjusted by adding one each time a card is used; a player lays down a sentence and pronounces it, the other players figure out what is meant and agree the grammar is fine, then an additional copy of each of those cards is made and put in the draw pile.

This requires a lot of paperwork, but it would be interesting when feedback got out of control. A word could essentially be robbed of its meaning by occurring in every sentence.

Now I should note, I've accidentally created two Glossotechnia discussions by mentioning this post on the Conlang list. That discussion is easily summarized though; we're trying to come up with good cards for letting players coin the tougher grammatical concepts for free. This includes things like evidentiality, aspect, definiteness, agency, modality. For these potential contrasts we'd have Grammar or perhaps more specifically titled Grammatical Contrast cards which are played to indicate the language makes this contrast, and then a handful of generic Coin Grammar cards which allow free coining of one expression of the contrast.

I'm not sure if this is the best way to handle the idea though. I like having a card on the table to indicate the contrast, but requiring two cards will make it rarer.

[Tanis]

This idea sounds a little like the set-up of 7 Wonders (eurogames ahoy in this thread). You take 6 'normal' turns, then you have a combat phase. Something like that could be implemented - six or so 'turns,' and then a sentence-building phase. The nice thing about 7 Wonders is you don't draw, so your hand becomes your countdown as well - when you have two cards left, you have two turns left. Not sure the 'don't draw' thing would work with Glossotechnia, but we (by which I mean you - I've mentioned my lack of people to playtest with) could try a similar system - take two or three turns each, then go around and build sentences and score them. Being cooperative, there wouldn't need to be hard and fast rules on how to score - the other players could be the 'judge' and vote on the score. Obviously there'd need to be an end-game condition - when someone has reached 10 or 20 points or so, or after three or four rounds.

[Daniel Demski]

We played again last night! Play lasted two and a half hours, even though the group translation challenge was pretty simple. There were five people at the beginning of the game, and a sixth joined in on the second round. 19 words were cointed.And, by the way, last week's game actually had 6, I neglected to count myself.

Having a person join the game was sort of fine since it lent to the relaxed atmosphere not focussed on winning. But our syllable rules had gotten fairly complicated and it took a while for him even to come up with a word allowed in the language.

Initially I tried to describe the more constraint-based version of the game but people didn't want to try it. Dividing the cards into two piles worked pretty well. I possibly should have included the syllable structure cards in the phonological pile, not sure. I did put the sound change, contrast, etc. cards there.

Scoring was: one point for understanding someone's translated sentence, two for successfully translating someone's sentence, three for getting the group sentence. This didn't work out well; understanding the sentence was a group effort and translating the group sentence was worth enough points to negate any other points earned.

There was a bit of an issue with the group translation sentence, "He is not over there". Some  of us agreed that it was unnecessary to translate the gender on "he", but this wasn't unanimous. This brought up the whole issue of how close the translation had to be. The challenge sentence would have been translated earlier in the game had substituting "hired assassin" for "he" been allowed, but it was generally agreed that went too far.

This led to a lot of discussion about the disadvantages of using English sentences. We probably should have used the constraint rules or something like them, and probably will do so next time. Sentences will be scored roughly based on how many coining turns it *would* have taken to get to them, plus bonus points for "constraints". I'm going to make a little deck of constraints based on good ones I see on game write-ups here. We may play with both public and private constraints (you reveal your private constraints when first scoring their points).

Another suggestion we'll probably try out is complement cards, which are a way of being rewarded for an entertaining word or sentence. You start the game holding a certain number of these, and if you still have them when the game ends they're -2 points each. However, any you've received from other players are worth +1 points.

We'll have to see how this works out. Will people just reward most coinings and sentences until they run out?

I can't play next Wednesday but I'll probably play with a smaller group over that weekend, and we'll definitely try out pretty altered rules if that game occurs.

I added a total of 8 cards, all for requiring distinctions across some word class; two for "suppletion", requiring a distinction to be made through a different vocab word, and then specific semantic ones, namely tense, aspect, modality, evidentiality, topicality, and definiteness. The only one which came up was a suppletion card. It was used to require all prepositions be either abstract or concrete, which made sense since the only preposition we had in play was purely abstract; "inside of" but not applicable to anything which is actually a container. The card allowed coining of a complementary preposition to handle concrete insideness.

All these cards I added allowed free, charade-less coinings of one sort or another. (Only the suppletion card said "instead of coining a word".) But now I'm noticing that when people play the inflection card their usage varies, sometimes miming the meaning and sometimes using English. I don't want to discourage the charades because it's fun, but I don't want to discourage the English use because it can result in meanings we never would have gotten through charades.

Also I should mention a couple semi-failed charades. The first one, the player was trying to coin "my people" (as a shortcut to translate his sentence quickly, as opposed to separate ownership and people words). Someone guessed "clones", and he decided to accept that answer as "more interesting than what I was going for". He then elaborated that the word originally meant "those like me"/"tribesmen", having racial connotations; then was broadened to general identification by the Women's Literature movement; then repurposed with the discovery of genetics.

All this was a creative way of saying it could still mean "my people". He didn't finish his sentence so I don't know how well this would have gone over in the end. I'd say it's allowed, and I like the mechanic of grabbing the most interesting charade response. I'd even consider having everyone write down a guess and the word coiner just has to choose the closest one, except that would probably take too long.

The other one was me, trying to coin the needed vocabulary "see". I think my sentence was "the cat would see the red table". I'd already coined table as Nkofo, and said Nkofo didn't mean anything alone, but required a color word. But then I decided to use my word for 'see' in a sentence, with me seeing the table; and we didn't have any color words. People realized I was saying "see" but also that the word before table had to be a color. So it became one.

This is the first time I've seen a direct consequence for misusing the language, which is great. I'd like it if something interesting happened when someone tried to translate their sentence and got the word order wrong, or whathaveyou.

A rule we added was, when playing a card that can replace another card, you *always* have the option of instead adding a second meaning like you would with the "secondary word order" card. In practice this was used on word order but we look forward to future creative uses. :)

As an overall comment I would just repeat that the basic gameplay of Glossotechnia is usually really fun, but the goal doesn't complement it well. During this game I let that get in my way, coining boring-but-necessary content words for my sentence every round; a couple of other people actually used some of their turns to add random interesting words instead of getting closer to winning. (This often helped other peoples' sentences by chance!) But some players really expect the scoring to be "fair" and match with what's fun about the game.

An interesting suggestion for the goal-sentence based version of the game was to not reveal the group goal until the first individual goal is completed; or even allow or require anyone completing an individual goal to draw a new group goal. This requires the language to be more widely capable before the game can be completed. Naturally this wouldn't work with the two hours our group generally has.

Other suggestions: a computer version could balance naturalness better using which cards come up, or have a natural - unnatural dial; a computer version could also help with pronunciation.

On Tuesday, February 19, 2013 3:50:04 PM UTC-5, Tanis wrote:

This idea sounds a little like the set-up of 7 Wonders (eurogames ahoy in this thread). You take 6 'normal' turns, then you have a combat phase. Something like that could be implemented - six or so 'turns,' and then a sentence-building phase. The nice thing about 7 Wonders is you don't draw, so your hand becomes your countdown as well - when you have two cards left, you have two turns left. Not sure the 'don't draw' thing would work with Glossotechnia, but we (by which I mean you - I've mentioned my lack of people to playtest with) could try a similar system - take two or three turns each, then go around and build sentences and score them. Being cooperative, there wouldn't need to be hard and fast rules on how to score - the other players could be the 'judge' and vote on the score. Obviously there'd need to be an end-game condition - when someone has reached 10 or 20 points or so, or after three or four rounds.

This would lend itself well to other more complicated/time-consuming rules too, like if scoring sentences is based on a group decision after the sentence is created. But I'm hoping we can reach a more spontaneous balance where people score points just for playing around with the language.

[Jim Henry]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 2:15 PM, Daniel Demski <dran...@gmail.com> wrote:
> sentences. We probably should have used the constraint rules or something
> like them, and probably will do so next time. Sentences will be scored
> roughly based on how many coining turns it *would* have taken to get to
> them, plus bonus points for "constraints". I'm going to make a little deck

The one or two times I've played with constraints were more fun
overall than the times I've played with translation challenge cards.
But I think they took more time, especially on the
setup/rules-explaining end.

> Another suggestion we'll probably try out is complement cards, which are a
> way of being rewarded for an entertaining word or sentence. You start the
> game holding a certain number of these, and if you still have them when the
> game ends they're -2 points each. However, any you've received from other
> players are worth +1 points.
>
> We'll have to see how this works out. Will people just reward most coinings
> and sentences until they run out?

That sounds fun! And if there aren't too many compliment cards, I
don't think people would be in a big hurry to get rid of theirs early,
so they could be selective about whom to award them to. Maybe three
or four per player would be about right.

> the most interesting charade response. I'd even consider having everyone
> write down a guess and the word coiner just has to choose the closest one,
> except that would probably take too long.

I'm not sure how much advantage you'd get to the independent, secret
guessing either. I feel like the communal, simultaneous guessing and
gradually narrowing in on the (approximate) meaning is more fun than
silent, secret writing down of guesses would be. But you could have
other players offering guesses for a certain time limit, and then the
coining player picks the offered meaning that most closely
approximates his intent.

> well. During this game I let that get in my way, coining
> boring-but-necessary content words for my sentence every round; a couple of
> other people actually used some of their turns to add random interesting
> words instead of getting closer to winning. (This often helped other
> peoples' sentences by chance!) But some players really expect the scoring to
> be "fair" and match with what's fun about the game.

I've tried to design a set of challenge sentence cards with a fair
amount of overlap in vocabulary, so there's a decent chance that a
word you coin for your own sentence will help someone else with their
own, or that words people coin for the group sentence will help
someone's individual sentence. But I haven't noticed much effect of
that kind, and probably overall constraints work better.

> An interesting suggestion for the goal-sentence based version of the game
> was to not reveal the group goal until the first individual goal is
> completed; or even allow or require anyone completing an individual goal to
> draw a new group goal. This requires the language to be more widely capable

That could help too.

[Alex Fink]

Finally getting back to this:

On 18 February 2013 12:58, Daniel Demski <dran...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Alex, you've played the constraint version several times, haven't you? I'd
> like to try it next week instead of challenge sentences. Was your approach
> just like that described in the glossotechnia rules?

I'm trying to call to mind instances in which I've played with
constraints, and I'm not coming up with any.

Tangentially, every time one of these Glossotechnia threads comes up,
I get the idea of playtesting it online -- the charades would be easy
to replace with drawing, but the card-handling is more awkward than it
should be. One of these days I'm going to break down and write a
webapp that just acts as an arbitrary deck of cards...

> Back to the scrabble version, I suppose if someone uses their coining turn
> to mime altering a vowel or reduplicating a final syllable to express some
> meaning, it's straightforward to add a card (or two) for that to the vocab
> deck. But certain coinings, like negation, should be in the draw pile lots
> of times!

Elsewhere you were lamenting that people never feel the need to
introduce affixes, only words. Perhaps this ruleset could help
counteract that if it were only word roots, not affixal material of
any sort, which was regulated by cards: make an affix and you can
immediately use it freely.

> Now I should note, I've accidentally created two Glossotechnia discussions
> by mentioning this post on the Conlang list. That discussion is easily
> summarized though; we're trying to come up with good cards for letting
> players coin the tougher grammatical concepts for free. This includes things
> like evidentiality, aspect, definiteness, agency, modality. For these
> potential contrasts we'd have Grammar or perhaps more specifically titled
> Grammatical Contrast cards which are played to indicate the language makes
> this contrast, and then a handful of generic Coin Grammar cards which allow
> free coining of one expression of the contrast.
>
> I'm not sure if this is the best way to handle the idea though. I like
> having a card on the table to indicate the contrast, but requiring two cards
> will make it rarer.

Yes; I'd think the obvious thing to do is to let you coin one nonzero
value to contrast with zero -- or a contrast between two values
otherwise -- when the card is introduced.

On 21 February 2013 14:15, Daniel Demski <dran...@gmail.com> wrote:
> But our syllable rules had gotten fairly
> complicated and it took a while for him even to come up with a word allowed
> in the language.

Despite CV being allowed?

> Scoring was: one point for understanding someone's translated sentence, two
> for successfully translating someone's sentence, three for getting the group
> sentence. This didn't work out well; understanding the sentence was a group
> effort and translating the group sentence was worth enough points to negate
> any other points earned.

It might well be that understanding the sentence shouldn't be worth
points. Was the communality of this somehow not a problem in your
first game?

> This led to a lot of discussion about the disadvantages of using English
> sentences. We probably should have used the constraint rules or something
> like them, and probably will do so next time. Sentences will be scored
> roughly based on how many coining turns it *would* have taken to get to
> them, plus bonus points for "constraints". I'm going to make a little deck
> of constraints based on good ones I see on game write-ups here. We may play
> with both public and private constraints (you reveal your private
> constraints when first scoring their points).

Yeah, a suggested constraint deck is something I think would very much
merit being added to Jim's central repository of Glossotechnia
materials -- ideally even with suggested scores worked out. What
constraints have you collected so far?

> I'd say it's allowed, and I like the mechanic of grabbing
> the most interesting charade response. I'd even consider having everyone
> write down a guess and the word coiner just has to choose the closest one,
> except that would probably take too long.

While I'm also hesitant about reducing the charades to writing and
thereby limiting the fun audience-interaction effects, I do
essentially always play that if the guessers get tired of guessing
what the performer means and settle on something else particularly
amusing, that wins the day as the charade response.

> This is the first time I've seen a direct consequence for misusing the
> language, which is great. I'd like it if something interesting happened when
> someone tried to translate their sentence and got the word order wrong, or
> whathaveyou.

If someone can propose a different interpretation of the sentence
played more in accord with known properties of the language, it
stands?

> A rule we added was, when playing a card that can replace another card, you
> *always* have the option of instead adding a second meaning like you would
> with the "secondary word order" card. In practice this was used on word
> order but we look forward to future creative uses. :)

Cool.

> Other suggestions: a computer version could balance naturalness better using
> which cards come up, or have a natural - unnatural dial;

Yet another reason I'm a fan of featural phonology cards!

Or, having recently read Jim's official rules page again, another way
to help naturality would be with a broad usage of the suggestion in
the "Allophony" section. Declare that each card on the table
represents _one_ allophone of a phoneme, but it doesn't have to be the
default allophone: its player should specify the base phoneme and the
allophonic rule allowing it to arise (and for even better naturality,
the allophonic rule should be allowed to parallelly affect more than
just the one phoneme in question). For instance, if I play the "ɨ"
card and there is no "i" played, I could say it's underlyingly /i/,
but front vowels are backed to central before velars, getting me my
[ɨ]; if I state the rule that way and /ɛ/ is already played then it
picks up an [ɜ] allophone too.

> But I'm hoping we can reach a more spontaneous balance
> where people score points just for playing around with the language.

Mhmm, the right balance might be to have two sorts of scoring phases,
one where the players are just playing around and points are scored
for coolness somehow, either your complement cards or another
mechanic; and one where they're specfically going after constraints.

Alex