Representing Board Game State — The Pieces
This is the fourth in a series of posts describing ideas for a board game state modelling language. The previous posts in the series have dealt with the board, the cards and the players.
Pieces are game components that, like cards, have relationships with other concepts in the board game state modelling language. Pieces can be owned by players or sets of players and be placed in or on spaces. Pieces can also be associated with cards.
For example in the game Council of Verona after the character cards have been played to the table players can place betting markers on certain cards that score for them if that character’s objective is achieved.
Pieces can also be associated with a space side as well as a space itself. This is the way that the concept of “facing” is represented. For example in the game Robo Rally the facing of a player’s robot is vitally important when issuing orders to that robot. A command to “move forward” whilst facing one way might be perfectly safe but when facing another way it might send the robot into a pit.
Pieces can have properties that interact with the rules of the game and distinguish them from one another. In some cases, like in the game A Game of Thrones, the properties are as simple as a type (knight, footman, fleet) and a colour. In other games pieces can have a number of properties. For example in the game Inca Empire the province markers have a value for the number of victory points they grant and the number of workers they contribute to your faction.
Pieces can also have their properties change during the course of a game although this is usually represented by the addition of pieces or markers so that human players can tell the difference.
For example the anomaly ships from the Eclipse Shadow of the Rift expansion accumulate damage from their own actions as well as battles with the players. The level of damage is a property of the piece and is represented by placing damage cubes on the counter. In representing this situation the modelling language may not track the individual damage cubes, as they aren’t critical to the state of the game, but rather track the total level of damage of the anomaly as a property.
As already mentioned in the post on players, pieces can be associated or owned by one player, a set of players or no players.
It should be noted that pieces, like cards, can have hidden information or “sides” that is only available to a subset of the players. Generally this is information on the bottom of a piece. For example in the game Fire and Axe: a Viking Saga the values of the cities you can raid are hidden until you actually encounter and defeat them.
Well that’s it for pieces, next time I will examine game turn structure.
