This is basically a big game that takes the prisoner’s dilemma construct and applies it to love, loosely. The game can accommodate as many players as your heart desires (pun intended) and probably still work with as few as 8 or 9 people. I plan to premiere this game in the 2009 Come Out and Play Festival which will be June 12 – 14 in New York City. Hopefully my game will take place in Central Park, weather permitting (backup: Grand Central Station).
How It Works:
Players are given a scorecard with 6 hearts, 3 levels of heart temperatures, their personality type (a number), and a place to track how many hearts they broke.
Throughout the game, players will approach one another in front of a judge and they can do one of two things: find out if the other is the their true love match OR they can break the other’s heart. The player who breaks the most hearts AND finds their true love wins the game.
Any player that has all six of their hearts broken is eliminated. Any player who’s core heart temperature falls into the blue is frozen until a 4th player suffers the same fate. The player can then return to the game at full heart warmth.
Built on a prisoner’s dilemma construct, Heartbreak challenges players to develop a strategy that involves elements of trust, backstabbing, and/or a mix of the two.
Rules:
1. When players both flip “true love,” they judge will compare codes to see if they’re a match. There is no penalty for not making a match.
2. When only one player flips “true love,” this player will have his heart broken.
3. When both players flip “break heart,” they will both have their hearts temperatures lowered.
This is a game I made up over a decade ago to entertain myself when alone on a basketball court — just me, a ball, and a hoop. I played it again this past weekend and realized I should really share it:
The idea is that you have to beat the game in 6 rounds by scoring/surpassing a certain amount of points. The 1st round you have to score 5 points, 2nd round 10, 3rd round 15… and so on until the last round you have to score at least 30. A 3 point shot is worth 3 points… all the normal scoring methods of bball apply. The trick is this: every round begins with a 3 pointer — if it goes in, you shoot another and continue until you miss. When you do miss, you have to rush to the rebound and shoot from wherever you grab the ball. As soon as you score you return to 3 point line, all the while adding your points. The kicker is that you can only miss three total shots per round… and once you do you’re given a free throw where you can make as many as you can until you miss your first one. If you haven’t scored the minimum assigned to that round after the three misses and the missed free throw, well then you lose.
This is great training for any jump shooter… because most people lose their legs by the 3rd or 4th round and it teaches you how to maintain form as exhaustion approaches, especially from the free throw line.
The Box, aka Avalanche, is a card game using an original deck of cards that is played with an even number of players (4 to 10 can play). I designed this game with Teo Fernandez and Dave Spector at ITP in the Fall of 2006. The game is essentially in the vein of the card game UNO, except on steroids and offers a bit more strategy. The premise of The Box is to win rounds with a partner, but win the game by yourself. This mechanic alone creates some delicious moments of backstabbing. You see, even in mid-round you can trade your partner, or trade yourself for another player on another team. The game is played in an elimination style way so that the last team of two standing each round gets a point. The first player with four points wins the game.
Victory Mechanics has plans to build this card game into an XBox Live arcade game, since it offers a social aspect and is easy to learn. Look for this sometime in 2009.
Ministry of Silence, or M.O.S. as it’s referred to in mid-game, is a BIG game (or urban game or street game) that is played inside a bookstore… the bigger the better, and preferably with security. Luckily New York City has lots of these, and of the two times I’ve run this game we have been lucky enough to have never been kicked out of a store. That’s part of the joy of putting together a guerrilla game like this: not only are we repurposing an existing environment for the game play, but we’re taking over a commercial space and turning it into the playing field.
Ministry of Silence is a game for 12 people. The premise is that 9 of the players are given ID cards, each owning a unique clue to solving the mystery behind the game: namely “how do you win?” To make a long story short, the players will need to gather many of the clues to be able to solve that puzzle. Each ID card has a specific number on it, numbers one through nine. The main mechanic of the game is that numbers can only talk to one digit away, meaning a player who has the ID of number six can only “legally” speak to numbers five and seven (one below and one above, with numbers nine and one being connected). The three other players who aren’t given a numbered ID card begin the game as M.O.S. officers. These players try to hunt down players that are standing to close to a number that they shouldn’t be (say a six standing within five feet of a number two). If an M.O.S. officer catches two players standing this close who shouldn’t be, the officer can decide to trade rolls with either player. This would mean the officer could take the number six card (along with that unique clue) and the six player would now be an officer
My favorite part of this game is watching the players negotiate the bookstore while being watched by the M.O.S. officer who are being watched by the bookstore security. So far in both games, the player who has won has been the player that kept the lowest profile and even hid from other players.
This game was originally conceived in Frank Lantz’s Big Games class at ITP. Bob Clark also helped design the game and often serves as one of many actors embedded in the game play. This game appeared in the 2008 Come Out and Play Festival.
As seen and experienced in the 2008 Come Out & Play Festival, Metrophile originally debuted back in the Fall of 2007 in Frank Lantz’s Big Games class at ITP. I designed the game along with Kate Hartman, Leah Gilliam, Derek Stoops, and Scott Varland.
Frank Lantz Gets Excited
Metrophile is a game for three teams of at least 7 players on each. The teams compete to capture subway train cars between stations. Each train car has a referee on it to take score. The train cars are worth different amounts of points with the central most car of the line being worth the most. From there, each car is worth slightly less as they are removed from the center. A team captures a car by placing a majority of players on the car, which it to say if the blue team has 4 players in the car, the red team 2 and the white team 1, then the blue team would be rewarded for that train’s points. Anytime there is a tie, no team gets points.
The game has a halftime where players exit the train to receive a tally of points. At this point, teams can adjust strategy. The more players the game has, the more fun it seems to be. People seem to run between the cars once the doors open at each stop, avoiding strangers going about their commute. If a player doesn’t get on a train car and the doors close, then they are naturally eliminated from the game.
Player in mid-game Metrophile
If you would like to run this game yourself, feel free to contact me. I have all of the rules and materials you need to get it going, including headbands and clipboards and referee shirts.
Cage Match has become one of my friends’ favorite games. I have to give credit to my lawyer friend David Hoffman for helping me refine the concept, but it basically goes like this: Cage Match is a three player game, with one of the three serving as a moderator. The other two go head-to-head in a best-of-seven match… not fighting to the death, but rather naming things that would win in a cage match fight to the death. It’s the moderator’s role to name a category at the beginning of each round, and then the players name something that falls within that category that would win in the cage match. The moderator then judges the responses and picks a winner. Now here’s the best part of the game: if a player disagrees with the judge’s decision, they can ask any stranger in the bar for their opinion — and this opinion will serve as the supreme decision. This element turns Cage Match into a wonderful social game and a great way to meet new people.
For an example of actual game play, consider the following round: the moderator asked the players to name “something that is red.” The first player responded with “fire truck,” which is a pretty solid answer until you consider the second player’s response: “the soviet union.” You can probably guess who won that round.
Witness Tree is an Alternate Reality Game I made for Greg Trefry’s ARG class while I was at ITP. Greg is the gy who started the Come Out & Play Festival which has been nominated for the 2008 Diana Jones Award for excellence in gaming.
The idea behind Witness Tree is pretty simple: I wanted to create an ARG that was more game like, that was all encompassing, and that didn’t require a rabbit hole to start playing. I also wanted a game that could be played by anyone, at anytime — not something space and time specific. So the form that I found to these functions was the blog form. In character, I created a blog to document the weird dreams the character was having related to a graveyard he had visited in the real world. It’s through these dreams and blog posts that a riddle is revealed that leads to a treasure. The story is told in 8 chapters along with 15 other brief posts. Give it a try and see if you can solve the logic puzzle.
Political Capital is a 3 player game that explores electoral strategy. The original version was made for the tabletop but is currently under production to be released as an online, multiplayer video game in the Fall of 2008 by Victory Mechanics. Political Capital is not a simulation of running for President, rather it’s very much a game in the vein of Risk where a player must manage the resources of time and money while forming strategic alliances with opponents.
The Conveyor Player game that I helped produce and design along with Tim Stutts is now up and ready to be downloaded at InclusiveGames.com. Amit Pitaru (our teacher at ITP) designed the site so that children hospitals all over the world could have access to these games that are meant for disabled children. Every game on the site incorporates the pragmatic, inclusive design approach that Amit preaches. The games work with either switches, touchscreens, mouses, keyboards, or some simply by movement. Here’s a video of The Conveyor Player in action:
