B ★ O ★ T

• The sorts of things bored kids do
• Battletech
• "Want to play again?"
• So you're telling me that this whole thing is just math.
• Credits and acknowledgements

The sorts of things bored kids do

Growing up as a young lad, I was often taken to parties and meetings which I felt had nothing to do with me. For one, there weren't many kids my age at those parties; my family immigrated to the United States fairly early among our diaspora, so I was slightly older than most of the other kids. Besides, all these gatherings were the same from my point of view: loud music (if it was a party), grown-ups talking about local politics (if it wasn't), and nothing entertaining to do either way.

But that was fine; I have a brother two years younger than me, and he was dragged to the same functions for the same reasons. As siblings often do in trying situations such as these, we made our own fun. But no running around and chasing each other in circles for us; besides being expressly forbidden at these venues, we preferred more intellectual styles of play.

Thus at some point we made sure to always surreptitiously sneak a few pieces of blank paper into these venues. Paper's good for all sorts of things: there was drawing, of course; pencil-and-paper games (to this day, I remain an expert at Tic-Tac-Toe); and when you were done writing on both sides, you could always fold the sheets into paper airplanes or the like.

That continued for a little while. But things changed when we plucked a handful of dice from our Parcheesi and Ludo boards and secreted them into these facilities. Our play had suddenly gained dimensions of nuance! But what was there that we could do with these raw materials?

Battletech

In the late 80s and early 90s, the table-top game Battletech/MechWarrior began to come into its own as a cultural phenomenon. In short, it was a game about future humans colonizing the galaxy, but who cares about that since they're pummeling one another with giant attack robots.

While I never played the official game itself (and still haven't), I followed the stories of the Inner Sphere and the Steiner-Davions with more than a passing enthusiasm. We had a couple of novels set in that universe which we read and re-read (mostly because of the fanciful mech illustrations in the back of the books.) I even recall a short-lived cartoon being created at some point and never coming to a satisfactory conclusion—just like most other late 80s, early 90s cartoons.

By now, you can perhaps see where I am going with this: I invented a new paper-and pencil game very loosely based on the MechWarrior stories I loved. A game where players would roll dice to attack each other and mark the results on the paper.

I called that game "Bot."

"Want to play again?"

Bot was not a video game. It could be played anytime, anywhere, with just a piece of paper, a pencil, some dice (the more, the merrier), and at least two minds. One started by agreeing on the hitpoints and weapons that the available 'Bots for both players should have—for instance, a Locust might use two dice to attack, no dice to defend, and have 10 hitpoints. Since this was a fairly weak 'Bot, we'd mutually agree to assign it a low "score" of (say) 5 points.

Players agree beforehand on a limit for their total 'Bot scores—their budget, more or less—and then "purchase" as many 'Bots as they can with the budget allotted by writing them on their side of the sheet. Then the game begins! One by one, each player selects their next available 'Bot, selects a target enemy Bot, and rolls dice to determine how much the one wallops the other. Repeat until dead.

Some easy variations arose to break the monotony: bigger 'Bots would roll an armor die to prevent some incoming damage, while other smaller 'Bots might be equipped with "jump thrusters", allowing them to completely bypass an attack by rolling an even number on a die. Bots might have a variety of weapons to choose from with different attack formulae, and my brother and I would carefully select the weapon that seemed most likely to deal the finishing blow in a given situation.

Like all things, we grew weary of even this game after a while and moved on, but for those couple of years in the early 90s, Bot was our go-to means of evading boredom...provided our parents didn't hear us quietly rolling dice at parties and move to confiscate them, which happened a number of times. For some reason, we were always able to find more dice.

So you're telling me that this whole thing is just math.

Well, yeah.

Obviously, without the ability to move the 'Bots in any way, this is strictly a game of probabalistic likelihoods and subtraction—those are definitely math, so that's what this game is, too. But it is my hope that with these improved graphics and special effects, the game won't feel like it's just a math game, and that you will derive a sense of satisfaction from successfully walloping the bad guy's giant attack robots.

Credits and Acknowledgments

BOT is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

I am not an artist. Yet a surfeit of fantastic, professional artwork was available for me to choose from thanks to the Open Content community. I am extremely grateful for all of their contributions.

Any missing entries in this list are my fault entirely; please let me know if that is the case.

I also used a number of open-source tools to create this project. Worthy of particular mention are:

• The GIMP, an all-around image manipulator;
• Antiprism, which I used to generate the polyhedral dice images;
• ImageMagick's montage command, which comes in handy when one needs to generate sprite sheets;
• Pngcrush, which helped to shrink some of the PNG files I created with the previous three tools;
• And of course, Emacs, the most powerful text editor I have ever encountered.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this. I hope you have as much fun playing as I had reminiscing.