Oort is an idea that popped into my head while playing the very excellent indie computer game Dyson, which is a procedurally-generated RTS where you colonize an asteroid field with a swarm of self-replicating robots. The different asteroids that you colonize give the robots created there different properties. The differences aren’t really all that noticeable in the game, but that’s not really the point. It’s very engaging and don’t install it if you have any actual work to get done.

This got my mind turning over, wondering if you could construct a sort of strategy/roleplaying game based on the idea. As an added touch, the game would play with table-chatter by limiting player-to-player communication to the short list of nouns and verbs in the game. Why not?

Here’s what I have so far:

• The game begins with each player having control of a swarm of self-replicating robots who’ve been sent to the far reaches of the Solar System (specifically, the Oort Cloud, hence the name) to return these resources to Earth. Things get strange for the von Neumann machines when they find an ‘Artifact’ in the Cloud that gives the machines a glimmer of sentience.
• The game starts with a limited number of nouns and verbs in the vocabulary. The players then construct commands for their swarm by stringing together these words (bytes). The swarm has eight spots for commands: four for interacting with the environment, two for modifying itself, two for interacting with other swarms (the other characters). You also have eight slots of ‘memory’ to move commands in an out of active memory.
• After harvesting a certain amount of resources (and gaining points for doing so), the characters advance in certain ways: they can add to the vocabulary by introducing new nouns (new structures, etc) and creating new verbs by stringing together the basic verbs and nouns. For example, ‘go asteroid make warren’ could be turned into a new verb, ‘colonize’. These complex commands would belong to one player, but others could use them for a higher cost.
• As the game progresses, then, the players can accomplish more in every turn – this simulates the growing, replicating and spreading. Also, the players may choose to specialize, adding unique verbs into their vocabulary.

At some point (I’m imagining a deck of cards with different Trans-Neptunian bodies on them), you turn up the Artifact, and things start to change. Each of the characters starts to develop ‘culture’. In the beginning, all of the players are working collectively to return resources to Earth. From contact with the Artifact on, the different characters begin competing with one another, attempting to achieve dominance over the others in one way or another (perhaps decided by the special functions that they’ve chosen), so the game goes from co-op to competitive.

As the turns continue, more of the swarm’s commands must include keywords that the Artifact introduces.  This cranks up the differences between the swarms and the competitiveness – it gets progressively harder to get things done, and the machines are progressively focused on achieving a very small number of goals.

The other aspect of the game that I enjoy is toying with the communication at the table – requiring that players communicate with one another with only the vocabulary in play.  Impossible to enforce, I know, but it strikes me as interesting anyways.