Re-invention and plagiarism

I just looked at Taiji and Tonga:
If you look at the implementation here (http://homepages.di.fc.ul.pt/~jpn/gv/tonga.htm) for Tonga, there are fewer similarities. Tonga would actually play much differently using the stones on the diagonal as shown. A different game indeed.

The scoring of "islands" is similar, but it is an obvious solution to a shared design problem. I see coincidence of design.

The party accusing you of plagiarism should be very, very careful. This is not a word that should be used flippantly. If said party makes statements as such in public, think about contacting a lawyer.

I think the more abstract a game is, the more chances there may be that someone else is thinking of something similar, especially if they use components commonly found around the house (like dominoes, standard playing cards, etc.)

Your Blue Panther version looks very nice and has a higher BGG rating, so perhaps there is a little jealousy there.

It's difficult to accuse someone of plagarism, though, in this business, as there are so many mechanisms that are used multiple times and you can't patent them. When a game is published, you only hold the copyright to that completed game (that particular theme and mechanics combination).

There are so many games that have similar mechanics that were most likely developed at the same time, unbeknownst to the other designer. The innovative time track for Neuland and Thebes is an example.

Still, there are other games I really wonder about. Like the children's game from Selecta called Viva Topo that seems to have identical mechanics to Wolfgang Kramer's popular "Mitternachtsparty."

Néstor, I wouldn't be concerned about Taiji. I have a game called Linkstones that predates your publication of Taiji that I haven't published yet. It's part of our upcoming "Box of Rox" game set (I was waiting to publish it until I could bundle it with another game). I said, "Lee, what kinds of good abstract games can you design with game stones and a 10 x 10 grid". I came up with Linkstones as the first response to that.

You place stones on a checkerboard (one per space). At the end of your game you get 50 points minus one for every one of your stones that forms a corner with other stones of your color (i.e., that has a stone both above or below it AND one to the left or right of it).

Mechanically Linkstones is different than Taiji, but both are effectively chain scoring games with much similarity. That's part of the reason I liked Taiji so much -- I like that genre of games. Linkstones and Taiji are in the family of Go, Go Moku, Reversi, etc. Go is 2500 years old, there are only so many "stones on a grid" variants that one can come up with. Taiji could trivially be played with game stones of two colors, but is merely more convenient to be played with wooden pieces you designed. It's still very much in the "stones making a pattern on a board" family, so there will always be similarities to other games in the family.

In any case, I have no problems with borrowing from other designers as long as I have had a significant amount of additional materials or some twists that improve upon the original in some way.

My game Powerstorm, in its advanced version, had about a 20% similarity to Overpower, about 20% similarity to Wildstorms, about a 10% similarity to the Vs. System and about 50% all new mechanical implementations. Anyone who had played one of the other superhero CCGs games always said it played something like a game that they knew. People identify what they are familiar with. Powerstorm has no resource/energy mechanic, and yet people were always trying to find something to "tap". Why? They had played Magic the Gathering and were looking for similarities so that they could grasp the game better.

Taiji, at least, is novel because of the pieces you invented which allow you to play the game a little more easily than you could have with stones and a board. Take your innovation, embrace it, and realize that nay sayers are everywhere. Move on to designing your next game.

Regards,
Lee Valentine
President
Veritas Games Co. LLC

I still remember the binary offering you gave to the continuous hidden movement problem and thought well of you ever since... I haven't used that idea, but I think there will be use for it in some design someday.

BTW - let me know if you ever brainstorm another idea on that one! I had to go in another direction, but I still love the binary thing you did... simple and perfect.

Disclaimer: Blue Panther is the publisherof Taiji.

We research titles before we publish. Did not catch Tonga. It happens. Sometimes people publish games to capitalize on other intellectual property (e.g. the recent online game Scrabulous ran afoul of the Hasborg machine)

Our first game was called Courtyard. Researched that one too. There was a game published in the 80s called Courtyard. Different mechanics, same name. Live and learn.

We live in a world where someone can patent the idea of "tapping" a card by turning it 90 degrees sideways. Where punching a game piece out of a credit card sized piece of plastic can be patented. In theory, does this mean I could patent the idea of cutting out the pieces of a game from a piece of wood? Where would Blue Panther be unless we held that patent?

There are perhaps millions of gamers, and some portion of those gamers want to design their own games. There are not nearly as many "game mechanics" ideas out there as there are designers. So it's reasonable to expect that somewhere, someone else may have thought of an idea similar to or even exactly the same as the ones those at BGDF have. The difference is that you took that idea and actually developed it into a game that's now on the market. That puts you in a much smaller group of people - those that have been "published" vs those that "have a cool game idea".

When I designed a more recent game, I started with the design idea of "Ticket to Ride with combat", although I did not know about TTR at the time. I wanted a game where you build routes, where turns move really fast, there are only two or three choices per turn, and each action you take makes a difference to the outcome of the game. This could be a good description of Ticket to Ride. I also wanted a very simple combat option (if you have more pieces you win) and a population control mechanic to keep the board tense (population limits). When I put these ideas toegether those ideas, along with the destination cards, I came up with Nepal. A new combination of some very common mechanics that many high-selling games happen to share. My first version of the game was actually playtesting before Ticket To Ride came out. So we have parallel evolution. The only difference is about 700000 more copies of that other game sold :-)

It's natural to have ideas start from somewhere else. When I explain a game to someone who hasn't seen it, I often start with "it's like Game X".

Plagiarizing someone else is bad. If it's truly copying then it's copyright or patent infringement, and you can be sued. Plagiarizing yourself can be good and very lucrative. It's the story of the movie sequel industry and several popular game franchises (e.g. Ticket to Ride: Country X and Age of Steam: Country X).

Nuff'said.

SJ

I think it's the same for me. Either I get inspiration from a game first or eventually I find a game that looks close to mine.