Want to help turn Glossotechnia into a production quality game?
Sai Emrys
The goal is to trim the fat and make Glossotechnia into a card game that would be fun & accessible for all language-loving geeks, yet with enough depth (perhaps in optional rules) for hardcore conlangers. This would be sold as an actual commercial-quality deck.
If you want to help, just join the group and contribute your ideas for how to get there.
The first thread (archived from plain ol' email) should give you all the background you may need.
Thanks,
- Sai
Liam
~Liam
Brian Henry
- BMH
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Zytar is Hungry!!!
Sai Emrys
From what I've seen play testing with groups of Non-conlangers, I'd say the best bet may be to have the deck ship with the 'basic deck' and a set of additional cards you could shuffle in, and alternate rules to add the "conlanger spark". Having it be fun for "lay-people" who happen to enjoy language and games and having it have enough "out-there-ness" to satisfy hard-core conlangers just seems, if not mutually exclusive, at least harder than it needs to be, if you are willing to "split the deck", so to speak.
I see no problem with having alternate ('advanced') rules. Having extra cards is just a pragmatic question: how many? I.e. would it mean having to make another deckfull, or just a handful of cards that can be set aside normally?
Unfortunately, deck size is pretty important for keeping costs reasonable.
- Sai
Jim Henry
> From what I've seen play testing with groups of Non-conlangers, I'd say the
> best bet may be to have the deck ship with the 'basic deck' and a set of
> additional cards you could shuffle in, and alternate rules to add the
> "conlanger spark". Having it be fun for "lay-people" who happen to enjoy
> language and games and having it have enough "out-there-ness" to satisfy
> hard-core conlangers just seems, if not mutually exclusive, at least harder
> than it needs to be, if you are willing to "split the deck", so to speak.
That seems ideal, if we could figure out how -- but it wouldn't work with
the current configurations of the simplified deck and the advanced
deck. There's a fair amount of overlap between them (the syntax
cards and action cards and meaning change cards are pretty similar),
but the sound change cards are fundamentally different between the
two decks. In the simplified deck, where there are no Phoneme
or Syllable cards, the text of the sound change cards is written
differently from those in the advanced deck where they refer to
playing or discarding phoneme or syllable cards, etc. So turning
a simple deck into an advanced deck would mean not just adding
phoneme, syllable, suprasegmental, etc. cards, but *replacing*
the sound change cards, and probably other changes as well.
So we'd probably produce two completely separate versions.
Which we'd do first, I'm not sure.
I plan to write up a description of the simplified deck and put
in on my website soon. Then maybe other subscribers to this
list could make their own versions of said deck and playtest
it with non-conlanger friends, and we could discuss improvements
to it.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/
Sai Emrys
> That seems ideal, if we could figure out how -- but it wouldn't work with
> the current configurations of the simplified deck and the advanced
> deck.
> So we'd probably produce two completely separate versions.
> Which we'd do first, I'm not sure.
Note that this is just how it is *now*.
I see no reason that this cannot in principle be designed as primarily
a rules change rather than a major card change...
- Sai
Emerson Knapp
to differentiate, while still having the same number of cards. This
could lead to a lot of text on those cards, but through some
creativity I'm sure this can be minimized.
-Emerson
Jim Henry
>
> There could be Advanced and Regular rules text on the cards that need
> to differentiate, while still having the same number of cards. This
> could lead to a lot of text on those cards, but through some
> creativity I'm sure this can be minimized.
Hmm, maybe. What about this -- the Phoneme
Split card read thus in the advanced version:
Play a phoneme card that matches at least one feature with a phoneme already
in play. Specify the context(s) where the old phoneme changes to the new one
in existing words.<br>
<strong>Draw another card at the end of your turn.</strong>
===
That probably leaves enough room for a whole
separate paragraph, the above headed "Advanced"
and the next one "Basic":
===
Specify a sound that occurs in one or more
words, and another sound it will change into.
===
(The basic version, which I've described vaguely
in emails to this list and the CONLANG list but haven't
described in detail on my webpage yet, doesn't
have Phoneme or Syllable cards; players coin
words free-form, without the game phonology being
constrained by the cards in play.)
Jim Henry
> Not up to how to join a group,
Send mail to conlang-card-...@googlegroups.com.
> but I do have a suggestion for glossotechnia.
> I never get to play it (but have a deck I made in my pocket all the time)
> because no one will play it with me, maybe I'm just too much of a rule nazi,
Soonish, I should have a description of my simplified deck and more
basic rules up on my website; maybe you can find someone to play
that version with you...
> anyhow: the idea.
> When I do play, instead of having phoneme charts, I have a large version of
> the IPA chart, and some bingo markers, and a chart with syllable structures
> on it.
> You roll a die, and depending on the number you get, you can activate a POA
> or MOA or a sound along an intersection, or you can activate a syllable
> structure, and then the IPA chart and the syllable chart take care of the
> phonotactics and phonology and there are no phoneme cards in the deck, the
> only distinction and sound change cards.
This sounds a bit similar to an idea we tossed around a while
ago for how to reduce the number of cards in the deck -- instead
of phoneme cards and phonemic contrast cards, we could have
Manner of Articulation and Point of Articulation cards, and the
set of both in play and their intersections determines the
actual phonemes available... We finally decided it wouldn't actually
save that many cards over the phoneme-based version, and
would be harder to explain to non-conlangers than the other
version.
In your version, when and how do you decide it's time to
add a new phoneme or syllable structure and roll dice
to select a point on the IPA chart or phonotactics chart...?
When certain "add new phoneme" cards come up, or what?
Jim Henry
> Every turn before coining a word you rolled the die, and if
> d6 = 1; do nothing
> d6 = 2,3; select a MOA or POA / Height or Closeness
> d6 = 4,5; select a possible phoneme
> d6 = 6; select a syllable structure
>
> we had that CV was defaultly available
> I think that that should make the phoneme inventory get big enough pretty
> fast, but there is a minimum of six turns before any word can be coined,
> presumably these turns consist of pretty much just dice rolling and
> morpho-syntax cards being played.
Hmm. I might do some playtesting with your
version sometime... But it seems it could use
some improvement re: startup time. With the
alpha-test version of Glossotechnia people
complained that it was slow to get started and
in the early rounds the phonemes and
syllable forms available for coining words with
were too few. I fixed that by starting the game
with laying out a few phoneme cards face-up
at random and then reshuffling the deck before
dealing people's hands, and by allowing
people to use CV syllables at any time whether
there are syllable cards in play or not.
In your version (or my variant of it) I suppose
I would start with one round where everyone
contributes a phoneme to the inventory,
before we start drawing and playing cards
and rolling dice...?
Dhokarena56
On Apr 9, 1:34 pm, Jim Henry <jimhenry1...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hmm, yeah...
If we want to make a more complicated version with theta-roles and 50
case cards and glottal trills and all that, maybe it would be best to
make the more complicated version online. I just think there aren't
enough conlangers out there to make this commercially viable
offline...but you never know.
Dhokarena56
web?
Alex Fink
> Is it possible, Sai Emrys, to put the whole deck (in text form) on the
> web?
More explicitly than
http://bellsouthpwp.net/j/i/jimhenry1973/conlang/glossotechnia_deck.html
?
Alex
Jim Henry
Actually, the same URL but ending in
glossotechnia_long_deck_descr.html
is even *more* explicit. I'm not sure it's linked
from elsewhere on my website yet -- I put it
up and posted the URL to the list for feedback
a while ago but may not have linked it from
elsewhere. If not, it will be when I do the next
site update in a day or two.
And note that the deck description is going
to change radically soon -- or more likely
that description will remain as it is and a
new description of a more compact deck
will be added, based on our discussions
of a few months ago, once I finish re-reading
and digesting those old emails. We were
talking about how to reduce those 170-odd
cards to 110, which Sai tells us is the largest
deck that's economically printable and
boxable, when the discussion threads
here died out back in September or October.
Dhokarena56
Pursuit...
Of course, in those games the cards aren't everything.
On Apr 12, 5:34 pm, Jim Henry <jimhenry1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Alex Fink <000...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
Dhokarena56
On Apr 12, 5:34 pm, Jim Henry <jimhenry1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Alex Fink <000...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
Dhokarena56
[O]. For many American English speakers, myself included, [a], [A] and
[O] collapse into a phoneme which is either /a/ or /A/ (I'm not sure).
So, when you put up examples such as "ought" or "law", that's fine for
British consumers, but for many of us Yankees that's no different from
"father".
Also, for /M/, might want to put Japanese <u> up there too-more people
know Japanese than Turkish or Hixkaryana.
On Apr 12, 5:34 pm, Jim Henry <jimhenry1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Alex Fink <000...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
Dhokarena56
give an accompaniment for them...at least not on Wikipedia.
On Apr 12, 5:34 pm, Jim Henry <jimhenry1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Alex Fink <000...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
Jim Henry
>
> Maybe 110 isn't the smallest number.
No, I suppose 0 is the smallest number.
But what is the *optimal* number of cards
that makes the game rich and complex
enough without being so large that it
can't be printed and boxed for a price
that many conlangers are willing/able
to pay?
My original alpha-test deck was 90 cards.
Every change and improvement that's
been made since then had tended to
expand the deck; but the current 170-odd
cards are a pain to shuffle, and would
apparently be too expensive to print
and box.
> Think about, say, Trivial
> Pursuit...
> Of course, in those games the cards aren't everything.
Have you read the list archives where
Sai, Alex and I were talking about whether
and why and how much we need to reduce
the size of the deck? If not, please do so
whenever you have time.
Re: [O], good point. Maybe the vowel
cards should specify the English dialect
the example words are from.
[M], yes, I should probably add a Japanese example
as well.
Re: clicks, see the list archives where Alex
and I were talking about this. In the reduced
deck, there will be no click phoneme cards
as such, but a Phonemic Contrast card that
lets you add clicks based on the plosives
that are in play.
Dhokarena56
examples. I find that, say, "harder" is for many of us say /har\4r
\_=/.
On Apr 13, 11:54 am, Jim Henry <jimhenry1...@gmail.com> wrote:
Dhokarena56
to direct friends to the group and/or inform them about the game as it
is in production?
Jim Henry
>
> By the way-put this in a new topic if it belongs there-is it too early
> to direct friends to the group and/or inform them about the game as it
> is in production?
It's too early to say that the game is in production.
But if anyone wants to look at the description of
the game on my website, make their own deck,
playtest, and contribute to the discussions about
the game on this list, they're welcome to do so.
Dhokarena56
On Apr 9, 11:29 am, Sai Emrys <sai...@gmail.com> wrote:
(maybe with some expansion decks), because it'll be for a larger
market and easier to produce, but the more advanced one we could put
on the web, where we could, say, charge a very small yearly membership
fee-then we'd stay afloat and there'd be no limit to how many cards we
had!
Dhokarena56
English?
Jim Henry
>
> Is it too early to think about versions in languages other than
> English?
I've already made an Esperanto deck, but
haven't got a detailed description of it on my
website yet. Feel free to translate the deck
into other languages under the same terms
of use described in the deck and rules docs
on my site.