Ars Poetica

This one is cheating a bit as I've already worked on this one a bit including several playtests, but in the spirit of sparking creative productivity I'll say a few words about it here.


P.D. Magnus is a good friend of mine, and I'm a huge fan of his creation, The Decktet.  The Decktet is a game system, so P.D. and many others have designed games for it.  It's a deck with a novel mathematical structure, whereby each card has two suits instead of one, so the games you can create for it are also rather novel.  But the cards also have really neat, quirky and evocative illustrations, and I've never seen a game utilize these as part of the gameplay.  Thus I conceived a word game, in which you lay out a set of cards and must compose a line of poetry using those illustrations.  The rule is that each card must provide exactly one word for the poem.  The game gives you freebies -- pronouns, articles, prepositions, etc. but the main words come from the illustrations and your imagination.  There are similarities with Dixit, but Dixit is an association/mind-reading game of the Apples to Apples variety.  This game is a language game; it's about getting words and putting them together in semantically meaningful combinations, but since it's poetry there's plenty of scope for creativity.


I struggled with a scoring system, but happily P.D. tested the game and came up with a system that works very well.  In a 4p game, each player composes three lines, using 6 cards each.  Thus there are four total sets of 6 cards.  Everyone is given 4 cubes and must distribute them to the other players, however they wish, for "best overall poem".  Then each player receives 2 cubes and must distribute them to the other players for 'best line', for the 6 cards that the player did not himself use.  Finally, each player gets 6 cubes and distributes them for 'best word' for each card in that line.


So this encourages you to write a poem that makes sense overall (not at all easy), but also to try to come up with clever and creative uses of the illustrations.  An illustration that includes a sword can be used woodenly as "sword", but thinking more creatively can lead you to "sharp" or "pierce" or even "divide" or "draw".  It's up to your creativity and the needs of your poem.


The Decktet version of the game is currently entitled "Unlock Yourself", in honor of the best line of poetry we've heard the game produce so far:  "Gentlemen stab through clutter -- unlock yourself!"


But I think the game could be played with non-Decktet illustrations as well; for example you could probably play with Dixit cards.  To explore this I'm hoping to also add in something that's not easy to include in the Decktet:  additional 'goals' for the players, in the form of poetic devices.  I think there would be 6-10 cards, and you reveal one or two each game, and it awards points for each use of that device.  Things like rhyme, alliteration, repetition, onomatopoeia, etc.  Not sure if this is a variant or a core ruleset, but I think this would be the main difference between "Unlock Yourself" and the more pretentiously-entitled "Ars Poetica".  I think these can live as separate games and that the latter could be a standalone game with its own illustrations, if a publisher wanted to do that.  I do think the scoring system is probably a little involved for a family game, but it really is essential for getting all aspects of the composition process to shine through so I don't think it can easily be simplified.


I guess this shares with Ultimatum my interest lately in trying to come up with elements that haven't been used in games previously.  There are word-assembly games but I've not seen a game in which you have to assemble words into a composition like this, and I like the way this shows through in the poems that players compose.  It's not just about their creativity, but also about their approach to language and how they think about language.  It's very different from strategy games but players have responded well to it so far so I hope that the broader gaming world might as well.