ideas for stone-age mini-games

Norman Barrows · 2016-09-29T14:00:15

the game: Caveman 3.0 - a Paleo-world simulation. one of the last gameplay features on the todo list is mini-games you can play. so far all i have is some references to games played in the Americas before Columbus: 1. a dodge ball type game supposedly played by the Aztecs(?) 2. throw javelin at hurled stone 3. throw stick like a javelin at a hoop target on the ground - sort of like lawn darts. i made up a rock toss game: knock a small stone off a larger stone with a large pebble from about 20 feet away. sort of like horse shoes or thowing baseballs at milk bottles (just one very heavy milk bottle with a very small baseball). i thikn it was 1 point if you hit it, and two if you knocked it off, each player takes three throws, like horseshoes. this was a while ago, i tried it in real life with my neighbor. worked out pretty well. sort of like playing darts. Caveman's game engine already uses realistic physics for missiles - including throwing rocks. so it wouldn't be too hard to add a target that a projectile could collide with. the game has NPCs with specialties, such as trader, storyteller, warrior, etc. one of the specialties is gambler, which lets you play a spin the wheel type of gambling mini-game. but i'd really like to have some sort of simple gambling game that you could play with any NPC at any time. but nothing come to mind offhand. pitching pennies? there's no curbs or pennies in the stone age! <g>. please excuse any typos, brain is warp 10 and fingers are sub-light speed only! <g>.

Game Design and Theory Game Design

Started by Norman Barrows September 25, 2016 06:16 PM

20 comments, last by valrus 7 years, 6 months ago

wodinoneeye

1,691

September 29, 2016 09:20 AM

'knuckle bones' ... you literally played with the knuckle bones of some food animal (?) so likely for agricultural age people

Interesting thing was they were NOT symetrical and when rolled fell with an irregular statistical pattern on the different facings (which had names of their shape rather than numbers).

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my mention of 'pre-tecnological' - that early hominids may have thrown rocks earlier than anything else. I recall a case of paleoarcheologists finding an fairly early hominid site in africa where there had been a large colony of baboons, and several tons of rocks of a convenient size (to throw) were deposited there where the hominids had been systematically trying to kill the baboons for food. I believe this was PRE stone age hominids...

rocks/slings/throwing spears/arrows/atl-atl all take more than a little practice to be effective at range

and probably stick fighting/clubbing as well -- even after the range weapons used above - (the monty python joke...) the target often

"wasn't quite dead" .

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I recall from a history book long ago, that for many Native Americans (and likely in many other diverse cultures) GAMBLING had a religious connotation ('luck' having some metaphysical connection).

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valrus

2,242

September 29, 2016 02:00 PM

I recall from a history book long ago, that for many Native Americans (and likely in many other diverse cultures) GAMBLING had a religious connotation ('luck' having some metaphysical connection).

Yeah, I think quite a lot of gambling culture around the world originated in religion/magic.

One historian of gambling said it's a probably a natural progression. You start out asking the opinion of the spirits about future good fortune and ill, about what you should decide, etc., and doing something (like casting shells on the ground) for your answer. Among those are questions of good fortune like "Who gets the best cut of meat from our successful hunt?", "Who gets the nice spear from that enemy we killed?" It's a gradual progression from "Who gets the nice stuff? Let the gods decide!" to "Let's bring our nice stuff and throw shells at the ground to decide who takes it home!"

(Also note that this fulfills a trade function in a world before currency or barter. Hunter-gatherer societies don't tend to have either, at least as their basic system of goods distribution, until they're in contact with another society that does.)

ideas for stone-age mini-games

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