Talk:Capstone

Number of players

When I initially wrote the rules, I wanted to accomodate as many as four players. After doing some more two-player playtesting, I have my doubts as to whether or not this would scale to 4 players. It may scale to 3 players in a reasonable fashion, but I've never tried it. Thus, I've revised the rules to state that this is only a two-player game, though you could certainly try the game with three players without any rule changes. -- Jeremiah 20:18, 30 Oct 2005 (GMT)

Scaling, number of stashes

The most recent playtesting session spawned a discussion of whether or not you could play a variant of this game with 5 stashes. I think it would probably work OK. Each stack would still be limited to 4 pieces in height, and there would still only be 5 stacks. The change is that you would never be able to play all the pieces, and there would be 5 capstones to contend with instead of 4. -- Jeremiah 20:18, 30 Oct 2005 (GMT)

Rule change: capstones not allowed to be moved back to Stash pad

The original rules for this game allowed the capstones to be moved back to the Stash pad, but this has been changed in the current rules. It was rarely useful to move a capstone back to the stash pad anyways, and forcing them to remain in play makes the game a bit more tense and avoids do/undo cycles. -- Jeremiah 20:18, 30 Oct 2005 (GMT)

What to do if a player draws more than 2 pyramids of the same color at the beginning of the game

Under the current rules, if a player draws 3 or even 4 pyramids of the same color at the beginning of the game, they're stuck with them. There is no provision for a re-draw. I'm not sure if things should stay this way or not. I've played one game where I had 3 blues, and I still did OK. Having more than one pyramid of any given color lowers the total potential number of points you can obtain, but makes obtaining points slightly easier in some cases. It doesn't seem to be a large problem with 2 pieces of the same color, though I could see it becoming potentially problematic if there were 3 or 4 of the same color in your goal stack. Probably I need to do some playtesting where the goal stacks are pre-chosen to have 3 or 4 of the same color and see how it affects play. The rule change I'm considering is that if a player draws more than 2 of any color, they can opt to re-draw. -- Jeremiah 20:24, 30 Oct 2005 (GMT)

If someone were to draw four same-colored pyramids (against the odds), it would make for a very weird game. It would be easy for that player to score points (they would get 1 point for each pyramid of that color that was in a full stack at the end of the game), but very hard to get the full stack bonus. I gave this a quick playtest, and I don't like the results. So, I am changing the rule such that a player who draws more than 2 of the same color must re-draw. -- Jeremiah 02:24, 5 Nov 2005 (GMT)

Redesign Capstone for Treehouse stashes

I think I can probably adapt Capstone to play with Treehouse sets. Certainly it would work with 4 Treehouse stashes, but i'm wondering if it couldn't be made to work with only 3 Treehouse sets. With 3 sets, you have one set of capstones and 10 pieces for goal stacks (of 4 each). 4-tall stacks with 15 of each size means you would have only 3 stacks of each color, six total. In this case, we would probably want 3 or fewer capstones.

What about using the three opaque smalls as the capstones, and leave the other opaque pieces out of the game? This leaves 12 each of medium and large, and now the math works out (3 stacks of each size, 4 in each stack, no leftovers (of course, the capstones will get in the way possibly, just like the current game). I'll have to give this a playtest and write up another set of game rules assuming it goes OK.

What should this variant be called? Treecap? Threestone?

-- Jeremiah 06:19, 12 Feb 2006 (GMT)

I've posted the first draft of the rules to ThreeStone, an adaptation of Capstone for 3 Treehouse sets. -- Jeremiah 16:11, 21 Oct 2006 (GMT)