A bad game [benlehman]

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Don't play this game.

Have a prime number of players greater than three. Seven is good. So's five. You could easily do 11 or 13. By the time you get to 17 or 19, wow.

Talk amongst yourselves.

After talking, everyone votes for a winner, secretly.

If one player gets the most votes, they win.

If there's a tie, all tied players are now ineligible to win (runners up, if any, are still contenders). Talk amongst yourselves, have another vote.

Repeat until there is a winner.

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There are 13 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

I am somehow reminded of high school.

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Why, you've invented Mafia!

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Really? I thought Mafia had different rules.

yrs--
--Ben

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I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not! It has different rules, but exactly the same mechanism, and the same outcome. This is why I hate Mafia.

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Ah, yes.

Any game can have these rules, with a sufficiently unpleasant play-culture.

Some games (Catan, and perhaps Mafia?) seem to breed these sorts of play cultures.

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Catan--which I don't play either--has at least a set of mechanics with which one can interact, in theory. But in Mafia the only way to play the game is through social engineering on real human beings, who are punished in the real world (by boredom) for failure to play well.

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Every board game I played in high school worked like this:
"If everyone agree on who is the most likely winner, that person loses immediately."

(We didn't have a nasty culture of play; just a naive one.)

-- Alex

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I think the effect is overstated for many board games, like Monopoly and Catan. In my experience, a winning player simply accelerates faster than other players can build up drag. There's only so much withholding you can do in these games, since trading is useful but not always necessary. Risk, on the other hand, seems like an elemental example.

For Catan, and Risk, there can be a breakpoint; identifying and decapitating leaders isn't sufficient as a winning strategy, after all, so you can move past that as a phase, if the game is fun enough that you want to bother with hit. I mean, the culture can progress, if it's worth the bother (and players are reflective).

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This seems very similar to "Relationship: The Unraveling" :)

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I hope for all your sakes that none of you actually believe you can stop playing this game.

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I'd like to think that it's possible to learn from past mistakes and apply them to future problems.

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Certainly - and I'd add that game designers who want to shape the game with subgames are engaged in something noble.

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I finally read what spawned this. I immediately think of, in a non-ironic way, "Rules exist to prevent bitterness between players" O.o.

It highlights the burnouts of a lot of rpg groups:

Lacking a functional set of rules AND lacking the understanding/tools to negotiate a set of rules out of them, plus a lot of self esteem riding on it, you end up with people applying social pressure left and right in a non-workable situation, and when fun still isn't happening, feeling betrayed and bitter.

The whole thing about my friend's group having a fistfight just went from dysfunctional-funny to dysfunctional tragic in my head.

Guh.

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benlehman

A bad game

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Ah, I see what you did there.

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May