Author’s Note: this essay is out of date, because, thanks to this very essay, the rules of this game have changed. I’m leaving this up for legacy purposes for now, and will rewrite it when I have the time. This also means the online implementation of Blooms at BoardSpace (described below) only allows you to play by the old rules. I’ve contacted the owner to update them.

“I get ‘please implement my game’ requests pretty frequently, and I always give these requests their due consideration. Most such requests end up on the slow-to-never track, but Blooms was an exception – it went straight to the top of my list.”

– Dave Dyer, owner of BoardSpace.

Before I tuck into the subject of this post, a very related plug: you can now play my game Blooms on the strategy game app BoardSpace.

To get started:

This new way to play Blooms comes at a good time because I recently discovered it has an issue. I’ve been analyzing how to address it and it will help to examine more games, which BoardSpace affords. The issue in question is what the rest of this post is about.

If your main interest is in trying a new (good) game, stop reading and go try Blooms on BoardSpace. If you want to learn about the problem I’m trying to solve (and maybe even help solve it), and game design generally, keep reading.

Blooms is a 2 player territory game related to Go, though it’s shorter and more colorful. You can read about Blooms here, and here’s an example game:

The issue: Blooms has rare (so far) cyclical positions in it. A cyclical position is a sequence of turns leading to a game state identical to the state at the beginning of the sequence. When a game’s rules incentivize all players to carry out their part of the sequence, they create a never-ending cycle of play, which is both infinite and boring (infinitely boring). So a game’s rules must ensure cycles end. Here’s an example of a cycle in Blooms:

In this example, the cycle starts on Grey-Black’s turn. Red-Yellow is leading 34-27. Grey-Black can only take the lead by adding stones as you see above. In doing so, she also threatens the red bloom on the bottom of the board. Red-Yellow must then capture the placed Grey-Black stones to recover the lead and protect her red bloom, at which point the cycle begins again.

So far, one cycle has occurred in about 300 known plays of Blooms. But it’s not clear how common cycles will be among more experienced players, especially if one or both players try to force a cycle. I need to see more people play more games.

To persuade you to try Blooms at BoardSpace (so I can examine your games), I’ll note the game has drawn as much interest as any I’ve designed, and people seem to really like it. For example, here’s a comment from BGG:

“Blooms makes me want to set fire to my collection and finally spend a lifetime mastering a game. If you remember a time when you rejected boardgames because you didn’t like Scrabble, Risk and Monopoly but then you found Catan, Azul or Gloomhaven; if you’ve been avoiding abstracts because you don’t like Chess or are intimidated by Go; if you want to be surprised by how much you’re going to like a family of games you’d previously written off, you owe it to yourself to give Blooms a shot.”

In addition, anyone who plays Blooms at least 5 times on BoardSpace in 2018 will get a free copy of the game in the event I publish a boxed version (via Kickstarter – see the bottom of this post for more about the Kickstarter). You’ll have to be a registered Boardspace user to qualify (so I can verify your plays).

For the purpose of my research, I prefer players play on a board with 5 spaces per side. Each play will take ~20 minutes.

Possible solutions to the cycle problem

I’ve considered a slew of ways to address cycles, and I’ve narrowed it down to five, but I haven’t settled on one. I’ll start by describing those five, then zoom out and consider whether there are more general design lessons to be drawn. Tally ho.

Option #1: Draw by threefold repetition – The game ends in a draw if a position repeats three times. The rule comes from Chess.

perk: it’s familiar from Chess

perk: you don’t have to recognize immediately you’re in a cycle so long as you do eventually.

drawback: draws create risk. Specifically, it’s critical for me to make Blooms a good tournament game. Once players know how to arrive at a draw, there are incentives in tournament environments to seek them out (to avoid defeat or to conserve energy for more strategically important games later in the tournament). This can cause the draw rate to rise too much.

drawback: draws by repetition feel anticlimactic to me, as draws go. They feel to me like a petering out, rather than an earned conclusion.

Option #2: if a player recreates a previous board position by placing a stone or stones, the first player to pass after that wins – This is similar to Go’s Superko rule, except if the game continues after a position repeats, it doesn’t constitute a violation of the rules. Rather the game keeps going until someone notices a position has repeated and passes.

perk: there’s no risk of ballooning draw rates in tournament environments, since there would be no draws.

perk: I doubt it’ll feel anticlimactic like draws by repetition feel to me.

perk: it doesn’t require players to immediately recognize they’re in a cycle so long as they eventually do.

perk: you’ll notice in the example loop gif above that Red-Yellow passes once on her turn. At the moment, it looks like most or even all loops will involve one player passing in the course of a cycle. In such cases, the rule will pick a natural and fitting winner.

perk: In practice, players would just avoid repeated positions as with Superko, so this rule would only get triggered following a blunder. But there’s a downside:

drawback: it will only get triggered when one player fails to notice she repeated a position, which means she might not believe she did! In cases where one player passes naturally in a cycle, it won’t cause a problem because the players can just keep playing for a couple of turns to prove the cycle. But if there are loops where no or both players would naturally pass, it could cause disputes.

Option #3: if a player recreates a previous board position by placing a stone or stones, the first player to pass in the game wins – This is similar to option #2 above, except if a player passes before a position is repeated, that player wins once it does. Here’s how it differs from option #2 above:

perk: by uncoupling the timing of the game-deciding pass and the start of a cycle, it eliminates the possibility of debate over whether a player passed before or after a cycle started (because one or both players doesn’t remember when it did).

perk: first-to-pass-in-the-game is already the tiebreaker for the game as a whole, so this rule feels coherent to me. The first player to have passed in the game can take an opponent stone as a reminder that she passed first, so there’s never any confusion.

drawback: can a player pass early in the game and then spend the rest of the game trying to force a cyclical position? If that’s a viable strategy, this *could* be bad. I’m not sure. There’s lot of uncertainty. Passing early in the game is very costly, so pursuing a cycle would have to be fairly easy to be worth pursuing. Could it be?

Option #4: Each player has a limited number of stones, captured stones are removed from the game, and a player must pass if she runs out of stones. End and score the game as normal.

Perk: it’s in keeping with the game’s spirit: it doesn’t change the way the game is scored or add a special case outcome rule (as all the other options do)

Perk: ensures the game will end in victory for one player.

Perk: it works even if the players don’t recognize they’re in a cycle, or if they’re not in a cycle but think they are.

Perk: it’s adjustable: the lower the stone limit, the more the outcome will hinge on captures rather than territory, and vice versa. It might allow me to tune the game.

Perk: most, or possibly all, cycles in Blooms involve one player placing and losing more stones than the other. In many of those cases, it will be clear the latter will win and the game can just end there.

Drawback: if I ever sell physical sets of the game, more stones will be required if captured stones are removed rather than returned to the player who owns them. That will add significant cost unless I can think of a workaround.

Drawback: if there are cycles where players are trading the leading score in the course of the cycle, the winner will be determined by what point in the cycle the players run out of stones. I suspect this will be rare if it happens at all (it seems much more likely that one player will capture more stones during a cycle than than the other so that the scores diverge), and even if it does happen I think it’s much more likely to happen at the end of a game when it’s no trouble, but I can’t rule it out entirely.

Option #5: You win if you capture a pre-specified number of stones during the game.

Perk: ensures the game will terminate in a victory for one player or the other.

Perk: it’s somewhat in keeping with the spirit of the game, which is partly about capturing your opponent’s stones.

Perk: it works even if the players don’t recognize they’re in a cycle, or if they’re not in a cycle but think they are.

Perk: it could be used as a tool to adjust how aggressively the players are incentivized to capture vs. secure territory. The capturing is probably my favorite thing about the game, and it’s possible using this rule to bring it out more could be a great thing.

Perk: most, or possibly all, cycles in Blooms involve one player placing and losing more stones to capture than the other. In many of those cases, it will be clear the latter will win and the game can just end there.

Drawback: requires players to keep track of captures on a sheet of paper or score track. If cycles are rare and the capture limit high, players will do this tracking every game just in case a rare situation occurs, which is super icky. The only way this rule works is by making the capture limit low enough that it’s triggered fairly frequently. Does that make for an interesting game? I think it could, but I’m not sure. I like the fact that it would incentivize capture-heavy games. I’ve used the mechanic in another game of mine, Carnivores, and it’s pretty fabulous there.

Drawback: both players are incentivized to try to create cycles in which they capture more stones than the opponent. If that’s easy to do, the game could become cycle-centric.

Drawback: if there are cycles where players are trading the lead in captured stones in the course of the cycle, the winner will be determined by what point in the cycle the win condition is triggered. I suspect this will be rare if it happens at all (it seems much more likely that one player will capture more stones during a cycle than than the other so that the scores diverge), and even if it does happen I think it’s much more likely to happen at the end of a game when it’s no trouble, but I can’t rule it out entirely.

Drawback: the number of stones to be captured must be scaled to board size. That must be determined empirically.

Which solution should I pick?

The short answer: I don’t know and I would love to read opinions in the comments.

A longer answer: the effects every one of the above solutions will have on the game depends sensitively on how easy it is for one or both players to create situations leading to cycles. If cycles are rare and hard to force (as it seems so far), my current favorite is option #3. If cycles are common and easy to force, my current favorites are #2 or #4. My fingers are crossed for #3.

So: I need to see more people play more games of Blooms, and I need to see more people try to force cycles. That’s why I’m so happy it can be played on BoardSpace now. Go play Blooms at BoardSpace and force some cycles goddamnit. I’d love it if players tried exploiting rule #3 by passing and then trying to force a cycle.

Also, if you think any of my analysis is wrong, say so in the comments. I don’t want to be stupid longer than necessary.

Lessons Learned

A general lesson: there are lots of ways to skin every cat, even when at first you see none. I, anyway, am a better designer and I understand my games better by chasing options and “staying in the question” for an uncomfortably long time. In fact, staying in the question is, for my money, one of the most powerful mindsets for problem solving of any kind.

I’ve also learned more specific lessons about how to deal with cycles. When faced with a cycle in a game, I recommend asking four questions:

Why do cycles happen? The more fundamental your answer, the better equipped you are to address the issue. It gives you a chance to eliminate cycles not by adding rules to address them, but by changing or removing rules so there are no cycles in the first place. This could change the game for the worse or for the better, but if for the better, it’s the best solution. Try pursuing this question through The 5 Whys, which is a great technique for getting at the fundamentals of any problem.

Are cyclical positions completely cyclical? Hint: the answer is always no. At the very least, the number of turns each player has taken keeps rising. Often there are other non-cyclical dimensions of cyclical play. For example, in Blooms, the number of both placed and captured stones only rises during cycles. If you can identify non-cyclical aspects of cycles, you might be able to use them to create natural game-end conditions.

How rare are cycles are likely to be at all skill levels? This can be hard to do because it’s hard to anticipate the details of high-level play, but it’s a worthy exercise because the rarity of cycles makes a major difference to the best way to deal with them. For example, if cycles are rare, declaring them a draw is much more likely to be a good solution than if cycles are common.

How easy it is for players to see a cycle? If cycles are hard to see (which can happen if long, complicated cycles are possible), you should look for a solution that doesn’t require players to recognize they’re happening immediately.

Another way to play Blooms

Besides BoardSpace, you can also play Blooms against a weak AI, or against yourself, using Stephen Tavener’s AiAi system. To run it, you’ll need Java and you may need to change your security preferences. You’ll get some zipped files when you download AiAi. The file to run is “ai ai.jar”. Once opened, load Blooms by going to: File –> Choose Game, then select Blooms.mgl. You can change the AI settings from the AI menu. By default the AI is set to think for 1 second, which leads it to play randomly. Raise it to at least 30 seconds to make it a bit interesting.

Kickstarter?

There’s a chance I’ll make a boxed version of Blooms through Kickstarter. Sign up here to be alerted if it happens. The more people sign up, the more likely I am to do it. I have an idea about how to make an unusually beautiful physical set.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Dave Dyer for putting Blooms on the wonderful Boardspace app

Thanks to Russ Williams for his discovery of a cycle in Blooms

Thanks to Russ Williams, Luis Bolaños Mures, BGG user The Player of Games, Dave Dyer, BGG user Malcom S, Cody Kunka, and Joel Fox for hashing out the rule ideas in the BGG thread that inspired this post.