Charlie--
--not sure whether this suggestion best belongs here, or under the "ideas for new variants", but how about a feature for the classical scholars among us - apterous in Latin? There appears to be a suitable wordlist at
http://users.erols.com/whitaker/wordsoth.htm (download LISTALL.zip from this page), which doesn't seem to need much editing other than removing the proper nouns.
Also, to make things more "authentic", I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to code the numbers games in Latin as well (if you'd be interested in doing so)? Obviously you could just do this by changing all the standard large and small numbers to their Latin equivalents (i.e. the big numbers would be C, LXXV, L and XXV, and the target would come up as e.g. DCCXCI), and you would have to type your solution in the Notes box using the Roman Numerals rather than modern-day numbers. Or you could use the numbers mouse interface as normal, but with all the calculations and buttons displayed in Roman numerals.
Alternatively, to make a new "Latin Numbers" variant entirely, the big numbers would be M, D, C and L (1000, 500, 100 and 50 respectively), and the small numbers would be X, V and I (6 of each of X, V and I gives 18 small numbers to pick from). Now, due to the greatly decreased likelihood of exact solutions being achievable for this numbers set, I suggest that you might offer 8, rather than 6, numbers to work with, although the target would still be in the range CI to CMXCIX (101 to 999, if I've got that right). The player may only pick 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 large.
Of course, offering 8 small numbers for Latin Normal Numbers begs the question: how many numbers to deal if some hardcore nutcase wants to play Latin Junior Numbers or Latin Hyper Numbers? Maybe it would be best to stick to 6 numbers after all, although this would lead to a lot of numbers games being extremely difficult to solve (at least until Craig Chittenden manages to max the format
).
Any thoughts?
--Matt
PS Credit for the numbers idea goes to my mate Dave.
