Multiple sessions of a game in one gamebox

[Bill Barrett]

Ok guys, I've just discovered that ZunTzu has a whole lot more power under the hood than Jerome has admitted!

For months now, I've been intrigued by these two sentences:

"Note that you can also use the "tab" attribute with regular "layout" nodes. It can be used to implement two tabs with the same image."

I thought they could be useful, but couldn't figure out how. Then suddenly, in a "Eureka" moment, it hit me...

You can have two instances of a game running, in parallel, in one gamebox session!

All you have to do is add one line to a Scenario file - something like:

<layout board="Map" tab="Game 2" />

where "Map" equals whatever you've called your main board in the game-box file.

So I added it to my France 1940 gamebox, loaded it into ZunTzu, and sure enough tab "Game 2" displayed an exact copy of the map. So then I thought what the heck - let's try six games at once...

and I added these further lines:

<layout board="Map" tab="Game 3" />
<layout board="Map" tab="Game 4" />
<layout board="Map" tab="Game 5" />
<layout board="Map" tab="Game 6" />

Loaded it up and sure enough, six separate tabs, all with copies of the map in them.

Now I had originally "supplied" six German and eleven Allied "counter-sheets" to this gamebox to provide enough pieces for players to chose from the 66 possible combinations of setup, so it was a simple matter to use these extra "counter-sheets" to set up six separate games.

It took a while (but I had to see if it worked and also to see how ZunTzu would perform), and when I finished I saved it as a separate .ztg file.

When I loaded it back up, I noticed it was slow (it took about 2 minutes longer than the single game scenario) and also that the panning/zooming was a little jerky.

But remember, this has a fairly large 300dpi map and there would be about six hundred 300dpi counters to position on the maps (and six games at once is maybe a little excessive). However, if you turn down ZunTzu's display settings (and/or if you have more memory/a better processor) it's as smooth as ever. Also it seemed that performance improved once ZunTzu had been running for a while.

OK, so that's pretty cool, but it might not always be a good idea to use the "supply" attribute to increase the numbers of counters in every gamebox (some games use the physical limit of counters supplied as the Force pool for example) and you'd never know if anyone wanted to play 12 games at once (say) so what would be your limit? This is where it gets even better:

Out of curiosity (I didn't think it'd work for a minute!) I added the line:

<layout board="Counters" tab="Counter Sheet 2" />

Saved it, loaded it, and to my amazement, there on the second tab, was a complete fully functioning copy of the Counter sheet! It was identical in every way, even down to the individual "supply" numbers of each counter). Even more impressive was that when you move one of them to a map, and press the delete key, it "knows" which tab it belongs to and returns there.

So then of course, I tried it with cards... and exactly the same thing happened!

And of course Terrains are "unlimited" out of the box from the start, so you don’t need to do anything as far as they're concerned.

Right, on the basis that a demonstration is worth a thousand words I suggest you do this: download a copy of Jerome's Poker gamebox, open it up, copy the "startup.zts file" to somewhere else and load it into your favourite text editor. Go to the bottom of the page and paste (make sure you do this on the line just ABOVE the "</game>" command):

<layout board="Table" tab="Table 2" />
<layout board="Cards" tab="Cards 2" />
<layout board="Chips" tab="Chips 2" />

So that the last FOUR lines should look like this:

<layout board="Table" tab="Table 2" />
<layout board="Cards" tab="Cards 2" />
<layout board="Chips" tab="Chips 2" />
</game>

Save it as something like "2 games setup.zts", copy it into Poker-v2.zip, rename the folder to .ztb and load it into ZunTzu. On the scenario menu it will be the second one listed.

You'll see the power and scope of this - and remember, all you had to do was add three lines of text to a scenario file! So what are the possible uses?

1) For me personally, it would be great to have the opportunity of playing two games at the same time (take the Allied side in one and the Axis in the other for example).

2) It's dead easy to set up three maps and counter sets to deal with hidden placement. You might use this code:

<layout board="Map" tab="Hidden Map A" />
<layout board="Map" tab="Hidden Map B" />
<layout board="Counters" tab="Hidden Counters A" />
<layout board="Counters" tab="Hidden Counters B" />

3) Rather than have each scenario in a gamebox load one at a time, you could set up a "scenario" which had all of them loaded simultaneously, each with their own tab.

4) It's a brilliant play testing tool - imagine being able to have six games setup to explore six different opening turn strategies. Or, you could test a game with optional rules/pieces against one without them...

And I'm sure there are others I haven’t yet thought of…

Obviously there are a couple of caveats:

You’ve got to be careful that you don’t mix up which game tab you’re currently concentrating on – it’d obviously be easy to move cards/counters into one in which they don’t belong. But the biggest problem is that you only have one player hand. If you’re playing multiple sessions of games with cards, each player will have to “empty” their hands out onto the “table” before moving onto the next – irritating maybe, but not a fatal flaw.

Anyway – give it a try, it’ll be interesting to see what you think… and if you'd like to see a crude shockwave video of it in action go here:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/m2nzzzukyzj/France 1940 v2.0.swf