Lou Anders has announced a new contest related to Mike Resnick’s forthcoming novel, Starship: Pirate.

Now, if you’ll excuse a tiny spoiler, in Starship: Pirate, one of the characters introduces the crew of the Teddy R. to a wildly popular, presumably alien game called “bilsang,” said to be as “a game that makes chess and toprench look like kid’s games.” Mike describes some of the aspects of the game, but leaves the actual rules up to the reader’s imagination.

Now, because I thought it was a pretty nifty idea last time, we are running some fairly extensive appendices in the back of each of the Starship books. And when I came to the passage about bilsang, I thought, what a good appendix a set of bilsang rules would make.

So, that brings us to the contest.

We’re looking for some brilliant, talented gamers with time on their hands to have a go at creating the rules of bilsang. …