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BGonline.org Forums
Alternate 'Flat Dice' Proposal--no split boards SVP
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Alternate 'Flat Dice' Proposal--no split boards SVP (mamabear)
Date: Thursday, 16 February 2017, at 12:53 a.m.
mamabear wrote:
Is there any benefit to our opening the door on this possibility?
First let me say that in general I usually am opposed to changing well-established rules. I am not totally opposed, but I do believe that there is a major cost incurred when a well-established rule is changed. So I am predisposed to oppose this rule change as well, just for that general reason, irrespective of the merits of this specific rule.
That said, suppose we pretend that there was no well-established rule and we were approaching this question starting with a blank slate. I think that there is some merit to picking rules that most rank beginners with no experience find intuitive. It's always healthy for a game to keep the barrier to entry low. Having non-intuitive rules is a barrier. Of course, not everyone's intuition is the same, but often the vast majority of beginners have the same intuition about many of these issues.
For example, playing "legal moves" in the sense of requiring checker plays to match what the dice show is intuitive to almost every beginner.
I would say that allowing a dice roll to stand as long as the dice fall within the board and are flat is intuitive to almost every beginner. I have yet to encounter a total beginner who stops and asks me, "Does that roll count?" if the dice land flat on a checker or if the dice land on opposite halves of the board. On the contrary, learning this rule always seem to require some instruction from an experienced player.
This, in my mind, would be the main argument in favor of this rule. But as I said, I don't think this argument is strong enough to overcome the cost of changing an existing convention. The horse has left the barn.
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