Author Topic: New game suggestion - Speed Chi  (Read 4287 times)

Tom44

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New game suggestion - Speed Chi
« on: November 29, 2014, 04:50:30 AM »
When I work a Chi puzzle, I typically find 90% of what I am going to find in the first 10 or 15 minutes, then struggle to add  more, then really struggle or just get lucky and get a rosette.  Anyway, I wonder what people would thing about a speed game.

Lets say you log into a speed game and get a blank X of letters.  Press begin, the letters appear, and the puzzle closes for you in a set, short period of time.  Does that sound interesting to anyone?  Don't have any ideas of the computer complexities that would entail, though.
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ensiform

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Re: New game suggestion - Speed Chi
« Reply #1 on: November 29, 2014, 02:15:32 PM »
That's how I play and I would definitely be interested in having such an option.

Alan W

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Re: New game suggestion - Speed Chi
« Reply #2 on: November 29, 2014, 04:25:22 PM »
This idea came up in 2011 in a thread about the introduction of the 10-letter puzzle. This is what I said then:

Quote
Ilandrah, I have given some thought to puzzles with shorter time limits.

I had thought that players might use the "Your puzzles" tab to create a quick puzzle competition, but almost all of the published custom puzzles have a duration of 1, 2 or 3 days. There have been only a handful of published puzzles of one hour's duration or less. Yet I find, looking at the data records, that quite a lot of unpublished puzzles have had a life span of 10 minutes, 15 minutes or 20 minutes. So some players set themselves a time limit, but don't open the competition up to others. In this, players are probably being realistic - if you published a puzzle with a life less than one hour, you would probably be the only person to play it anyway.

An illustration of what can be done with a short duration word game is some of the online implementations of the Boggle concept: WEBoggle and WordSplay. On each of these sites there is a continual stream of 3-minute games, with a gap of a minute or so between the games. There seem to be enough people playing at any given time to make it interesting.

Three minutes is probably too short for Chihuahua, but I think one hour would be too long. If you came to the site, found a one-hour game that had been going for 20 minutes and played it until you had run out of words, would you then wait around till the puzzle closed, to see what words you missed, and how you were placed on the final scoreboard? I think the key to a time limit is that it be not long enough for most players. So, when the competition stops, you will be still frantically looking for words. For Chi, this might be around 10 minutes, maybe even less.

If we had an ongoing series of 10-minute games, would there be enough competitors to make it interesting? Possibly not.

One idea I came up with a while ago was a time-trial competition, as they have in cycling. The puzzle might be open for 24 hours, but each player would be limited to 10 minutes of play, or whatever limit would make it exciting. You would see the scores of those who have already played, and maybe there could be a display comparing your performance so far with that of previous players at the same point in time. There could be separate rankings for common words and all words, and for players using keyboard or mouse. Maybe wrong words could be deducted from your score, or there might be a limit of how many wrong attempts you were allowed before being disqualified.

In short, I thought at the time it was a promising idea, and I still do, but I haven't so far done anything about it. I'd be glad to hear any other thoughts.
Alan Walker
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rhino

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Re: New game suggestion - Speed Chi
« Reply #3 on: November 30, 2014, 06:33:19 AM »
There have been some games created in the Your Puzzles section with a very short duration, e.g. 20-30 minutes, but I had the feeling that they were being created as "personal" puzzles rather than for anyone else to solve.  You pretty much have to be watching to be in the right place at the right time ...
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Tom44

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Re: New game suggestion - Speed Chi
« Reply #4 on: November 30, 2014, 12:02:14 PM »
The key to this is that you don't have to be at the right place at the right time.  When your computer accepts the cookie, that starts the clock running.  At the end of the allotted time (20 or 30 minutes, maybe?) the puzzle closes for that computer until a new cycle appears.  Lets say the puzzle is posted at 2AM my time (7 PM in Sydney), but I don't look at it until 9 in the morning.  As soon as I open the puzzle and the computer has signed in I have a short time to play it, then I have to wait until after 2AM the next day for another puzzle.

It could be that keeping track of all of this and  opening/closing puzzles is just too much, but if its a world-wide puzzle I don't see any other reasonable way to do it.
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Re: New game suggestion - Speed Chi
« Reply #5 on: December 02, 2014, 12:07:49 AM »
I like the idea of the time trials, although I would probably prefer that the game have a life span of more than 24 hours. Roberts and I used to engage in this sort of competition years ago, but we had to self-report our start times and end times in the Chinwag box. We were occasionally joined by other players who understood what we were doing. A programmed limit of ten minutes would have made this a little easier and perhaps attracted more players.
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