I sort of thought of this when I was in the chats today when someone was mentioning some ideas about using villagers in a sort of monster game. But I was thinking along the same lines, but having the game be like a super quick strategy game, where after each round, the person with the least amount of villagers and kicked out, and it just goes and goes until nobody is left. I thought it would be pretty simple to have it be like super go-fish, where the cards would be things like food industry: fishing, etc etc. and what not (just so it sort of fits the villiage idea) and whenever you guess wrong you lose a villager to that person, and whenever you guess right you take someones villager.
The idea I have seems pretty much as simple as it can get, so maybe it's not so much a strategy game by regular standards, but I thought it could be a really cool game to have like 12, maybe even 20 people playing and having just so many different types of cards to guess for so when it got down to the last few people it would be like going back and forth until someone eventually lost. (maybe when it got down to 4 people it would go in 2 rounds, then at 2 people 4 rounds, so it plays out more fair).
Anyone like the idea or have any thoughts?
Flash Strategy Game Idea
My very first thought is that you might have trouble rounding up 20 people to play a session.
~Josh
Hey, I'm always up for the trying of new things.
Is it an elimination game? If so, the first guy out is going to have to do a lot of waiting around before the next game starts up again. I would be interested to see how you can put together a working MMCCG.. Massive Multiplayer Collectible Card Game... it could be the birth of a whole new genre!
Even 16 players sounds like a lot to me, and difficult to manage, but I have no doubt that a good and coherent system that is fun can be put together with a little work... this becomes more of a party game than anything, I think, but ain't nothin wrong with that!
~Josh
Elimination as a game mechanic is not very common in modern games because it means that people sit on their hands, waiting for the game to end. Monopoly, Go Fish, these are games that were developed quite a long time ago.
These days you do sometimes see elimination, but generally only in games that take a total or 30 minutes or less, 20 minutes being even better.
So it's worth thinking about, anyway.
-- Matthew
But what if it really were a party game... something designed so that it's not the focus of the event...
Say everyone shows up at your house for a night of smoking cigarettes and eating cheese doodles... you hand them their deck of 4-5 cards when they walk in the door, and there's a big fat copy of the rules posted where everyone can see it, if they care.
The game takes place over the night, however long doesn't matter and there's no such thing as turn order...
People can walk up to each oher and challenge... a declined challenge means the handing over of 1 card, and that person cannot be challenged by you again for some time/event limit TBD.
Accepted challenge results in the playing out of the game (whatever it is, some duelling mechanic that takes a few minutes at most for a moderate-sized hand) and the loser ends up, by way of the duel, with zero cards in his/her hand. Eliminated. He or she goes back to smoking cigarettes and eating cheese doodles. The party goes on... maybe there's some betting/voting structure whereby eliminated players can support their favourite remaining player and get revenge on the bastard that did them in.
But they're out, and that's not so bad in the "party" situation... people wander around and do everything they would have done anyway, chat booze, throw up under the rug, you know, the usual. Eventually it will get down to two players, vying for all the cheese doodles, and the winner gets to lick the bowl. (mmmm...neon orange dust....)
I think it could work... the sting of elimination isn't so bad when the game isn't the only focus of the event... If it's designed and presented as a party game, then there's possibilities there.....
~Josh
You could make it so the people who get eliminated play a separate role. Like they can play cards from another deck and mess with the players still in the game. This would be a nice variant on the elimination theme if you could work it out.
You could make it so the people who get eliminated play a separate role. Like they can play cards from another deck and mess with the players still in the game. This would be a nice variant on the elimination theme if you could work it out.
That occurred to me too, hence my betting/voting tack-on... Nestalawe has been doing a lot of thinking about how to keep eliminated players involved in and interested in an elimination game... check his Pirates of Cannibal Island thread for some ideas on the topic...
~Josh
I think you are on to something worth pursuing. There are not many games available that can handle 10+ players. At my last Christmas party, we invited 20+ people and I attempted to create a huge group game based on Survivor, but it never materialized because the game was going to be too complex to explain and implement for that large of a group.
Whatever you design for that large of a group has to be simple and involve a large social element. The game that comes to mind is Werewolf, (I knew it as Mafia). However, it eventually comes down to who is the best lier and some people have issues with this, so I did not think it appropriate for a Christmas party.
I wound up splitting up the group into 4 smaller groups for the gaming portion of the party, but if there was an appropriate game for a lot of players, I would be interested.
I have friends who hold parties like OL describes, with a game that goes for the entire evening and involves everyone, but casually. They invent a new game for each party. I can certainly imagine others wanting to buy such a beast.
On games for 10+, Werewolf is really great (best with 12+).
-- Matthew
The best game I know for large-ish groups that are very mixed* is Haggle (the first printed description was in Sid Sackson's A Gamut of Games, I think.)
The great thing about it is that you can be as active or as passive as you wish, and it runs alongside everything else.
Basically, it's a complex logic puzzle type of thing: everyone gets a random pool of cards plus one or two "rules". At a certain point, everyone hands in their final pool of cards, and they are scored according to the complete ruleset. (e.g. one rule says that Hearts are worth 3; another rule says that Hearts count double if you have any Clubs; and a third says that if you have more than one Club, all other cards are worthless; so you really need to know all of those rules not to get caught out. etc.)
So players have to negotiate amongst themselve to try and acquire what they think will be the best scoring hand, both by exchanging specific cards and by learning what the other rules are.
And the game doesn't get screwed completely if there are some people who don't want to play, because the game is fluid enough to cope with that.
It requires some preparation work (and someone who is prepared to do the tedious scoring at the end!) but I can certainly confirm that it is a remarkably good participatory game that can run alongside lots of other things without getting in the way.
(*I certainly endorse the suggestion of Werewolf/Mafia for groups that can handle it, as it's one of the best group psychology games around. And for people who fancy something a little more active, I can seriously recommend Hollywood Lives, which is that rare beast: a Reiner Knizia party-game! It's a sort of basic level live-action role-playing game but it's so much more than that.)
Arconna,
I've been wondering, since you only mentionned Go Fish so far. Have you played the recent crop of "Designer/Euro/German" games?
Sure,
http://www.boardgamegeek.com (BoardGameGeek) is your one stop for all boargames. It might be a bit confusing at first because there's so much content. Check out the GeekLists, the Top10.
The classic introduction game is Settlers of Catan. There's also Carcassonne which is really popular. And recently, Ticket to Ride is the big hit as getting a broad audience.
I am a fan of strategy games, and one thing for sure a 12+ player game could be really cool, but the rules need to be really simple to accelerate the game play.
lol, well I know. I did some math on it and really it's only logical to do maybe 16 people at the most because any more than that and the amount of cards needed to keep things fresh is insane. So I thought a 100 card deck with 25 sets of 4. Point being, it can be a game done with 4 people, or 8 people, or 12 people, and even 16, it leaves it really open for large groups, and the game itself would go really quick. I did a lot of little workings with it in my head and I think it would be an eat idea to try.