Acrophobia: The Fear of Acronyms

A Toady mod that can run Acrophobia games on multiple channels simultaneously.

Install

Install into a Toady instance with:

./ribbit install acrophobia

or right inside of IRC with:

!ribbit install acrophobia

Then view the commands with:

!viewmod acrophobia

Gameplay

The game starts with the bot providing a random acronym to the room, such as "BBS". The population of the room is then invited to submit phrases that would match that acronym. For the next minute, players submit things like "Bulletin Board System" and "Bluth Banana Stand".

Once the time limit is up, each user's submission is shown next to a number. The channel is invited to vote for their favorite submission, and points are awarded based on the winning answer, who answered fastest, and who voted for the winning answer.

This process repeats, with a varying number of letters in the acronym, until the first player hits 30 points. At that time, the top two players on the scoreboard enter the Face-Off round. In the face-off, the players are given 3 acronyms and 30 seconds to answer each through private messages. As they answer, the rest of the room votes to determine the overall winner of the game.

Config options

Acrophobia runs great with default settings right out of the box, but can be tweaked heavily. To do so, open your server's .yaml file from Toady's config folder, and add the following section with any settings you'd like to override. The values given below are the defaults.

mod_acrophobia:
  # The pool of characters from which to pull letters when creating
  # acronyms.  The more a letter appears, the more likely it will be to
  # get chosen.  Note that all letters MUST be uppercase.
  charPool: AAAABBBBCCCCDDDDEEEEEFFFFGGGGHHHHIIIIJJKKLLLLMMMMNNNNOOOPPPPQQRRRSSSSTTTTUVVWWXYYZ
  # The number of letters at which to start the first face-off round
  faceOffMinLetters: 3
  # The number of rounds within the face-off phase of the game
  faceOffRounds: 3
  # The minimum number of letters for acros in a normal round
  minLetters: 3
  # The maximum number of letters for acros in a normal round
  maxLetters: 7
  # The number of points to be reached before face-off starts
  pointCap: 30
  # The number of points awarded for voting for the winning answer
  pointsVoteForWinner: 1
  # The number of points awarded for being the fastest answer that earned
  # a vote
  pointsFastestWithVote: 2
  # The number of seconds to wait after voting results are shown
  secsAfterResults: 7
  # The number of seconds to wait between game messages from the bot
  secsBetweenMessages: 5
  # The number of seconds to wait between normal game rounds
  secsBetweenRounds: 7
  # The number of seconds to allow for answering acros in normal rounds
  secsPerAcroRound: 60
  # The number of seconds to allow for voting in normal rounds
  secsPerVoteRound: 30
  # The number of seconds to allow for answering acros and voting in
  # a face-off round
  secsPerFaceOffRound: 30
  # The number of seconds to wait between face-off rounds
  secsBetweenFaceOffRounds: 2

Using the new Config module added to Toady 0.3.0, some config options can now be changed on the fly. Owners and SuperUsers can now type !viewmod acrophobia to see a listing of these options.

Credits

Acrophobia for Toady was written by Tom Frost in 2013.