Who made Last Bot Standing?
Last Bot' Standing was my favorite submission, I voted 3 times for it. I would like to congratulate whoever made this submission and would love to see it fully developed and rules posted. I wouldn't mind helping make it into a real game, as I would like to see it completed. Also, a better rules explanation (such as how movement worked, and how parts were attached) would be awesome. Congrats to you!

I voted twice for Over There because I thought the theme was interesting and it best displayed the permanence aspect in my opinion. Congrats to you!

My last vote went to Nations of the World, mainly because I like Diplomacy/Civ-Building games and it looked really interesting (exceptional art too!) Congrats to you too!

Wheel of History I didn't really understand. I liked the theme, and I would have voted for it, but I just didn't understand how it fit together. Your pictures were good too, but sadly, I had voted before the error was fixed.

Gods and Heroes seemed neat, but didn't grab my attention. I liked the idea of making the board with hexes and triangles in the beginning, but I didn't understand how heroes worked.

Congratulations to everybody!

Shootout in El Tiroteo was my submission, and I am sure everyone thought it was terrible. Please let me know why in this Critique thread I have posted: http://www.bgdf.com/node/5316

By the way, El Tiroteo means "The Shootout" in case anyone was wondering

Over There

I'm not a huge fan of world war games but I liked the card tearing and how it was used as a sort of health point track. Having tech remain throughout gameplay was nice as well but somewhat of a moot point, I felt, compared to the primary components change. Speaking of which, I wish that more had been said about unit upgrades which I thought should have gotten more attention.

Gods and Heroes

This entry and Wheel of History were my top picks.
I wasn't sure about the creation. Were the triangles to be colored in or would there be pieces? I'm assuming that the board would be colored due to the permanence requirement of the challenge.
I love stats so introducing heroes with stats definitely helped soften me up.
I know that it's not complete and more of a rough rough draft but I would have liked to have seen more detail on the loyalty aspect/stat of the heroes and cities. How much loyalty could one accrue? Would loyalty to one player prove to be greater after so many games and cover loyalty to any other initials covering the card?

Wheel of History
You know you didn't include where to get my starter deck, right? ;P
After seeing the images, I kinda wondered why you didn't leave the number next to settlements blank or have them covered up by stickers. Then I figured it out. To sell more cards!
I liked the concept behind this one and really like civ games and the Wheel of Time series. So to see this in game form was pretty cool. The fact that it didn't go the route that I feel most of us went was a definite plus. Although, the marking of the province cards is basically the same thing.

Shootout in El Tiroteo
This one used permanence in, I felt, a unique manner but it seemed to be more of a side item than something that made a difference in the way the game would be played.

Nations of the World

Was this a late entry? I didn't notice this at first.
Politics aren't my thing and that goes for round-the-table-meta-gaming politics. That said, I felt this did about as good a job as the rest of the entries.

Last 'Bot Standing

This was mine and, frankly, I was surprised I got any votes since I realized AFTER submitting that I had left out the most important section. *facepalm* I had been so set on trimming the entry down to 800 words that I forgot to do it. Ah well, c'est la vie. I wish that I could have been more creative with my application of permanence. As it was, all I had was the arena(board) modding and the bots themselves with the assimilating. (That's the part I left out.) Hopefully next challenge will be something that I'm better at visualizing, like juggling flaming tigers on a tight rope with one hand.

Overview

I was a lil' disappointed that most of the entries seemed to have followed in Risk Legacy's footsteps, mine included, and done more with the "map" portion of the board changing than anything else. Over There's tech additions and Shootout in El Tiroteo's wanted posters were the most innovative, in my opinion.

Responses

Yeah, I should have mentioned more about how the bots can make and break the environment. Unfortunately, all I did was include mention of it in the ability to build walls. That was s'posed t'be expanded. Maybe I'll go ahead and keep working on this one to see what I can do with it. Not sure that permanence will play a major role, however, besides the boards and the 'Bots Learning Integration Programming (BLIP).

As far as the repairing not being permanent. I don't agree. Just as a medic can stitch a soldier back up to full health between wars, a bot can be remade between matches. Only a helluva lot easier. What changes with both the man and the machine, however, is the experience taken away. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, in all my brilliance I forgot to include that one. Also the reason that I'm surprised to have come in as a runner up.

That said, I was glad to get a chance to participate in this challenge. It was a learning experience for me. I know next time to concentrate much more on how the game actually includes the required mechanics/themes/etc.

Looking forward to the next one!

Part II: where I talk about me, me, me

Again, thank you all for the comments on the game, and of course, the votes. I'm glad that Loneliest Banana (and others, presumably) picked up on main thrust of the design, which is that WWI was just completely devastating to the nations involved. I had hoped to capture that central idea with most of the permanence mechanics I used:

• The board itself getting messed up. I think ultimately it's OK if the armistice line doesn't go away cleanly each time, if players start getting a little frustrated about redrawing it and it gets harder to tell exactly where it is. That is highly thematic, of course, although in real-world gameplay terms it might just be annoying. Obviously if I took this concept further this would require a materials test, and possibly some other way to mark armistice (removeable or coverable stickers come to mind, of course, but I really liked the idea of hand-drawing the line).

• Ripping the corners on troops. This came under fire (har har) a bit as unnecessary to track damage (wouldn't counters or cards do?), but I think that overlooks two things. First, that all unit cards are placed face down, but if they have ripped corners a savvy enemy can hope to guess which ones are which from their backs. Second, that the act of ripping these cards was a destructive one, and left you with a permanently and visibly weakened force. By game 20 I'm imagining two pretty much exhausted armies with one or two corners left on most of their cards, just slugging away at each other with appalling casualties (since any one-corner soldier is killed for the battle rather than further wounded, and similarly hurt leaders are destroyed outright). Ideally the cards would also get scuffed and dirtied up as a consequence of playing on a constantly-markered board, making fresh troops stick out like sore thumbs amidst their grizzled veteran buddies.

• The permanent killing of leaders. You'd want to use your best leaders and their powerful abilities, but not put them in too much jeopardy, because unlike regular soldiers once they are knocked out, they're gone for the rest of the war. On the other hand, since dead leaders (and soldiers) earn glory, a quasi-suicide charge might be worth it, at least in the short term (ie this battle). Again, this was designed to be thematic -- to encourage the players to think like the historical glory-hound generals who would throw their men into meat grinders to take hills and plant flags so they could "win" a battle which changed almost nothing on a strategic level. The hope was also that by the end of the war, if you hadn't killed them all off, you could tailor your choice of leaders to your secret objective based on their special powers.

• The other end-game options, which were basically a grab-bag of goodies but included a number of very destructive choices. Razing a city is, of course, a devastating permanent effect, and knocking out an enemy control point will make it easier for you to win future games, since you'll be denying them an easy source of glory. It's designed to be a hard choice as to which one to take, as much informed by what your opponent will want to do -- you can prevent him from doing it if you do it instead. I did include a few choices out there that would be satisfying second prizes, though, like the tech research and the unit upgrades, because I didn't want one battle to decide the war (WWI wasn't that kind of war).

Things I cut for wordcount and complexity:

• A discussion of the various soldier and leader upgrades, which at least two commenters noted. Basically they would boil down to +1 buffs on the various statistics -- an extra combat die for upgraded weapons, extra range for a sniper team, etc.

• Tech discussion. I mentioned some tantalizing tech titles (poison gas), but only actually described one (propaganda). Again, there just wasn't space so I hoped to give people a sense that techs would range from combat bonuses to rule changes to devastating battlefield weapons.

• I even imagined, though didn't mention, political cards that would require players to decide how their nation behaved. For instance, there might be an allied tech card offering the choice between martial law and general elections -- you could pick martial law and get some free recruitment or something, but you'd have to ditch any "democratic" politics cards. There's a whole sub-game here that I tossed off as "some cards may require you to destroy other conflicting cards".

• Tech upgrades. Originally I imagined that tech upgrades would work like this: you'd have a bunch of identical cards in the deck for certain upgradable techs (say, artillery). When you drew a copy, you were now at level 2 on that tech; another copy would bring you to level 3, and so on. So someone might get a bunch of artillery cards, and then they'd have one really powerful artillery at their disposal. I ended up just saying that you could obsolesce old cards but I like my original system more.

• Airplanes. This cut hurt. Originally, I had airplanes come out of the tech deck but for the rest of the war functioned like soldiers for set-up purposes. They would be very effective at things like recon and fighting one another (which was mostly how they were used historically) and would have excellent movement, however if you moved them their full 3 spaces you had to reveal them as planes in the air. You could also put in AA guns to knock out enemy planes. However, all this was a very heavy and wordy piece of rules that just had to get abstracted out, at least for the GDS. This is what my theater producer friend calls "killing the babies" -- you have to cut out anything and everything that doesn't serve to get your point across in those 800 words.

• I briefly imagined that artillery would work like this as well, and include a minimum range so you could sneak up on them and knock them out. Again, though, too complex and too many words to explain, so I also abstracted them. That was an easier choice than killing the planes but I was still sad to do it since it would have added a great deal of variety to the on-board maneuvering.

Regrets and Missed Opportunities

• I should have definitely talked about entrenching, which I imagined in a sense similar to some of the terrain in Memoir 44 where you could ignore the first "hit" in any combat. I wasn't sold on the idea and I was at the word limit anyway, so I just slid past it. In retrospect such an important aspect of the war -- indeed, one of its defining elements -- deserved both more description, and more thought.

• I probably should have given the winning side their choice of any two of the game alteration options, or made "move the armistice line" happen automatically and probably more cleanly (it seems easy to imagine a very messy back-and-forth armistice line as is). I think they should also be more exciting too -- some of the Risk benes are really neat.

• I should have added a rule for set-up, of course, that a player who has fewer than 3 remaining leaders may break the 21:3 reinforcement deck composition rule; hopefully that would be obvious but technically it's a game-stopping hole in the rules.

Conclusion: Games as Art

I hope you all enjoyed my bloviating, or at least found it helpful or interesting.

I actually tried to reach for something bigger than just game mechanics with this design -- my hope was that players looking at their devastated board and scuffed, ripped up cards would approach WWI, and even war in general, with a much more sober perspective. Maybe? Is that too much to expect from a game? Do people even want An Artistic Statement from their games, or do they want to move their dudes around and conquer Kamchatka with a few die rolls? Based on the strongly-argued-but-mostly-positive reaction to Labyrinth: The War on Terror, I think that there is space for a game that tries to say something.

I think I got most of the way there with this design. I'm not sure I'm interested enough in permanence to take it all the way (and I have some other projects I'm working on anyway) but if people were moved by it I'd probably work on polishing it up a bit into something real.