Links: Computed Card Games, Lines for Leisure Items & A Game Good Enough to Eat?

The researchers first had to come up with a way to describe rules that were general enough to capture games as diverse as blackjack and poker – and all the possible variations in between – while including number of players, actions taken each round, and winning conditions. The system searches through these possible variations, exploring sets of rules to see if they lead to a playable game. It chucks out games that end too quickly or lead to dead ends. It comes down to balance, says Togelius, who will present the work at the Foundations of Digital Games conference in Chania, Crete, later this month.

Queue, introduced in 2011, paradoxically proved to be so popular that buyers had to stand in line for hours for one and a black market emerged.

It also inspired a competing game about frustrations of Polish shopping during the 1980s, called You Cut the Line, Sir. Publisher Jaroslaw Basalyga says his goal was to create a game "whose climate and emotions convey the absurdity of those years".

[Konrad] Piasecki says his daughters, age 12 and 17, have no problem grasping Queue's convoluted rules. "They can understand the game, but it's harder for them to understand the world of this game," he says.

Unintentionally, the game is a living example of that world because it is produced by the Polish government. The Institute of National Remembrance, a state body created in 1998 to preserve memories of Poles' struggles against Nazism and communism, gets money to produce Queue from the national budget. Overwhelming demand hasn't induced bureaucrats to fund a production increase.

"It's like under socialism," quips Andrzej Zawistowski, the institute's director of public education, who is pushing for a market-based approach. One queue for Queue formed roughly four days before sales began, he said.

The shortage of the game about shortages has even prompted angry letters from consumers for whom it brought back bad memories, says Mr. Madaj. "Some people didn't appreciate the irony."