A bad game

[benlehman]

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.

Comments

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

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.

Ah, I see what you did there.

[xorphus.livejournal.com]

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.

[alexpshenichkin.livejournal.com]

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

[yurodivuie.livejournal.com]

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).