Talk:Branches & Twigs & Thorns

Cerulean's Ideas for a 3-Player Variant

The board is 7x7, totalling 49 squares. The first player plays one root, the second player plays both nulls, and the third player plays the remaining root. This leaves 49-4=45 squares, which is exactly three stashes, one per player. - Cerulean 12:46, 9 Jan 2006 (GMT)

I promoted this impeccable suggestion to the BTT page proper.

Treehouse variant

I've come up with the basic outline for a variant of this, that uses 3 treehouse stashes. However, I am unsure how to go about contributing it. Any advice on how to contribute it would be welcomed. --Lardarse 22:46, 18 July 2007 (EDT)

I would list it as a variant on the BTT page itself, rather than post it as a separate page. For example, see how the variants are displayed for Volcano. If you're clueless at wiki formatting, don't worry about it. Just type the text of your variant somewhere and let us experts take care of the rest. (If nothing else, add it to your user page.) - Cerulean 08:59, 21 March 2008 (EDT)

Small problem: I've forgotten the details :-( I don't document my thoughts very well, sadly, so it could well be lost into the mists of time (and my brain)... --Lardarse 02:43, 22 March 2008 (EDT)

Scorekeeping

I like this game a lot, but the pencil-and-paper scorekeeping during play seems fiddly and distracting to me. The worked-out example in the current rules demonstrates that scoring can simply be done post-mortem once the game is complete. Alternatively, for keeping score during play, it's possible to use another set or two of pyramids as scoring tokens. --Carthoris 17:37, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

Scorekeeping (2)

I'd like to mention that there is a problem with the scorekeeping method for more than 2 players. I wrote an article about it on the Looney Labs Forum (see here, especially my comment here).

Most notably, there is an infinite number of rules, but all of them give the same result (same winner) for a 2-player game. In that sense, they are all equally "fair". However, in multiplayer games with more than 2 players, these rules give different results. I found that among these rules, there is only one rule that is fair! Fairness is based on the value of pieces branching off of opponent's pieces and the value of the pieces they branch off of (just like in the 2-player game), see Fairness in BTT for the justification and formal definition of fairness I used.

The rule I proposed I called rule (1/2) or (1/2)' (see article) and it translates as follows:

Fair Rule (1/2)': If a piece of a pips of player A branches off of a piece of b pips of player B, then player A pays a penalty of a + b tokens to player B.

A consequence of this rule is that the loser has a negative score in the end and the winner has the highest positive score (ties are possible but less prevalent than with the original rule.) -- Cuc (talk) 21:08, 14 April 2017 (PDT) -- Updated Cuc (talk) 18:58, 3 July 2018 (PDT)

Root and Null Markers

In pursuit of a more purely pyramidal game, I made my root marker out of an erect large pyramid from the set that I was using for scoring (vide supra), and my null was the color die from Ice Dice.--Carthoris 17:37, 26 December 2011 (UTC)