Thing Ladder (designed for cloning and specialisation)

This post will make more sense in the context of Ning Things.

I shamelessly and hastily generalised from here (I need to check more sources of house rules, e.g. this one has a grid not a ladder, and the games must be longer for higher ranked players).

Description

The Thing Ladder is a list of people who all want to play a regular game of Thing, e.g. pool, darts, snooker, chess, draughts, connect 4 etc.

For now, Thing is just a two player game.

Rules

1. Any player may challenge another player up to N places above him/her, where N is set by the owner of the Ladder.
2. A challenge is determined by a M games of Thing (e.g. best of 3 in pool, 1 game of chess, etc), where M is set by the owner of the Ladder.
3. If a challenge is successful, the challenger takes the losers place, the loser and any players in between each move down one.
4. If a challenge is unsuccessful, the ladder remains unchanged.
5. A draw is to be considered an unsuccessful challenge.
6. The cost of the game is to be split between the two players (this is not about betting, or about getting free games of Thing for the best player).
7. Any players not on the ladder are considered unranked. New players may challenge the bottom K positions on the ladder, where K is set by the owner of the Ladder.
8. K may also be set to vary by availability (e.g. if a challengee declines, K++), or Ladder length.
9. Every J days/weeks/months, running scores for the Ladder will be calculated, and the Ladder will be reordered. One possible reordering method is:
   1. The player at the top will get P points, where P is the number of players on the Ladder.
   2. The 2nd placed player gets P-1, 3rd gets P-2, and so on.
   3. The top P/Q players will be drawn at random for the top P/Q places, the next P/Q will be drawn at random for the next P/Q places, and so on. Q is set by the owner of the ladder.
10. Refusal of challenges:
    1. A player may decline a new challenge for D days, but must either play or concede after that time.
    2. A player may decline a ‘repeat challenge’ (any challenge issued by the same person on the same day as a failed challenge) for 2D days, but must then play or concede after that time.

Bare Minimum Web Implementation

• Do email invites for challenges. With one-click accept/decline links.
• Email nag for results.
• Emailing in of results.
• Nicely printable board.

For Bonus Points

• One page config.
• One page invite.
• Add comments/photos/videos from each game of Thing.
• Add testimonials for each player (from other players).
• Add “ranks” for players to level up. Allow higher ranked players more time to decline (or less).
• Run tournament graph algorithms to work out the dominance relationships between players who never play each other.
• Extend to X-player games (e.g. Scrabble, Monopoly).
• Add betting, for places where it’s legal.
• Add profile photos (link to other apps? Geocode?).
• Add venue data (link to other apps? Geocode?).
• Email digests of results.
• Do RSS feeds for results.
• SMS notification of challenges.
• Accept SMS for results.
• Promote its use in a few pubs, especially if they have wifi and a pool table.
• Seed the app with a night in the The Elbow Room (or favourite pool hall of your choice).
• Add an optional tournament module where seedings are taken from point rankings.