Gamestate Style Guide

Until 2019, BlogNomic used the GNDT to track its main gamestate; by necessity of the software this was always a simple table of rows and columns, one row per player. Although we now use wiki pages to track gamestate, which can be arranged however we like, we do generally tend to stay in that mindset of black text and numbers in one or more grey row-and-column tables.

Here are some notes on ways that we've changed that, with examples from past dynasties.

At the time of writing, the ruleset allows any player to "change the layout or design of a gamestate wiki page if doing so would not change how any rules interpreted its content". There's no real etiquette for who can make such changes or when they can be applied. Players can try them unilaterally to see how the group react (moving to a straw poll proposal if there's disagreement), or ask what others think in a blog post or on Discord first.

Emoji and icons

It can save space and make the gamestate more readable if certain concepts are represented as icons rather than words. Historically we've had to upload images and make special templates to display these, but (I think) in more recent years it's become accepted that every player's browser will correctly render emoji, so emoji can just be dropped into the gamestate.

They can be used to track items or concepts in the game:

Street	Buildings
Auden Road	🏠🏢🏛️🏢🏗️
Blake Street	🏛️⛪🌳🏠🏠🏢
Coleridge Close	🏠🌳

They can also be used to condense the column widths of a table, or to squeeze supplementary information into existing space, where a legend is provided.

Player	Team	🏃‍➡️	🏋️‍♂️	🪨	🏅
Alice	Green ♛	7	8	7	2
Bob	Purple ♛	5	3	9	1
Chuck	Green	9	2	4	1

Legend: 🏃‍➡️ = Speed, 🏋️‍♂️ = Strength, 🪨 = Grit, 🏅 = Medals, ♛ = Captain

• The Individuals and Artefacts of the SCP dynasty used custom icon images to track types and extents of damage visually
• Zahndorf Crypt in the Vampire dynasty used icons in the cells of the grid map, to show what was present in each location
• The Duel Sheet of the Wizard Duel dynasty put a star next to the star counts, for emphasis
• Once Upon A Time in the Storytelling dynasty, tickbox emoji were used to show that things had been done
• The Puzzle Board of the Matching Symbols dynasty used fruit icons on both the board and the table headings, for easier cross-referencing.
• The Forest of the Gnome dynasty used emoji in column headers, with a legend.

Boxes and chips

Where there's a list of text elements, putting a {{box}} template around each element can make it easier to read the information at a glance, and to see where one starts and the next begins. It also gives a sense of the elements being similar to cards or tokens in a board game, in that they might be gained or lost.

Worker	Inventory
Alice	Angle grinder
Bob	Hammer Calipers Wrench
Chuck	Calipers Propane torch

The smaller {{letter}} template can be used for single-character inventories:

Player	Resources
Alice	B G G R W
Bob	B B B G
Chuck	S S W W W

• The Dead City of the Dead City dynasty used boxes for the factions and technologies of each district
• The Duel Sheet of the Wizard Duel dynasty put boxes around its achievement titles, some of which included commas
• The Atlantean City Plan in the Atlantean City dynasty used a custom version of the box template which showed who owned each building, the boxes being tilted and faded out when flooded
• Blackwater Bay in the Fishing dynasty used the {{chip}} template to mark players on the map grid
• The Inland Sea of the Freight Shipping dynasty used small, coloured "cube" boxes for its resources.
• The Red vs Blue of the Capture the Flag dynasty used a specialized {{Red vs Blue Map}} template to easily allow block and chip tokens to be moved around on a grid-like map.

Colour coding

Table cells and box templates can be colour-coded to communicate or highlight information, so long as it's agreed among active players that everyone is comfortably able to distinguish the colours.

Amulet of Yendor

Rusty athame

Swirly potion

Colours can also be used to brighten the place up a bit, possibly echoing the colour scheme of the blog. (Even the old GNDT, which had settings for its colour scheme, was often changed to match the blog.)

• Earthlink Tower in the Elevator dynasty displayed powered-up floors in yellow
• The Hall of Records in the Royal Succession dynasty colour-coded its three main tables so that lands were green and claims were yellow
• The Quiet Village of the Blizzard dynasty used the custom {{heat}} template to colour code each player's numerical Heat value, automatically highlighting various game-defined danger levels
• The Dead City of the Dead City dynasty colour-coded the cost of bought Innovations, with a legend beneath
• The Garret of the Thief dynasty colour-coded inventory items to make it clearer at a glance whether something was a tool, a treasure or a pouch
• The Town of the Break-In dynasty colour-coded some aspects to show the team that they applied to, and used a style for locations that matched the yellow circles on the game map.
• The Inland Sea of the Freight Shipping dynasty colour-coded each of its resources.
• The Race Log of the Wacky Races dynasty used colour-coded boxes and tables to make it easy to distinguish different types of Items, as well as the custom template:WackyItem to organize a list of Items horizontally.

Progress bars

The {{progress bar}} template can be used to give a numerical value more emphasis, where that value has an upper and lower bound. It can also make it easier to compare values at a glance to others.

  7/10 hull integrity  

• The Hall of Records in the Royal Succession dynasty used a progress bar to track the King's health
• The Graveyard in the Necromancer dynasty gave a vivid display of players' individual health values
• The Sublogical Genomics Laboratory in the Alien DNA dynasty used a progress bar to keep track of how many players had submitted orders
• The Snail Track of the Snail Racing dynasty used progress bars for player positions, to make them visually clear

Time and Date

• The {{deadline}} template can be used to turn a date and time red when that date and time have been reached.

 Example: 2024-08-23 10:12

• The {{HoursSince}} template (the capitalisation is important) can be used to calculate the number of hours since a date and time occurred, handy for knowing when to trigger actions based on the amount of time since a previous instance of that action was performed.

 Example: 22:34, 25 January 2026 (≥3101 hours ago)

Note that for these time-specific templates the wiki page may show an out-of-date cached version, but the sidebar embed on the blog front page will always be accurate. Adding &action=purge to the end of the URL for the wiki page will force the wiki's cache for that page to be purged (after clicking on OK to acknowledge the purge).

Images

The map of the Laboratory in the Alien DNA dynasty

Complex information can sometimes be best represented with an uploaded image, which can be included in the gamestate page. This is particular useful for maps, so long as the rules are able to describe how to unambiguously interpret that map: it can be easier to show visually which concepts are connected or adjacent to each other, than to try to describe this in text.

Images can also be used decoratively in the ruleset to illustrate concepts: the appendix notes that such an image "may not be considered to possess any meaning other than that given to it by ruletext".

• The Topology rule in the Great Flood dynasty included a (non-binding) diagram to show how terrain notation worked.
• Banewood Mansion in the Banewood Mansion dynasty had the map of the building tracked as an image, which was included in the gamestate page and updated by the Emperor whenever things changed
• The Overland Navigation rule in the Great Machine dynasty allowed adjacency between regions to be expressed as a simple map.

Line breaks

The {{-}} template can be used to put an optional linebreak point in a long player name or other word, to allow the browser to break the string at that point if it's trying to fit it into a table cell or token template.

For example, Wolfe{{-}}­schlegel{{-}}­stein­{{-}}hausen­{{-}}berger­{{-}}dorff and Anti{{-}}dis{{-}}establish{{-}}ment{{-}}arian{{-}}ism will render as:

Player	Politics
Wolfe​­schlegel​­stein­​hausen­​berger­​dorff	Anti​dis​establish​ment​arian​ism

In cases where you'd rather have a hyphen on the break, you can use ­ instead of {{-}}.

Table arrangement

Most gamestates tend to stack multiple tables vertically, but it's possible to arrange them horizontally and for them still to be legible in the sidebar.

• The Construction Site of the Jenga dynasty had the Jenga tower offset to the left of the gamestate page

Table subcolumns

Related table columns can be grouped together for legibility, and to perhaps make the heading titles easier to abbreviate.

Player	Ink			Score
	R	G	B
Alice	1	4	0	47
Bob	3	1	6	23
Chuck	7	5	3	8

• The Workshop in the Battlebots dynasty colour-coded its main table with subcolumns, to distinguish the Operator from the Bot
• The Isle of Multa in the Island Colony dynasty listed the five Domain types of each Settler as grouped subcolumns of "Domains"