[pbmserv] Broadcast from phil via PBM Server

[pbmserv <pbmserv@gamerz.net>]

Blame it on Cameron.

I eMailed him a couple of weeks ago with a game idea I had.  We
played around with it, and it mutated a lot, but ended up
somewhere that wasn't particularly interesting from a "new game"
standpoint.

During that time, though, I came up with a way to take a whole
lot of connection games and turn them into something different,
a sort of metagame where you vie for control of the "standard"
connection locations.  Cameron and I playtested two particular
applications of this "metarule," and today I present a pbmserv
implementation of one of them:

Caeth Y.

The game name is 'CaethY' on the server, and Cam has already
put my HTML help file up on the site, linked under "Connection
Games."  Unfortunately, the version you get with 'help caethy'
is pretty awful--why does the server no longer just do lynx/links
-dump, Richard?

But I digress.  I think you might find Caeth Y to be an interesting
take on the field of connection games.  You may notice that it's
fairly closely related to Conhex; that was unintentional, but a
system similar to Caeth but played on the points between locations
has been named 'Noc' in homage.

If you have any questions or suggestions, let me know.  I barely
have a handle on the codebase used here, so I will not be able to
make holographic 64-bit colour versions of the game, but I will
try to help nonetheless.

Thanks to Richard, and especially Cameron for politely forcing me
to write something so we could stop hand-editing eMails.

Of course, feel free to challenge me in a game or two of Caeth Y:

    CaethY challenge yourid phil
    CaethY challenge phil yourid

Phil Bordelon
phil .at. lsu #dot# edu