What I wanted is a simple game to add a mild amount of content to users of a forum.

I decided on a daily turn to encourage people to pay attention but also to allow the choice for the previous turn to simply be used again so there isnt that great a focus on performing a login every day which can quickly become a boring chore.

To this end I have used RockPaperScissors as the base but pushing it towards 5 states rather than 3. The strategy for RockPaperScissors is to try to take advantage of a non random opponent, a random opponent has no weakness but also is unlikely to win, they will draw against other random opponents but they will also never exploit and beat a non random one. People are very bad at being random, add in the apathy of having to make a turn every day and they will become even less random.

So like most online turn based game logging in is rewarded but failing to log in every day should not be overly punished.

I want to try to avoid opportunities for griefing whilst still allowing interaction between each player. To that end the basic game is performed such that everyones choices influences everyone elses in a nice simple feedback loop.

The game is played like so.

Every one starts at turn 0 with a population of 100(thousand), they can split this population however they like, by default it is split 20:20:20:20:20 in all 5 directions in a spread bet (this is actually the same as playing RPS completely randomly).

These bets are all added up and form the environment, the environment is broken down into simple fractions of the total amount bet. These fractions are compared to each other and a payback for each bet is calculated. If the majority of people bet on stone then the payback for paper will be the highest and so on, its slightly more complicated than this, negative payback is allowed for instance and a small amount of growth is built into the math.

This growth means that in an environment where everyone bets 20:20:20:20:20 then anyone betting 100:0:0:0:0 on any will perform slightly better. So putting all youe eggs in one basket is encouraged. I intend to further encourage this activity by allowing a 100% bet to trigger a special effect relative to that bet. eg a 100% bet on guns will allow an attack of some kind on another player.

What you win from betting well is growth in population, which allows you to bet more next turn and therefore grow more and so on. So the game progresses with everyone growing in size, some more than others.

After a set amount of turns, or upon one play reaching a set size, the game is declared over and a new one is started.

That's it, simple as possible but hopefully with some encouragement for interaction (more so when I implement special effects that I have planed) and an obvious winner and leader board that can be displayed in the forum.

I maintain a baseline user who always bets an ever spread so anyone signing up in the middle of the game can just be assigned this population and continue on with everyone else from that point on. This is also true for any forum user who doesn't play, they simply bet the even spread every turn.