Perky Goth Mechanics

Invisible City Productions, a collective of game designers, writers, and artists who occasionally release free games, has just released Perky Goth, a downloadable card game.

The theme and artwork is sure to please some, such as the Munchkin/Chez Geek loving crowd. Only one mechanic in the game interests me, and that is the scoring. Your final score is the average of your two point counts minus the difference between your two point counts. Very curious.

Like Tigris and Euphrates, this means that you have to progress in both counts at the same time. However, you cannot just simply grow exponentially in one count while making short gains in the other. You truly need a balanced score. A final count of 3 and 2 will beat a final count of 66 and 22.

Doing the math, you can see that given:

a >= b
(a+b)/2 - (a-b)

your score is:

a/2 + b/2 - a + b

which simplifies to:

-a/2 +3b/2

So you don't score any points at all if your higher score is 3 times as large as your lower score. Every one point less difference gives you a half a point for your score.

I kind of like it, and in any case, kudos for coming up with it, assuming that it is original.

Yehuda

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