Family (Tree) game?

Hi Tom,

Thankyou for the comments you are most kind (and thanks to Scurra to for the introduction).

I've put the ruleset for 6-Degrees on my homepage at http://www.geocities.com/daveman_uk/board_games.html

[Backstory] One of Scurra's playtesters and good friend of ours, Paul, told me a few months ago about his very wide family tree in terms of multiple uncles, aunts, and cousins. I quipped that it would make an interesting game to 'chart' such a tree indefinately given that, eventually, everyone should be at most 6 degrees of separation from each other (i.e. any one person knows everyone else in the world through 6 steps of relationships, e.g. friend, father, boss, hairdresser, internet chat buddy, etc. :) Within a week I had brought to the playtest group a deck of cards, half of which were characters and the other half were relationships. A simple set of rules governed how each player could place cards from their hand onto the table thus forming relationships between existing and newly placed characters. The end result was something you'd find on the Jerry Springer Show with bizarre family groups, unlikely marriages, and implied characters to fill in the 'missing person' gaps. Based on the high humour factor, with strategy hiding around the corner if you wanted to use it, we concluded that it fit the bill of a cheapass Xmas party game :)

The changes from v.1 to v.2 are concerned with the scoring system as it was apparent that the wildcard relationships of '..are friends..' were too easy to place for the same points as a more specific '..is the grand-father of..'.

Best wishes,
Dave W.

Oh, I don't know. Blood Royale could be a lot of fun with the right group of players, a spare weekend and (as you say) a lot of space. (Not as much fun as its predecessor, Warrior Knights though.)

There's a game with a French aristocracy theme (name completely escapes me!) which has marriages in it, and uses the similar trick of following a family, so that if your current character dies, you take over as their child (but, of course, no longer married to the person you were married to etc.)

That mechanic clearly still has potential.

The game is called Courtisans from Tilsit. The rules should be available to the public. (Maybe in French only).

It was also called Aristotle in the far past about 10 years ago. Not a family tree game per say, but very long when playing 6 players.