From: jabba@deathstar.Stanford.EDU (Richard Charles Graves)
Subject: Re: Bolo Championships (in Bendigo)
Keywords: description
Organization: Residential Computing, Stanford University
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1992 05:49:29 GMT

Our friend from down under writes:

[Reasonable Bolo 'rules' deleted]

> Scoring: (this is the bit we are still arguing over)
>        you get score for kills and lose it for deaths
>        get score for pill boxes
>        get/don't get score for bases (I don't believe you should)

NO NO NO!

IMO one of the most interesting aspects of the game is that objectives
and strategy are left wide open. The tradeoffs between offense and defense,
capturing or bypassing pillboxes, fortifying bases or sprinting around the
island to claim new bases, when to ally or message, when to farm for trees,
how or whether to protect your combat engineer, etc, are essential. If you
set arbitrary point values for these things, you constrain strategy and
distort the game. Let the players do whatever they want. It should be clear
after an hour or so who has come the closest to achieving his or her chosen
objectives.

The key to the game is clearly the control of the bases. After the five
minute or so grace period, you simply don't get any bullets if you can't
maintain control of a base. However, this doesn't mean you should get
'points' for controlling bases. It just becomes obvious after a while that
whoever has the most, best-guarded bases 'wins.' I've played many a
'tournament' with no rules, with 2-12 people, lasting 10 minutes-6 hours,
and we've never had to define victory conditions.

Anarchy breeds creativity.

I 'won' a 2-player game in 10 minutes once by sprinting around the map,
claiming all the bases and ignoring all the pillboxes. By the time my
opponent realized his error, he had 4 pillboxes and 1 base to my 0
pillboxes and 10 bases. It was an easy matter to finish him off. The
next game, he won the race with a few well-placed mines. The game after
that was a drawn-out building-to-building streetfight.

In another game, three allies devised an intricate pillbox dance that
allowed them to capture pillboxes with no damage. I discovered that
carrying a pillbox into combat and dropping it at an appropriate time
(psst! shoot at your own pillbox to make it engage the enemy faster)
was an effective counterweight.

There are of course counter-strategies and counter-counter strategies to
everything. Play wide open games, preferably on the original map, and
see what you can come up with. Don't waste time arguing about unnecessary
rules that bolster preconceived notions about strategy.

If you must have a gauge of winningness, use number of deaths. Low number
wins. Though I can think of at least 10 circumstances where suicide is a
good tactic...

Stuart likes to think of Bolo as a thinking game like chess. How do you
know who's 'winning' at chess? You know the basic moves; you can usually
assume that having more pieces, especially a Queen, indicates some level
of success; but you can win in countless ways at any time.

Happy Boloing
--
| rich graves, stanfd res affairs mac tech, and occasional senior, poli sci |
| jabba@deathstar.stanford.edu     88C Escondido Village     (415) 497-1573 |