I was trying to say that you didn’t seem to mind it as much as me, but I could have expressed it far better.

A PBW moderator would certainly be a nice experiment. I’m sure it wouldn’t be a difficult coding project either – it’s not as if there would be much of a GUI required after all. Sounds like a job for the lazyweb href=”http://www.hoosgot.com/” rel=”nofollow”>lazyweb href=”http://www.hoosgot.com/” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.hoosgot.com/.

“There is also the issue that the game is absolutely unforgiving of mistakes—if a player accidentally indicates that he has only one spy rather than two, it will completely destroy the work of others. Since there is such a large investment of effort in the game you really do need to stress the importance of answering correctly. This is a problem with all deduction games but the reason it feels so bad here is that Black Vienna is so challenging to play. If someone makes a mistake in Clue, it’s not that big a deal but if the same thing happens in Black Vienna, you feel that you’ve wasted 45 minutes of intense effort.”

What I didn’t state in the article, is that I very rarely play Black Vienna anymore precisely because of this issue. It’s absolutely fantastic when it’s played without errors but this happens only about half the time.

I think a computer-moderated version would be ideal. Playing over a long period? I think this would IMPROVE the game. Removing the pressure to play quickly allows you to devote as much effort as you like to long chains of logic. I’d love to play a game that had a turn-a-day rate of play.

http://cheyne.net/blog/2006/08/july-and-august-catch-up/