Ok looks like we now have an official german translation complete, I will push it to the github repository.

I love Gloom.  It plays a lot to my daughter's strengths as a writer and a lover of Supernatural.  Not sure if this is the type of game you're looking for, not having played Codenames however.  There's also twilight struggle, but there's been so many implementations that I'm not sure if that would be a good fit either.

My wife and I just played this, and this is my report and review of the game (not of the program that generates games).

I printed just the instructions and the first game for each player, so we could both try it.

We were terribly confused by the instructions (except the part about taking turns, which we understood thoroughly), but kept reading the instructions as we went along.

What we needed was a complete sample game, showing exactly what happened in each turn. What we got was only difficult instructions.

For example, the guesser is supposed to say a word and a number. We never did understand what the number was for, since it wasn't used during our experiment. We chose great clue words (cigarette was the clue for ASH and horse was the clue for STABLE), but that had nothing to do with who got green and was "correct" and who got yellow and was "incorrect"! So unintuitive.

Looking at our two sheets, I see that most of the words have the SAME color. This is confusing, because I thought they were supposed to be random, so I was expecting them to be mixed up. I kept being "correct" and my wife kept being "incorrect", which doesn't work well with our interpersonal dynamics.

We gave up during our 4th turn because we were so lost and saw no point in continuing to play the game.

Our experiences were perhaps not representative of other people, but for us the game, lacking an example of correct play, was only entertaining in that it was kind of funny to be so completely confused.

For example, the guesser is supposed to say a word and a number. We never did understand what the number was for, since it wasn't used during our experiment.

I haven't played in a long time but,
you try and give a clue that will work for as many words as possible e.g. 'fruit' for apple, pear, -- that's where the number comes in, 2 in this case. So the other knows the clue refers to two words on their page.

I have updated the ENGLISH book downloads with better instructions.

Hi ThR1LL.

This is by design so that games are predictable between users.

You can use the --seedstart option to pass in a different seed number which will generate different random values; every time you use a different seed number you will get different games.

It may seem confusing but the idea was that YOUR games #1-10 would be the same as MY games #1-10, for easy comparison and playing together.

So the way I do it is I don't change the see, but I just make a pdf with like 500 games, and then just print a few of those at a time.  I thought I had an option where you could tell the program what game # to start printing at, but it seems I was wrong; I should probably add that feature.



You'll find commandline options in the readme.txt in the documentation folder:

//---------------------------------------------------------------------------
usage: cnduet.py [-h] [--language OPTION_LANGUAGE]
                 [--wordfile OPTION_WORDFILE]
                 [--patternfile OPTION_PATTERNFILE] [--outpath OPTION_OUTPATH]
                 [--turncount OPTION_TURNCOUNT]
                 [--mistakecount OPTION_MISTAKECOUNT]
                 [--goalcount OPTION_GOALCOUNT] [--seedstart OPTION_SEEDSTART]
                 [--gamecount OPTION_GAMECOUNT] [--bookname OPTION_BOOKNAME]
                 [--format {html,pdf}]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --language OPTION_LANGUAGE
                        language name (specifies a subdirectory of the data
                        directory where wordfile and templates will be looked
                        for)
  --wordfile OPTION_WORDFILE
                        filename (word list text file to user; should not
                        include subdirectory; will be looked for in
                        data/language and then data/ directories) (each word
                        should be on its own line)
  --patternfile OPTION_PATTERNFILE
                        filename (optionally with path) of card coloring
                        pattern data (each line is a triple specifying
                        cardcount, player1color, player2color); just base name
                        no subdir
  --outpath OPTION_OUTPATH
                        path to save output files
  --turncount OPTION_TURNCOUNT
                        number of turns per game
  --mistakecount OPTION_MISTAKECOUNT
                        number of mistakes allowed per game
  --goalcount OPTION_GOALCOUNT
                        number of goals needed to win game)
  --seedstart OPTION_SEEDSTART
                        starting seed number to use
  --gamecount OPTION_GAMECOUNT
                        number of games to generate
  --bookname OPTION_BOOKNAME
                        base name of book output files
  --format {html,pdf}   final output format (should be html or pdf)

E:\MyDocs\Programming\Python\cnpaperplay\source>

//---------------------------------------------------------------------------