omniwin training game

because it follows well from the previous 2

has some interesting stuff about culture and negotiations

and there's some (apparent) incentive to not reveal information

the basic premise is that each player has some set of constraints and the goal is to figure out how to satisfy them all at once

the simple version is that each player knows exactly what their own constraints are, but can't talk about them, they can only propose options and communicate 👍/ 👎 , and everybody wins when someone proposes an option that works for everybody

(an example of the simple version is that each player picks some criterion that a word has to match, could be like "must have exactly 2 vowels" or "must be a verb" and then you try to find a word that matches them all)

but I feel like the more interesting/realistic versions are where you don't actually have complete knowledge of your own constraints (/desires) but you have better access than others do to checking in with them... which would require some sort of system that could be deterministic (but with a lot of parameters) or could be run by an LLM or something.

and then you can communicate openly, and speculate about what you think would work for you

can you think of a fun game/social experiment one could play where each player is handed a piece of paper that is supposedly just to share with them their role in the game, but it actually describes a somewhat different game (some mix of "different framing" and straight up different rules!) and somehow in the course of the game the players find themselves in confusing conflicts about this, but (assuming reasonably friendly and metacognitively aware players) they're able to sort it out to some extent, but not like, fully sort it out before the game is over, like usually still some ambiguity.

think about it from a few different angles, and consider analogies with other games with secret info and complex win-conditions, like one-night ultimate werewolf. the game itself could be one where actually everybody can win but some players are led to believe that their win-condition will NOT be one that other players will tolerate. or it could be one where not everybody can win, or where each player believes everybody is working towards a collaborative win condition when in fact no such condition exists. you might consider analogies to real-world situations, whether office politics, war, family dynamics, sports, [add more items to this list], etc,

consider all the different possible combinations of these kinds of variations, and come up with a sketch or two for each one, then critique each of the ideas, then present me with your best ideas, in the form of a set of different player-cards that would go together. note that the player cards need to contain the entire ruleset, because the whole point is that we're giving people these cards to read in order to understand the game, not just to hand them their role. but you can make a note before you write out the cards, of which rules would be 100% in common between the roles.

this turing machine board game feels related

inspired a bit more about how this could work based on playing The Mind

you have a similar gameplay mechanic of there being random cards being played in some order that's collectively determined

but each person has a different condition that the process needs to satisfy

although this is MAYBE a pretty big departure from The Mind in that (at least in the variant I played—I believe there's more) there's sort of a single answer to "what order do cards need to be played in?" and so you can't add more constraints because they'd either contradict or be redundant

---

ah, although, if it's not based on getting a perfect ordering but more based on some sort of sequence that maximizes a bunch of different scalar functions

this post by Tasshin Fogleman has some suggestions for finding win-wins internally or between people

use creativity to find win-win solutions to complex conflicts

oh, there's a version of this that's like a collaborative version of zendo

see recording exploring this with Eric Chisholm on April 9th, 2021