World Simulation

Haha you totally did infocorn, it sounds great - I love how you started the post, but "liminial" you will have to explain and also "lives out a simulation of your board" you will have to explain.

It sounds very expansive and quite expansive though :)

Ok cool so it's a Spacey BoardGame?.

Roger on the four play areas and the connections - cool.

The "Piece" you're hoping to find? what do you mean by "piece".

Ok, to run "real world" events and come back later to see how it is: I assume you do NOT mean "Real World" as in, run a simulation on the Meterological events in South Africa and see what happens? And I also assume you do NOT mean to "let the game run itelf for a while and come back to see how it's getting on" because you would essentially need to create a basic artificial intelligence and let the computer continuously run the game - basically like a pc style M.M.O. game.

If you do not mean these two things (which you dont...right?) then what you want to happen is (correct me if I am wrong):

" My game idea is to have a BoardGame that would dynamically change in response to all other players all over the world. The way I will accomplish this is that the players would need to consult a website that would tell them the "current status" of certain elements in the (meta) game-world. This information would equate to certain practical changes of the set=up of the boardgame before play starts. At the end of the game session, players would be asked to upload their data back into the database. This uploaded data would then have a visible effect and change the new (meta) game-world."

In which case - cool idea bro!

You would need to have a clever website with each boardgame sold to have a unique "log in" code or something. Before play players would scrape the current game world from the website and then change their boardgame set up accordingly. At the end they would log in, and tap in their game-end info eg "After your game finished, which viaduct was you close?" answe: "We closed Viaduct 2". This would then update on a big ol' spreadsheet based on your website (MYSQL database). Then if I was the next person to log in and look at game set up - I would go to the website and it would tell me that "Currently, Viaduct 2 is closed. Please can you place the "Closed" marker on Viaduct 2 before starting a new game".

So then this new guy would do the same, at game end his Viaduct number 5 would be closed, he would log in, update it and it would then change.

You could expand this quite nicely by the way: if the info that was updated was the "position on the board of each player at game-end" then, I would go to the website and click on "Current meta game-world for a 4 Player Game" and it would tell me the positions of the player pieces that I would need to use.

If you wanted to go further still:
1. Which Viaduct is closed
2. Where are the player pieces
3. What items does each player currently have

but remember that without basically making the game as a PC internet based online-boardgame (dont even try and think about this btw) you only have the word of players that they will update anything. Also, if they want to update it wrong eg: Put player character: "Andrea the Healer" in a very poor situation just to grief whoever plays a game with the updated "andrea the healer" position, they will find that they "always seem to start next to the Death-Knight..." so you have to think about that too.

You defianltey would need a fancy website with some programming behind it too - it MIGHT be possible to get it done simply but if you wanted to make it a big flagship game then you would probably need a good website to back it up.

:)