08-09-2017, 06:00 PM
(08-09-2017, 05:15 PM)Angerak Wrote: If you ever decide you want to make it into an online board game (which is kind of what Cohorts is), I can give you some design tips on how to manage the hidden data. It's not trivial, but it's definitely doable.
In Galac-Tac, all you'd see on the board would be the equivalent of topography. Where everyone starts, where ships are, what you've discovered to date, and even where large combats are is only available to you personally. Effectively, every piece of data in the game is hidden.
One of the things my GTac Assistant program does is accumulate all that personal information over time and display it to you all together on the screen at once. I guess I could do something like that if every player had his own galaxy map that they updated themselves and kept hidden from all the other players. Actually, Galac-Tac (especially in its old paper version) can print what's called a "wall map" where you could assemble a dozen or more sheets of paper (the original cut-and-paste) and hang it on the wall for you to mark up or stick push-pins in, and a number of people did just that. Since there were seldom two people in the same household playing in the same galaxy it was usually pretty easy to keep secret from other players. But if people are sitting around a table playing, I just can't see that as being a reasonable option.