Crumble Rules

I've been playing crumble for a couple of years now, and the rules are no longer changing. I think the game is done. Every once in awhile I consider ditching one or more rules that seem difficult to explain to new players; but I always decide that those rules make the game much better than it would otherwise be.

Take joins. They typically never happen in the early part of the game, and you can definitely get some good play without resorting to them. But having the option to do a join is a very powerful weapon that forces the opponent to take your pieces seriously, even your pieces are smaller than theirs. Without the threat of a join, a player could simply ignore the smaller pieces on the board, until the entire position became completely immobile.

Even relatively obscure elements of joins, such as the ability to join many pieces into one, seem essential. Not only do they allow sudden interaction with much larger pieces, but they also make it possible to create regions of the board that are completely distinct from other regions, like a world within a world.

Long splits are another feature that sometimes gets criticism, though it's used much more frequently than joins. But long splits are one of the major ways that multiple simultaneous attacks can be launched. This is something that is so difficult to set up in a game like chess. In crumble, multiple attacks are much more common, and they add an element of force to games of even relative beginners, that you'd almost never see in chess.

It's the same right down the line. People criticize captures on the same grounds - takes up time to explain how it works. But capturing is important because it forces players to maintain cohesion between their pieces. In general, the entire game position is always very significant in crumble. Without captures, you'd end up with little pockets of pieces everywhere, not really doing anything, but just hanging out, waiting. With the possibility of captures, most of the pieces on the board have to remain focused on protecting one another.

Other rules come under criticism for more legitimate reasons. Why is it necessary to be able to divide the pieces down into other, arbitrarily smaller pieces? Why not have a reasonable limit?

That's something I have to answer on more abstract terms. For one thing, imposing a limit would mean that at a certain level of recursion, the very strategy and nature of the game would completely change, in order to accommodate that limit. For another thing, that limit would put an inherent limit on the ultimate complexity of the game. And one of my goals when I first started thinking about designing a game, was to create something that didn't suffer from having a finite game tree. I wanted something whose complexity would grow to match the needs of its players. The game of checkers has already been solved, and chess is not far behind. Unless an entirely new approach to game analysis is discovered, that fate will never befall crumble.

It can be frustrating to introduce someone new to crumble, and see them shake their head sadly at the 'obvious' mistakes I've made in its design. But without exception, those people are looking at the game in terms of irrelevancies. They have no clue of the justifications behind each rule of crumble, they only think in terms of how well it could be packaged or marketed.

My idea is, first you get the good idea, then you get other good ideas that solve the packaging and marketing problems that may stand in its way. But you don't cripple your good idea just because it would be easier to fit it in a box.

For example, I've had consistent problems writing down the rules. I've written them down a number of different times in a number of different ways, but each attempt has been unsatisfactory. The problem is that the rules do require a lot of explanation. But another problem is that the more explanation I give, the more likely it is that a newcomer will miss something I've clearly explained.

So, this is an example of needing to have more good ideas in order to solve the problems surrounding the good ideas I've already had. There has to be a way to express these rules clearly and concisely, so that people find it easy to get started.

One reason I know there has to be a way is because once a player learns the rules and gets comfortable with them, oftentimes they'll remark that the rules are actually extremely simple, once you know them. In other words, they're clear, intuitive, and result in easy-to-follow moves by both players. I just need to find a way to express them, so that all the details are just obvious. Maybe there's a natural analogy somewhere, or a set of natural analogies, that would make a lot of the nuance of the rules seem obvious to all concerned.

That's what I'm thinking about lately. I'm trying to write the rules down again, in yet another way that will hopefully be easy to read. So far, though, the new text is still relatively long. I have to keep working on it.