Vitenka/LiftDogs

A Game of Herding Lifts

I've had this image in my head for ages now. A bell-hop with a shepherd's staff, whistling. "Lay down; shaft 2. Come by Shaft 3". It's sat in my quotes page, I think. And I finally decided that the right venue to use this is a game. Influenced by some time on a ship with a really terribly behaved bank of lifts.

So yeah. In this world, lifts are, basically, sheep. You can see it; right? They're big, slow, dumb, never where you want them to be, and tend to arrive all at once. Thus, obviously, they need lift-dogs to split them up and get them where you want them to be.

This is... maybe quarter-baked right now?

The layout

the building is 6 (?) floors high, and 3 (?) lift-shafts wide. In these shafts are the lift cars, and the lift-dogs. To the side are the floors, with a queue of waiting passengers. Passengers may also be in the cars; there's limited space for 4 each (?)

Each turn you:

Flip up a card to see what new passengers have arrived. They will have a floor they arrive on, and a target floor. If your premium passenger isn't currently out; the first arriving passenger becomes marked as such.
Move your lift dog. Up to 4 (?) spaces orthogonally. Optionally, lie down.
- You cannot share space with a lift. You can with other dogs.
- Unless it turns out to be fun to have lifts carrying dogs around. Then we will allow it.
  - The 4 is chosen to be enough to let you go around, from one side of a car to another; usually. Orthogonal because otherwise you can always change shaft freely which seems too much. If you can move onto/through lifts, then either movement ends there, or reduce movement. Maybe. Maybe they wanna go faster? Who knows.
Then move the lift in that shaft. This is the complex bit.
Deliver any passengers that arrived. Score points for each passenger, and premium passengers also score for their owner. (Get both, big points). Currently I'm thinking just 1 +2 for these, but we'll see.
- The aim here is to reward you for keeping passengers waiting as little as possible - so high throughput scores best. But everyone is also incentivised to betray by trying to deliver for their bonus points.
- And the gravwell-style "Oh, I messed you up, so very not sorry" of leaving your dog somewhere inconvenient.
Load as many passengers as possible.
There's a special "building owner" passenger, near the end of the deck. Game ends when you deliver him; or if you take too many turns to do so.

Lift Motion

Look in that shaft for the closest standing dog. You're moving away from it.
- If there's a tie, you're moving in the direction away from the most standing dogs in your shaft.
- If there's no standing dog, and you're at one extreme - you're going the other way.
- If even that fails - you're staying put. And you won't be scoring any points today.
You cannot stop on a dog; either lying or standing.
You cannot stop with a standing dog on that floor in another shaft. (You can't see lying down ones. There's... tall grass in the way? I don't know, the metaphor is escaping now.)
And you can't go past the top floor, or below the bottom floor. So you might not be able to move at all.
Given that direction and constraint -
- Stop at the first floor that you have a passenger waiting for.
- If you're empty, stop at the first floor with passengers waiting, if it comes sooner. Take no notice of whether they want to go up or down. Or whether they pressed the button or not.

Things that need to change:

It's too controlled. I want more gravwell-style chaotic interactions. Current thought is that you get to roll some dice for the movement available to you. The dice would be 4x'thing you want' 1x'something else' and 1x'sit and bark' and you have to use everything you roll.
I also want more long term variation. I'm currently thinking Yahtzee-style combo scoring. Cash in your 2 points for delivering 2 passengers now? Or wait to score this card for its "delivered one to every floor" potential?

That was too fiddly. But I think I've got it now.

There is only one lift dog. Passengers belong to players. There are cards; each having a direction you want the dog to go; a passenger route to fulfill; and a time (which is the means of communicating with the dog. Time 1 is whistling, the fastest; time 5 is the dog reading a neatly calligraphied letter...) - and a points value, which is inverse to the time. These cards start some in players hands; but mainly in a 5-slot river.

There is a 5-slot clock, with the dog existing on the lines between the times. So time 1 is the time directly in front of the dogs pointer. When you play a card, you count that many slots (so if clock is entirely empty, 1 goes in slot 1, 2 in 2 etc. But if partly filled, it could wrap around) and put the card there. Place the marked passenger (if they aren't on the board already) and score the points for the card immediately.

On your turn, play a card either from the river, or from your hand. The river does not refill at this point.

Then, if slot 1 is filled - the dog does the actions that are filled until it hits an empty slot (where it stops) and then a lift reacts. So playing in slot 1 moves the dog once then the lifts. But playing 2 then 1 would move the dog twice; then the lift. The river refills now, when the lift moves.

Each player scores their passengers for disembarking. I think that the extra score for the playing cards in advance will be sufficient motivation to try fiddly things.

Not really examined this for feasibility - but I think we can get the right amount of random out of:

Dogs go either clockwise, or anticlockwise. Your choice each turn.
And this is relative to your lift. You're in it, you see. They circle around you.
They go around lifts. (And can walk on the outside of the building. Like all dogs, they have suction-cups for feet.)
Order of play is by tile usage.
And these tiles also show how close a dog has to be to your lift to make it move. (And when it moves, it goes up to the nearest floor where there's something for it to do)
And it's your job to try and trun that into cartesian movement so that they can make the lifts move where you want.
I think 'get back your tiles' is a move you can take instead of playing one. Your dog sits down, and lifts move due to this. The tile in front of you stays, I guess?

Ok; it feels good; and the physrep I have in mind works lovely. but UGH so many flaws. The biggest most obvious one is "What does counterclockwise even mean when lit and dog are far apart". Though the actual first show-stopped players hit is "Huh, lifts all start on the ground floor I guess? Uh, how do dogs get past that then?" Which will crop up any time lifts are all on the same floor. Maybe dog position and "which lift moves" need divorcing?

Next thing to try; and I have a good feeling about this one; is just adding an extra lift-shaft-slot on the topmost and bottom-most floors. Just to give the dogs a way through it it gets jammed. A jam in the middle of the shaft is fine; since it's dynamic - move the dogs and it breaks. So hopefully putting the complexity to fix the special case in the map will suffice.
Regarding 'what is clockwise' I think we'll go with "Go in the direction you face until you've gone past the midpoint, then turn ninety degrees, repeat". So you'll get closer after the turn. And evasion is then mapped to be ALWAYS moving father out in the direction you're not facing. Your dogs will describe some pretty wide circles, but that's fine. And if they manage to loop round on one axis, that's both fine and hilarious.