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Kiri's up early the next morning, restless with various low-level simmering concerns, and wanders out of her room.
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free-flowing
"We could try the one I made up next," Loel suggests. "Unless you think you'd be bad at that too."
free-flowing
"All right," he says, "it's like this - we give everybody a bowl of coins, no extraordinaries, just the elemental blessings. The first person puts down a coin in the middle of the - floor," he gestures to the empty space within the loose circle of people in the room, "or table if there is one, whatever. The second person has to put down a coin that's the same element, but a different blessing. The next person has to put down a coin that's the same element as everything on the table, but not the same blessing as any of them."
He pauses for breath, then continues, "If it gets around to somebody who can't do that, then they have to take all the coins that are sitting there, and keep 'em in a shame pile next to their bowl. Then the person after them gets to pick a coin to put down and start a new chain. If somebody actually manages to finish a whole row of eight, I'm not sure what to do with the coins in that case but I think I'd like to let that player keep them in an, I dunno, glory pile, 'cause I bet that's going to be hard. We keep going until, mm, until one player runs out of coins - because then the players before them would just keep feeding their shame pile for the rest of the game if we kept going. And then whoever has the smallest shame pile wins. And if we do the glory pile thing, I guess those just count for the opposite of the shame pile - if you have a glory pile with eight coins, and a shame pile with ten, that's the same as having a shame pile with two. Make sense now?"
He pauses for breath, then continues, "If it gets around to somebody who can't do that, then they have to take all the coins that are sitting there, and keep 'em in a shame pile next to their bowl. Then the person after them gets to pick a coin to put down and start a new chain. If somebody actually manages to finish a whole row of eight, I'm not sure what to do with the coins in that case but I think I'd like to let that player keep them in an, I dunno, glory pile, 'cause I bet that's going to be hard. We keep going until, mm, until one player runs out of coins - because then the players before them would just keep feeding their shame pile for the rest of the game if we kept going. And then whoever has the smallest shame pile wins. And if we do the glory pile thing, I guess those just count for the opposite of the shame pile - if you have a glory pile with eight coins, and a shame pile with ten, that's the same as having a shame pile with two. Make sense now?"
salt_of_the
"Do you always have to give up a coin of the right element or can you just take the pile if you'd rather?"
free-flowing
"Ooh," says Loel, contemplating this. "Sure, why not, you can forfeit even if you don't have to. That should make things interesting."
calescent
"I'm not sure when you'd want to - I guess if you think the pile's going to go around if you don't take it now and you only have one of that element?"
free-flowing
"Yeah. Or you only have two and don't want to risk somebody else putting down the other one before it reaches you. Or you want to make people think you're out of that element, and it's a short chain so it's worth taking one or two more shame coins to do it."
calescent
"Interesting strategy implications. I guess I'll just sort of fling my coins from a safe distance and Loel will pass me my allotted dose of shame?"
free-flowing
"Me," says Loel. "Same reason as Aleko last time. And we can go the same direction, even."
salt_of_the
"Okay." Patience starts looking through her bowl to see what she's got. "This would be easier if there were little mini bins to sort them into... I guess then it'd be easy for people to see how much you had of any given thing though."
calescent
This game goes handily to Ekador, with the first person to run out of coins being Patience. The only person to collect a victory is Aleko, but he has so much shame in his heap as to thoroughly counteract it.
calescent
"A productive day of game design, certainly. I'll have to write the rules down. Maybe we can come up with a few more and publish a little booklet of blessing coin games."
