Hi!
I know it's not really a board game, but I'd love some feedback on a game I've been working on. It's designed to be played with a large group of people (15+) over a long time (a week +) My friends and I have done one playtest with 24 people over 3 weeks.
So I had a bunch of 6 puzzle piece kind of things that would fit together to make a cube. Starting the game, I gave one piece in secret to six people. I sent the 24 of us off with the following rules:
-Keep any pieces you have on your person
-Anyone with at least one piece can 'challenge' another player. (Saying 'I challenge ')
-If the challenged player has any pieces, they must give them all to the challenger.
-Otherwise, the challenger must give all their pieces to the challenged player.
The game worked pretty well, and several strategies emerged. Many people formed alliances, where someone who was revealed to have pieces would tranfer them to someone with none for safekeeping.
Many people spread misinformation about who had pieces and how many, (eg so-and-so has 5 pieces) to try and bait people into believing there were only two players left, and lose their pieces in challenges.
However, it did tend to stagnate a little bit. People talked about it a lot but didn't do a lot of challenging after the first week. Or maybe they did, and I just didn't see them. Who knows.
In the end, it worked well as a fun game about trust, lying, and information. What do you guys think? Questions? Comments? Advice?
Thanks for your comments!
I totally forgot to mention that the aim is to collect all of the pieces. If you have all of them, you win. There possibly could be a prize, shareable by the winner in the way they choose.
Players leaving: I think that players should be allowed to leave, if they give their pieces to someone else. If they can't do that, then I guess they'd have to inform the people running the game that they'd be playing with one less piece. Either that or the gamerunners randomly give someone a new piece. I think leaving should be permanent to prevent fuckery.
In all of these cases, there has to be a list of all the players which is easily accessible and updateable.
This list could also be used to keep track of elimination, ie cross off names as people are knocked out.
I like Zag's idea of a pieceless challenge a lot, at the risk of being eliminated. However I'm not sure about the time restriction. Perhaps a rephrasing:
"You can only make a pieceless challenge if you haven't had any pieces in your possession for X amount of time/ since last midnight"
This makes it so people losing their pieces still have to wait to get back in the game, but if they get a piece some other way before then, they can get right back.
In terms of getting the ball rolling, MC's idea of giving the players more information looks great, but I don't know about giving it all to one player, and instead give a little bit of info to everyone.
Here's my idea: at regular intervals, everyone gets together. Everyone writes down their name and the number of pieces they have on some paper. The papers are shuffled and one given to each player. This gives:
-more tools for the people with no pieces to play with
-concrete opportunities for misinformation and lying
-more information for people to trade
-an event after which a ton of action will probably happen
Is this too much information to give?
Should there be a buffer of time between when the papers are written and when they're distributed?
Is the downside of being exposed as a pieceholder worth the upside of gaining more pieces? (In the case of a very public challenge)
Should the pieceless challenge ability be revoked for a while in the wake of this incident?