What is *weid-? What do you need to play? How does the game work? The silence rule Phase 1: Setup Possible meanings of a Glyph Phase 2: Rise Placing a new Glyph Phase 3: Decline Corrupting the language Shifting meaning Phase 4: Epilogue

What is *weid-?

 

*weid- is a story game for 4 players, created by Daniele Di Rubbo for the Italian Game Chef 2014.
 
*weid- is a game about socio-historic-linguistic mechanisms: each people, each culture expresses their own vision of the world through their language. A language is a social phenomenon, strongly rooted in the history of the people who speak it. *weid- tries to capture the stories that a people tells to forge their own culture, and the way this inevitably ends creating a language.

When culture changes, so does language; when language changes, so does culture. This is what *weid- is about.

If you're wondering how I used the ingredients, I speak of it elsewhere.

 

 

What do you need to play?

 

• A group of 4 friends (you included) willing to play;
• A roomy table (the more the shape is regular - square, or even better, round - the easier it will be for everyone to interact with it during the game);
• Square pieces of paper (the origami blocs, or large Post-it notes will do fine);
• Pencils and erasers;
• A glass or plastic bowl, preferably transparent or semitransparent (but it's not really necessary);
• 32 markers or glass beads (you will find heaps of these in craft stores). 

 

How does the game work?

 

*weid- is divided in four play phases:

 

1. Setup Phase: here the players prepare the bases for their game;
2. Rise Phase: here our culture and its language are born and shaped;
3. Decline Phase: here our culture and its language go through crisis and corruption;
4. Epilogue Phase: here the players discuss the story that emerged, and the personal and group experiences during the game.

 

In play, the story itself ends abruptly after the Decline Phase, leaving us wondering what happened next.

 

Sometimes lost languages and cultures emerge from the ashes of history and archeology, giving us an incomplete picture which scholars put together with various pieces, as if it were a puzzle.

 

Something similar happened to the ancient Egyptian and Etruscan civilizations. *weid- wants to give us the same feeling of incomplete revelation at the end of the game.

 

Similarly, *weid- is based on the assumption that language reveals the culture of the civilization that produced it, which is currently scholarly accepted. But beyond that, *weid- posits that language is the container of reality and holds power over it. This isn't academically sound, but several cultures have taken on the belief that language - through its writing - granted a magical power over reality. This was the concept of language that some people had over their own writing, such as the Egyptian hyeroglyphs and the nordic runes.

 

When we play *weid- we must act as if all of this were true: language, through its signs, can unfold events, people and cultural facets, as if they magically resided within it.

 

When we play *weid- we act like the archeologist, discovering a carved wall, deciphering its language, and through it unveiling the history and culture of the people he retrieved from the depths of history.

 

The silence rule

 

This game has one key rule, the "silence rule". It's very simple: when it's not your turn to speak, you cannot speak (on game matters). In other games, it's possible if not encouraged to offer suggestions and opinions to other players, but that's not true in *weid-.

You can obviously speak freely of issues outside the game, such as asking your host if there's more soda and chips.

 

This rule holds for the first three game phases, but not for the fourth (Epilogue Phase). During the last phase, everyone can speak freely and conversation about the game is allowed.

 

Phase 1: Setup

 

 During the Setup Phase you get ready to play. I'm assuming that the person reading this will be the player introducing the game to the group, and making sure that everything flows smoothly.

 

Take the bowl and put it exactly at the center of the table. Point at it and say to your fellow players:

 

This is Oblivion. From it came our civilization and our language. In it they will disappear.

 

Then put 4 markers for each player (you included) for a total of 16 in the bowl, which from now on I'll call Oblivion.

 

Take the other markers and give 4 to each player, you included.

 

Give every player a piece of paper and a pencil (you included). Make sure that there are enough erasers around the table (ideally one each) as I think you're going to need them.

 

Now take the piece of paper, fold it along the diagonals to find its center and fold each corner towards it. In this way you will have a square piece of paper, with four triangular corners pointing towards the center on a covered side, which you will place on the table; the other side, facing up, is simply a square. Tell the other players to do the same.

Now tell the other players to think of an idea, a word, something they want to be relevant to your story and to draw it at the center of the piece of paper. The drawing should be sketched, representative, conceptual, ideographic, pictographic. What matters is that to you it represents that idea.

Starting from you, draw this Glyph at the center of the paper (on the side without the folded corners, the one that will remain uncovered). Now lift a corner to uncover it and write on it a word of three letters that are admissible in your language. The middle letter should be a vowel, the first and the last two consonants. Below it, write the meaning of the word (see the example below).

 

Put the piece of paper on the table in front of you, with the uncovered corner pointing towards Oblivion, and tell a brief story about an even, a tradition, a person in the history of your culture that defined the birth of that specific word and concept.

 

After doing this, take another blank piece of paper and, without folding it, sketch the story you just told and below it add the word that inspired you.

Example: Daniele is facilitating the game. He takes a piece of paper and sketches a sun on it. He lifts one of the four corners and writes the word "SOL", defining its meaning by writing "sun" under it.

Then he tells the story of how for the first time the People came to the world from the ground, and saw that above their heads there was a disc of sun and heat, which they called "SOL", the sun. He takes a blank piece of paper and sketches holes in the ground, stick figures with arms towards the sun, and below it he writes "SOL".

 

Every player does this, in clockwise order. The vignettes are placed next to each other around the table clockwise, following its border. The other pieces of paper, the Glyphs, are towards the center of the table. In this way the vignettes mark the flow of the game, while the Glyphs lay in the chaos at the center.

 

After everyone has put a Glyph on the table, and described and sketched a vignette connected to it, starting with the facilitator in clockwise order the players take one of the paper pieces on the table (the Glyphs), lift a corner, and inside it draw another possible meaning for that Glyph, slightly changing the imagery of the existing Glyph depending on what they think is more important to communicate visually. Then they change the word of the first meaning of the Glyph by one letter, writing it below the new drawing of the Glyph meaning. They fold the corner on the back for the piece of paper, where it cannot be seen, and put the Glyph back where it was.

In this way you will have a piece of paper with one out of four corners unveiled, another corner with writing but still covered, and two covered blank corners. Later in the game two markers will be placed next to the covered blank corners, but I'll speak of that later.

It's also possible that one or more players decide to enrich the same Glyph with hidden meaning (not yet unveiled). This is allowed, but you cannot unveil the written corners. To clarify, you can know what you're adding, but you can't know what others added.

 

Example: Anna takes the "SOL" Glyph and lifts a blank corner. Beneath it, she draws a stylized sun surrounded by three asterisks. Under the new ideogram she writes "SAL", changing one letter of the word and interpreting its meaning as "stars".

 

Note that in this process it's possible for a vowel to become a consonant and vice versa. A word could then have three consonants, or more than a vowel: this is ok - the central vowel rule holds only when the Glyphs are placed on the table during the Setup Phase.

 

Lastly, take a few markers from the Oblivion, and place one near every unwritten side of the Glyphs on the table. In this way you'll know at any time which are the written - but still unveiled - meanings of a Glyph.

Possible meanings of a Glyph

 

Now we must explain how, for the game's purposes, a Glyph has four possible meanings:

 

• A concrete meaning: something immediate and concrete, not too complicated, which can be immediately named (e.g. "SOL"/"sun");
• An active meaning: something representing a dynamism, a process (e.g. "SLL"/"to light", because the "SOL"/"sun" lights);
• An abstract meaning: something more complex and less consequential, which can be reached as a second step (e.g. "SAL"/"stars", as an abstraction of "SOL"/"sun");
• A modifier meaning: something that represents a quality, a mode, a connector (e.g. "AOL"/"brilliant", because the "SOL"/"sun" is brilliant).

 

Here you can see the straightforward distinction between concrete and abstract nouns, figurative concepts, verbs, adjectives, adverbs etc. For the game's purpose, your language doesn't need all this logic structure, nor should it follow the structure of you language as players - on the contrary, it could be interesting to mess with its form. What matters is that you will give a new structure to the language you're creating.

 

To avoid getting lost in the chaos of the Glyphs' papers, the top corner will always have the concrete meaning, the bottom corner will be the abstract, while the right will be the modifier and the left the action.

In short, clockwise from the top: concrete, modifier, abstract and active meaning. To remember it you can think that the action flows clockwise like the game.

 

Remember that, when you're drawing, the piece of paper towards you will have the right and left side mirrored, and behave accordingly.

 

When you're placing a Glyph on the table you must start from the concrete meaning, unless this Glyph is connected to other Glyphs placed on the table before or it's formed by the union of several Glyphs, which is possible during the game, but not during the Setup Phase.

 

Phase 2: Rise

 

The game continues with the Rise phase. This phase is played in clockwise order, as always starting from the facilitator, who will go first. The Rise Phase has four Periods, and each Period is headed by the active player. The role of active player passes around clockwise, after every complete set of rounds around the table. Every player, during their turn inside a Period, must carry out the following moves:

 

1. If you are the active player, take 4 markers from Oblivion;
2. Take one marker from the unwritten corner of a Glyph, modify the word of the Glyph for the meaning of that unwritten corner (according to the rules of the Setup Phase) and draw the modified Glyph according to the new meaning; then fold the corner so that it is not visible on the table (in short: write on an uncovered corner and hide it again, but keep the marker);
3. Unveil a written corner of a Glyph (i.e. one without marker);
4. If you have at least 4 markers, you can spend 3 of them on the table, and place down a new Glyph with an unveiled corner.

 

This last point requires further explaination.

 

Placing a new Glyph

 

If you have at least 4 markers during your turn (regardless of whether you are the active player for this Period or not), you can spend 3 of them to place a new Glyph on the table.

When you choose to do so, you can place on the table a new Glpyh, with a completely new meaning, not connected to the other Glyphs already in play. In this case you will have place it with the concrete meaning corner face up; you cannot choose to unveil the abstract, modifier or active meaning.

This procedure is exactly the same as in the Setup Phase. You will describe and draw a vignette and put it close to the last one on the table, in clockwise order.

 

Your other option is to place on the table a Glpyh formed by two words already present on the table. In this case the process is similar, but you need to take into account the meaning of the existing Glyphs and of the words that relate to them.

Example: Daniele sees on the table the Glyph with the concrete meaning "MAN"/"man" and the Glpyh with the abstract meaning "WAR"/"war". He holds 5 markers, so he spends 3 to place a new Glyph with the concrete meaning "WARMAN"/"soldier".

Let's imagine that the Glpyh "WAR"/"war" has for concrete meaning "WAG"/"conflict". In this case, Daniel could have put on the table a glyph with the concrete meaning "WAGMAN"/"quarreler". Or, imagining that the abstract meaning of "MAN"/"man" is "MEN"/"crowd", he could have put on the table the Glyph with the abstract meaning "WAGMEN"/"feud".

 

Do you see how the trick works? Get your brain in gear, be creative. Then describe and draw a vignette connected to the new meaning of the Glpyh, as usual.
 
When you place these new Glpyhs formed by two or more preexisting Glpyhs, try to move the paper Glyphs on the table so that the uncovered corners point towards the Glyphs that relate to them, if you can. This will be a good way to keep clarity in the map of a language that will soon be very crowded.

 

Phase 3: Decline

 

The Rise Phase continues for four Periods, therefore until four complete rounds around the table have been played and all players have had their turn at being the active player. Then you move forward to the third phase, the Decline Phase.
 

During the Decline Phase, the flow of play changes: the turns, from now on, run counterclockwise, while the vignettes are placed in a new row on top of the previous one (so always along the border of the table, but a bit closer to the center) and in counterclockwise order.

The first thing to do when the Decline Phase starts is to collect all the markers and place them only on the corners of the Glpyhs that have been unveiled in the two previous phases. In short, the only corners that must remain without markers are those whose meaning has not been unveiled before.

Should there be any markers around that have not been placed on the unveiled corners of the Glyphs on the table, put them back in the Oblivion.

From this moment forward the last active player in the previous phase becomes the first active player of the first Period of this new phase. In fact, as the order of play just switched from clockwise to counterclockwise, it shouldn't be hard to understand why.

The Decline Phase is also divided in four Periods, each with a different active player.
Every player, during their turn inside a Period, must carry out the following moves:

 

1. If you are the active player, decide what the Corruption of the language entails and enact its effect on the table (see below);
2. Take a marker from an unveiled corner of a Glpyh, put it in Oblivion and Shift that meaning of that Glyph (see below;)
3. Describe and draw a vignette that relates to the Shifting that you have just enacted and put it along the border of the table (see below).

 

This continues until four Periods have passed and every player has had a chance to be active player (and therefore enact once the Corruption of the language), and you've played a total of four turns in four different Periods.

 

Corrupting the language

 

If you are the active player during the Decline Phase, the first thing that you have to do is to specify how the language gets Corrupted.

This is a phenomenon that affects all languages. Obviously the word "Corruption" has a moral tinge that makes it scientifically inaccurate. Languages don't corrupt, they simply transform - like all human processes that are affected from the passing of time.

 

However, as we said at the beginning our culture believes in the pure connection of its language and the world, therefore changes of language are seen with sadness and resignation as a loss of purity, as the loss of a piece of the people's identity.

 

The same process, for example, happened in the passage from the latin-italic culture to the vulgar-italian culture, during middle ages and modern age. *weid- wants to recapture the feeling of uncertainty that takes over the members of a culture when they realize that their language changed from the past ("Nobody uses the subjunctives anymore!")

 

When the active player Corrupts the language, he can do one of the following things:

 

• Say that a certain letter in a certain position becomes another letter;
• Say that a letter in a certain position disappears;
• Say that a letter in a certain position is added.

 

The three possible positions are:

 

• Initial;
• Middle;
• Final.

 

In a three-letter Glyph, the first letter holds the initial position, the second is in the middle, and the third is the final.

 

In a six-letter Glpyh, the first two letters are initial, the third and fourth are in the middle, and the last two are the finals.

In a nine-letter Glpyh the first three letters are initial, the next three are in the middle, and the last three are the finals.

And so on.

 

At a certain point, especially if the letters in the various positions become asymmetrical (if through Corruption letters are removed or added), it can be useful to separate the various positions with slashes.

 

After the active player declars the Corruption, all players together check the Glyphs on the table and modify each affected Glyph.

 

Example: Elisa is the active player during the Decline Phase, so she has to Corrupt the language. She starts by saying that all middle Ms become Ds.

 

The players change all middle Ms in Ds. This affects the "WARMAN"/"soldier" that Daniele created, that now becomes "WARDAN"/"soldier". Similarly, this affects Anna's "AMT"/"flying", that becomes "ADT"/"flying".

 

It could happen that words representing different Glyphs become the same. In this case - as our language is one with the expression of the world as our culture imagines it - when we create vignettes we should consider this, by placing both Glpyhs in the vignette and providing an appropriate description. This should however happen sparingly.

 

Shifting meaning

 

It's unavoidable - as time goes by, the words of a language change meaning.

 

For this reason in central Italy the young girl, the "sposa", becomes over time the woman of wedding age, and arrives to the current meaning of "bride" (but somewhere in Tuscany you will still find people calling your girlfriend a "bella sposa" - beautiful bride - leaving you confused).

Another example: in the germanic world, he who belongs to a noble or divine legacy is the "*kuninggaz"; this word over time came to describe the chief of armed men, and finally to modern English as "king".

 

Semantic shifts. Through this rule, *weid- tries to capture this linguistic and cultural phenomenon.

When you Shift the meaning of a Glyph, take the marker from the corner of the meaning you want to Shift and put it into Oblivion. If this is the first Shift of that Glyph, turn the paper around and replace the markers as they were, in their correct positions. Note how now the modifier meaning is at the left, while the active meaning is on the right (following the new counterclockwise flow of play).

Look carefully at the meaning you're Shifting and think at what could change in the culture of that people. Redraw the Glyph as it was on the part of paper that now faces the table, then change its meaning by striking out the old one and writing a new one.

Finally think of a vignette, describe it and draw it on a new blank piece of paper and put it at the bottom of the table next to the latest vignette, taking care to proceed in counterclockwise order.

Example: It's Anna's turn. She notices that the "WARMAN"/"soldier" Glpyh just changed in "WARDAN"/"soldier" due to the Corruption in Elisa's turn. She likes the idea and decides to Slide the meaning of "WARDAN"/"soldier" to "WARDAN"/"soldier" "mercenary".

Anna describes how, during the Black Rose War, the king Ottakar dissolves the army - now faithful to the local nobles - and secures the services of a mercenary army from a remote territory. From this event the meaning of the word changes.

 

Note that the other meanings on the same piece of paper do not change automatically when one of the meanings of a Glyph Shifts. This is another linguistic phenomenon: there's a moment in the awareness of the speakers when words lose the semantic connection that they used to have with the related words.

We are obviously oversimplifying here: there are no singular events that can change the concept of a language by its people (or if there are, they are extremely rare). On the other hand, it is true that some events show how the concept of a language changed over time, but for our purposes in the game this distinction is not very relevant.

 

Phase 4: Epilogue

 

We have finally reached the end of our game. We have ended the fourth Period of the Decline Phase, when all the players have had a chance to be the active player and have played their turn four times: we now move forward to the Epilogue Phase.

 

In this phase, the Silence Rule is lifted: players can freely discuss the game and exchange feelings, opinions and share their experience with the others.

 

After this phase is over, the game is definitely over, and if I did my job right, you should have explored (through a strictly playful perspective) the historical, linguistic and cultural aspects that come to light during the life of a people and their language.

 

I hope you enjoyed the experience!