@Ted S posted:Here's a photo of the board game set I created back in 2021 as a proof-of-concept. The object and game play are very similar to what you described in your first post, including passengers that get impatient and leave the station if they are not picked up soon enough!
I won't claim that my game or the concept is especially prototypical. I've operated on many layouts that used a car card system, etc., to simulate prototypical operation. That's much better than loop running, but it can be pretty dry for non-train buffs, and operating sessions often seem to repeat from one month to the next. During the pandemic I played a lot of Terraforming Mars and other Euro-style games featuring multiple ways to accumulate "victory points." The best games never seemed to play the same way twice. So I was trying to come up with an operating scheme that promoted a lot of variety and interaction between operators.
Also... Some of what you're describing in your first post--using LCS to create a kind of automaton--has a different application: what I think of as a "mechanical fish bowl." A medical specialist in Dallas whose office I visited has a giant fish tank in the waiting area. Patients love to watch the fish. You can't even see all the way through the tank, you have to walk around to see different views from each side. I've designed a layout that works like this. It's designed to showcase different trains passing through four or more scenes from varying directions, to promote extended viewing. Using LCS to dispatch the trains--with provisions for randomness (which the system presently lacks IIRC)--would create a kind of "mechanical fish tank." The train layout might even cost less per month to maintain than his 1000-gallon fish tank! It could find a home in doctors' offices, children's hospitals, etc. IMO, it would also be a better example of what's possible in our hobby than so much of the round-and-round running that you see on holiday displays; I believe it would have more "sticky-ness" for extended viewing. My $.02.
First of all, your prototype board game train game is actually really cool. Very nice work. That's definitely a big element of the game mechanism I had in mind. We definitely need to go into detail on what made your game tick. We can certainly take that to a side chat.
I didn't even know that the concept of many paths to victory was called a Euro-game, knew I liked them, didn't know the name.
Also, you're in luck on the mechanical fishbowl idea. That client I mentioned wants me to leverage LCS to do just that and give his 1500 sq ft dedicated train room a way to run hands off with lots of switching and trains moving in every direction so he can focus on showing the layout to his guests rather than focus on not crashing trains while his guests are watching. He wants at least 6 trains running at once while showing the room off. So I will be doing work on that code no matter what, and you're free to join in on the fun of testing all that and or grab a copy of that code/ hardware.
The first road block I reached when doing this development work was realizing that the sensor track location data doesn't actually get transmitted out of the SER2 modules, this means for this game and that fishbowl project to happen I first need to develop a new LCS Device from absolute scratch. Since that track data is only visible within the PDI cable itself. I got to that point of development in the thick of covid times and was just kept on getting terrible serial converter chips from overseas. Probably in relation to the chip shortage.
So that's where my development currently sits. As soon as I am decoding Sensor Track data from my own module, programming, the bare basics of a game will be easy. The second challenge will be programming the director of that game that runs internally to generate events and track overall progress. Adding more than one player might have to wait until I work out the first player. One of the early concepts I want to test are enforcing rules like top speed by sending reduced speed commands to counter cab2 inputs that go past the game's set limit according to the progression system.
