This game started out with a totally different name ... "The Attack of the Clones" ... springing from mostly_harmless \ Sullla's Adv 21 - Sky Gods where they swapped out Monty and put in Alex. My idea was to have all of the players using the same leaderhead. There would be some confusion but lots of humour involved. I mentioned this to Sullla and he pointed out that it would mean everyone had the same traits - I can live with that.
After thinking about it a bit more, I had second thoughts about the title ... as it implies a course of action. I wanted a very open game were the player could do what ever they liked. After looking at some of the other newly launched games, I also wanted to play a map that we hadn't seen before ... thus 'Arboria'. I looked at some of the other new BtS maps and they just looked too hard (one was almost all plains). The Arboria map was lots (and lots) of forests and grasslands with out many hills. I haven't played out my game but I was thinking of playing a sort of variant (tech all the way to the end of the tree and only after I have all the techs can I start building my spaceship. I pictured a fleet of late game workers powered by the serfdom civic converting all of the towns into workshops ('state property' naturally). A city full of workshoped grasslands would really rock.
Anyway, I decided to change the name away from 'Attack of the Clones' and thought of Twins but nothing really sparked on that. Then my old D&D days helped out again, and the title Doppleganger was born. Once I saw the German origin of that name, the civilization I had to use was easy and I selected Bismark as the ... errr ... mark.
Now, every good game has to have some form of twist. With the multiple pictures of Bismark in it, I had something that would be funny the first 2 or 3 times, but would quickly get boring. So I built into the game other dopplegangers and '2' items and decided to introduce a scoring method ... totally optional and player defined. It seemed like fun. To get the player going and to challenge the players, I put in easy ones and hard ones and really, really hard ones. I will be surprised if all of them are found and really surprised if one player finds them all.
The game starts on turn 2. You get 1 point if you claim it. There are also 8 players in the game. The default set up is 7 but 8 is much more 2 related. You get 3 points if you claim this one. Why 3? 8 = 2 x 2 x 2. There are 3 sets of 2 patterns that have been added to the ocean. You get 3 points if you claim this one. Total easy points that I would claim = 7.
8 Leaders means that they are 28 pairs. If you claim this, you get 28 points. I claim 35 points so far.
Excluding the obviously WB'd islands, there are 800 land tiles. 800 = 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 5 x 5 or 2^5 x 5^2. If you claim this one, you get 5+2+1 points (the last '+1' is because of the symmetry in 2^5 x 5^2). I claim 43 points so far.
Did you notice that the capital cities are all the same (sans rivers). They all have 2 deer, a run of three plains, 1 hill with coal and the balance grassland. They are all a copy of the players city that I didn't change in any way. 8 Capital cities that are all the same ... that is 28 pairs for another 28 points. I claim 71 points so far.
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Now for the really hard ones. The islands that I WB'd in are not just random shapes. The shapes actually have meaning. The one on the right is '2' in morse code. Sticking with the morse code theme, the one immediately below spells out TWO in morse code.
Ok, enough morse code ... what about Brail? The other shape (further below) spells out TWO in brail. |
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I claim 6 points for the funny island shapes for a total of 77.