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Old 12-27-2014, 04:57 PM   #21
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Default Re: Can you have something similar to poker in a TL 1 setting

What exactly do you mean by 'something like poker'? PK says 'no' because he defines vying as the defining thing. I would have said 'yes,' because I would accept games with a suitable mixture of luck and skill (so you can have professional gamblers) as sufficiently poker-like for world building purposes.
A lot of people in this thread seem to be concentrating on the medium (cards), which means tiles for TL1.
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Old 12-27-2014, 05:00 PM   #22
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Default Re: Can you have something similar to poker in a TL 1 setting

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What exactly do you mean by 'something like poker'?
I had been thinking of something more like poker than it is like rummy or whist. Otherwise the OP would have said "something like card games".
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Old 12-27-2014, 05:07 PM   #23
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Default Re: Can you have something similar to poker in a TL 1 setting

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I had been thinking of something more like poker than it is like rummy or whist. Otherwise the OP would have said "something like card games".
Yes but is 'card game' really necessary? What about something like Backgammon? Like poker it needs both skill and luck.
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Old 12-27-2014, 05:11 PM   #24
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Yes but is 'card game' really necessary? What about something like Backgammon? Like poker it needs both skill and luck.
Fair enough, if that's what the OP wants. It's almost old enough, too. Backgammon is the modern form of a category of games called "Tables", of which the earliest known example is an Ancient Egyptian game called senet that is documented from 3500 BC.
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Old 12-27-2014, 06:33 PM   #25
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Default Re: Can you have something similar to poker in a TL 1 setting

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Ivory plaques sound interesting. Each god in this setting has an associated number - maybe something about adding the numbers together?
Use the gods as "face cards" and simple number cards/plaques/whatever as their number of einheriar and you could have something very similar to to poker in structure.

"Hah! Full Pantheon! Beat that!"

"I certainly can't with my God of Grain and a pair of celestial legions."

Changing the look of the game tokens and the names is easy enough but if you come up with something that's too novel in play style your players may not want to invest enough energy in your new game to learn it.
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Old 12-27-2014, 07:20 PM   #26
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Default Re: Can you have something similar to poker in a TL 1 setting

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Read the rules that come with a box of dominoes for an example. Mancala is a TL0 game, actually. Not the most exciting thing ever, but, use coin instead of pebbles, and you have gambling!
In a setting where food is extremely valuable, it's gambling enough to use seeds for pebbles (I may be wrong in saying it was originally played like I just said though).
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Old 12-27-2014, 07:41 PM   #27
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Default Re: Can you have something similar to poker in a TL 1 setting

As far as I can tell, the thing that makes poker different from the other gambling games suggested is knowing what your results are without knowing what your opponents are. Zero in on that, and regardless of the exact method for determining results, you'll have something that looks like poker.
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Old 12-27-2014, 09:24 PM   #28
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Default Re: Can you have something similar to poker in a TL 1 setting

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In a setting where food is extremely valuable, it's gambling enough to use seeds for pebbles (I may be wrong in saying it was originally played like I just said though).
Mancala has no random element, which means that very few people will play it for money even casually and no amateur will play for money against a professional. Would you risk your money in a chess game against Kasparov?

To get the equivalents of Doc Holliday and professional riverboat gamblers (which IMHO is the thing that sets poker in the old west apart from say dicing in historical TL1 societies in a world building sense) it needs to have a skill component (so that professional gamblers can expect to win over the long run -- say at the end of a month) but also luck based element (so that casual players can hope to win over a few games at one evening).
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Old 12-27-2014, 09:56 PM   #29
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Default Re: Can you have something similar to poker in a TL 1 setting

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To get the equivalents of Doc Holliday and professional riverboat gamblers (which IMHO is the thing that sets poker in the old west apart from say dicing in historical TL1 societies in a world building sense) it needs to have a skill component (so that professional gamblers can expect to win over the long run -- say at the end of a month) but also luck based element (so that casual players can hope to win over a few games at one evening).
I thought that professional gamblers more often ran banks in games like faro, railroad, and keno than they played poker. I read that a study in 1882 reported that more money was wagered in the USA on faro than on all other games of chance combined.
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Old 12-27-2014, 10:51 PM   #30
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Default Re: Can you have something similar to poker in a TL 1 setting

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Sketching on a TL 1 setting and I want to make it a little Old West as well. Could you have something like poker in the Bronze Age? There's no paper, but could you have painted wood plaques, maybe?

Or could you have something similar but not using cards?
I thought a bit about that for my TL3 Ärth historical fantasy setting, and I think the least bad fit is a game based on cubic dice, rolled in a cup and kept hidden by it, where you bid and bluff, and one of the things you can bid is how many of your dice you're going to re-roll, with lower numbers being worth more.

Clearly there's some room for cheating. Someone with good Sleight of Hand skill could covertly tip one of the dice over, unnoticed. On the other hand, the other players will know to be wary of this (I envision it as a money betting game, not a recreation) and so it's hard to get away with, and may depend on one of the dice being positioned just right, within easy reach of a finger duing "The Reveal" which is probably a formal process.

On the third hand, subtly weighed dice is also a real risk. I imagine many players would insist on using their own dice (at least each player has to have a set, of I think 6 if not 7 or even 8). But on the fourth hand, it's not about rolling high, so you don't really gain anything if you unbalance one or two dice to be more likely to roll 5 or 6. Rather it's about getting "combinations", like in Poker and Yatzee. Rolling many sives or many fives is a combination, as is rolling several of each, but not the only one.
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