The Problem: Playing head to head on the same board limits the effectiveness of hidden units, flexibilities in deployment strategy, and certain units such as tank destroyers.
The Traditional Solution: Double-blind play with a referee
The Traditional Solution's Problem: It's hard to get three people on the same playing schedule AND it's not a lot of fun for the referee.
The VASSAL Solution: "Triple Blind" play
Fancy Graphic:
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Explanation: With 3 participants, the same scenario is played simultaneously amongst every player. In this way each player plays both sides AND serves as judge for the other two. Since everyone is both player and judge, there is a stronger than usual incentive to see the scenarios through to the end. (I apologize to everyone I've ever flaked out on during VASSAL games!)
Provided 3 like-minded players can be found, I think this would be brilliant fun.
Thoughts?
Interesting idea. It does address the problem of true double-blind play rather directly.
I would but I will have to install the Vassal modules on my new computer.
I'm interested if we can make timing work.
It would be best to start with a scenario with few counters to iron out the game flow.
How would one handle unit revelation?
This seems the most natural to me:
- assume a German unit is in a town hex, unspotted
- assume an American unit is approaching across open ground from 5 hexes away
- It's the American player's turn and he activates the unit and records a logfile of the unit moving up to and entering the town hex (which appears empty)
- The American player submits his log to the judge
- The judge steps through the log and ... repeatedly asks the German player via email if he wants to OpFire?
- If OpFires, or if the American unit closes into spotting distance, the German unit is revealed and the rest of the American's logfile is now ignored. The activation segment is sent back to the American player to decide what to do with the remaining of his move points, and any subsequent move/fire from that activation.
I can imagine it getting bogged down during moments when units are first spotted, but that seems a fair price to pay for REAL hidden units?
Can anyone with VASSAL experience think about how this would work in practice and share your thoughts?
EDIT - all of the above is written assuming that play is asynchronous and logfiles exchanged via email. If all 3 people are online at the same time then it would be easy to manage the step-by-step decision-making.
A couple things:
Why would you not be doing this in realtime? Vassal can do 2 shared plays at once.
Why email? there are a lot of chat apps which do IM and voice.
Mentally I always default to using VASSAL for asynchronous play because I've been in Asia for the last 12 years and syncing up playtimes is quite difficult.
The way that we have done hidden units on Vassal is for the player with those units to mark their hex locations in an encrypted doc file, then send it to the opponent, and then provide the code once units have been exposed to validate the location. It' s not as elaborate, but has worked ok for hth play.
I agree with the encrypted doc file, and VASSAL modules can be set up to have encrypted data in them (I'm not sure if the PG ones have that).
For something like this, I'd prefer live play, with possibly just 1 game going on, and over 3 sessions, each person plays to games and umpires 1.
Why not just make use of VASSAL's "hidden" function for units? Seems a lot less trouble than encrypting doc files.