Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Proposal: Staying on Topic

In Backronym, add a subrule called “Topics” with the denoted description:

“Topic is listed as a game state and set by the Puzzler, defaulting to -. After the Puzzler has performed an Acrogenerate action but before Wordsmith have Backronym action, they may roll a DICE1000 and have the result equal to Y.

The list below shows the appropriate action the Puzzler does for Y:

- If Y is inclusively between 1-200: Set Topic to “FOOD”.

- If Y is inclusively between 201-400: Set Topic to “COLOR”.

- If Y is inclusively between 401-600: Set Topic to “MONEY”.

- If Y is inclusively between 601-800: Set Topic to “CLOTHES”.

- If Y is inclusively between 801-1000: Set Topic to “NUMBER”.


The list below has show’s the restrictions of each Topic from the list above:

- FOOD: Wordsmiths must have at least 1 word in their Backronym be the name of a type of specific kind of food.

- COLOR: Wordsmiths must have at least 1 word in their Backronym be the name of a type of a color.

- MONEY: Wordsmiths must have at least 1 word in their Backronym be the name of a type of specific type of currency used in the world

- CLOTHES: Wordsmiths must have at least 1 word in their Backronym be the name of an article of clothing or attire.

- NUMBER: Wordsmiths must have at least 1 word in their Backronym be the name of the word spelling of associated to a number.

Comments

Josh: he/they

24-06-2025 08:20:25 UTC

A couple of wording issues here. ‘Topic is listed as a game state’ doesn’t, I think, mean anything, and while the intention (‘The Topic is a publicly tracked variable’) is clear enough I think that the current wording is, at best, unusable, and at worst scammable.

‘After the Puzzler has performed an Acrogenerate action but before Wordsmith have Backronym action’ is not time-bound - because Wordsmiths have already performed Backronym actions in this dynasty this rule would never be able to fire off.

I also don’t understand why DICE1000 is being used rather than DICE5.

I’m leaning against in any case, though, as restricting the play space to these 5 topics seems artificially limiting.

Raven1207: he/they

24-06-2025 08:40:42 UTC

I put 1000 just in case someone wanted to add topics in

Kevan: he/him

24-06-2025 08:58:45 UTC

We could certainly propose more list items (and die faces) while the next round was happening. It’s such a strange blind spot in BlogNomic that we don’t expand on half the lists that we create, even though those would be such easy proposals to write. I still haven’t quite worked out why that is.

against for seeming too restrictive in combination with Prompts; some will give us a challenging constraint, but others seem like they’ll fall flat (“some famous last words, including a currency”). Given that this proposal is described as adding “topics” to the game, I don’t know if Raven overlooked the the enacted proposal to add “topics” in the form of Prompts a few days ago.

Point to ponder: what are the odds of an acronym being impossible under the Numbers topic? Most numbers start with the same handful of letters.

Raven1207: he/they

24-06-2025 09:26:17 UTC

I did overlook that against

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