My first iPhone application: nStragglers__

Aug 21, 2009

Over thirty years ago, I found an advertisement in The Space Gamer magazine for a game called Starweb. It was a play-by-mail game with 15 empires fighting over a web of 255 worlds. Every two weeks, the 15 players mailed their instructions to Flying Buffalo in to Scottsdale, Arizona. Expert typists entered the orders into the Raytheon 704 minicomputer (with 4K of memory) and the system would determinte the new state of the empire. The Buffalo mailed the paper turnsheets out to the players. A boss of mine once said “You mean you pay these folks $1 — to time-share their tiny computer — by mail???”

I’ve played Starweb ever since and it’s always been a lot of fun. A coworker learned of the game from me and wrote DecWeb, a variant of Starweb written in Lisp. Striving for perfection he wrote an entirely new game called TENN, much more complicated. There was no way I could keep track of all the details by hand, so a wrote a program. Since then, I’ve written lots of utility programs for a variety of games. The most successful is Constella, a mapping and management program for Starweb and RSW (yet another variant).

RSW has a web interface, a great Python client, a fantastic API, and it’s free. Even better, the developer created an architecture that is easy to extend. New player types, different game styles, and the very best: it’s all automated. When the last player submits their orders, the turn runs immediately.

This week’s Thing A Week is nStragglers, an iPhone program that watches the RSW game queue and reports how many players still need to turn in their orders. Why is that important? If the number gets to 1 and I still haven’t turned in my orders, that means that all the other players are waiting on me. Sure, the turn will run anyway on the due date, but it doesn’t seem polite to make everybody wait. It was also just the right size program to start with.

Technically, the program has not been published — a technical violation of Thing A Week rules. I do plan on publishing the program in the Apple iPhone App Store. Until then, if you play RSW and would like a copy, I’d be glad to send you one.