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history game/challenge
Nov. 5th, 2013 05:04 pmI'm working on a wee project, and I'm going to crowdsource it a little bit by using my friends and readers as a braintrust.
I'm moderately fond of the game Chrononauts, which (in a nutshell) allows players to flip various events throughout history (nominally world history, but mostly modern American history from 1865 to 1999) to create alternate realities. If you can create a specific alternate timeline by manipulating particular events (and leaving others alone) before your opponents create theirs, you win! You can also win in a couple of other ways, including collecting certain historical (or alternate historic) artifacts. But beware! If too many parts of the timeline are changed at once, the fabric of reality rips apart, and everyone loses.
OK, so this is good, clean, silly fun. And the makers, Looney Labs, came out with an alternate set that explores American history from 1770 to 1916. Which made me think, why not one for British history? My first thought was to come up with a variant and see if Looney Labs would like to publish it, but a look at their submissions policies deterred me from that course (they discourage submissions and ask that you assign all rights to any idea to them as a condition of their even looking at it).
But it would still be fun to build an alternate deck for me and my friends to play.
So, what events to include? Making one list for all of British history may be asking too much. It may need to be broken down into subtopics by era (even by country). But I'd be interested to see what suggestions folks would come up with for dates to be included.
The standard deck is 32 events. Each is a date and an event that took place then. Some dates are categorized as "lynchpins"; if these are flipped, an alternate version of history takes over. For example, instead of Abraham Lincoln being assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, he is only wounded. When a lynchpin is flipped, this may cause other cards, called ripplepoints, to flip also. When one of these is flipped, a small rip in the fabric of space-time occurs, which then has to be patched. Patches are, in effect, the reverse (or, rather, *a* reverse) of the event on the ripplepoint). Examples of these various cards are listed in the standard Chrononauts card list and the Early American Chrononauts card list.
So events need to be not just important, but to have an alternate version that would make for an interesting alternate timeline. The alternate version may be simply a different outcome (a patch) or it may lead to a whole series of changes of several other events. For instance a good lynchpin might be "Henry VII wins the Battle of Bosworth"; when flipped to "Richard III slays the pretender Henry Tudor", that would ripple to events about Henry VIII getting a divorce (for which the patch might be "Pope Leo X declares Richard IV fidei defensor") and Elizabeth defeating the Spanish Armada (patched by "Plantagenet-Hapsburg alliance signed in Bruges").
A LOT of the cards in the two existing decks deal with war or the death of leaders. A few others are social or cultural events. Some are large ("Stock Market Crashes") while some are relatively small ("Section of District of Columbia returned to Virginia"). There are all sorts of things to get up to with the additional cards (missions, artifacts, player characters, the "inverters" that allow you to flip lynchpins), but first I'd like to work out a good set of events.
Suggestions for UKC (UK Chrononauts)?
I'm moderately fond of the game Chrononauts, which (in a nutshell) allows players to flip various events throughout history (nominally world history, but mostly modern American history from 1865 to 1999) to create alternate realities. If you can create a specific alternate timeline by manipulating particular events (and leaving others alone) before your opponents create theirs, you win! You can also win in a couple of other ways, including collecting certain historical (or alternate historic) artifacts. But beware! If too many parts of the timeline are changed at once, the fabric of reality rips apart, and everyone loses.
OK, so this is good, clean, silly fun. And the makers, Looney Labs, came out with an alternate set that explores American history from 1770 to 1916. Which made me think, why not one for British history? My first thought was to come up with a variant and see if Looney Labs would like to publish it, but a look at their submissions policies deterred me from that course (they discourage submissions and ask that you assign all rights to any idea to them as a condition of their even looking at it).
But it would still be fun to build an alternate deck for me and my friends to play.
So, what events to include? Making one list for all of British history may be asking too much. It may need to be broken down into subtopics by era (even by country). But I'd be interested to see what suggestions folks would come up with for dates to be included.
The standard deck is 32 events. Each is a date and an event that took place then. Some dates are categorized as "lynchpins"; if these are flipped, an alternate version of history takes over. For example, instead of Abraham Lincoln being assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, he is only wounded. When a lynchpin is flipped, this may cause other cards, called ripplepoints, to flip also. When one of these is flipped, a small rip in the fabric of space-time occurs, which then has to be patched. Patches are, in effect, the reverse (or, rather, *a* reverse) of the event on the ripplepoint). Examples of these various cards are listed in the standard Chrononauts card list and the Early American Chrononauts card list.
So events need to be not just important, but to have an alternate version that would make for an interesting alternate timeline. The alternate version may be simply a different outcome (a patch) or it may lead to a whole series of changes of several other events. For instance a good lynchpin might be "Henry VII wins the Battle of Bosworth"; when flipped to "Richard III slays the pretender Henry Tudor", that would ripple to events about Henry VIII getting a divorce (for which the patch might be "Pope Leo X declares Richard IV fidei defensor") and Elizabeth defeating the Spanish Armada (patched by "Plantagenet-Hapsburg alliance signed in Bruges").
A LOT of the cards in the two existing decks deal with war or the death of leaders. A few others are social or cultural events. Some are large ("Stock Market Crashes") while some are relatively small ("Section of District of Columbia returned to Virginia"). There are all sorts of things to get up to with the additional cards (missions, artifacts, player characters, the "inverters" that allow you to flip lynchpins), but first I'd like to work out a good set of events.
Suggestions for UKC (UK Chrononauts)?
