This is really just a little idea I've tried to figure out conceptually and I'm not quite satisfied with what I've come up with so far. So the general layout is the same as the larger game. You have two rooms, two teams, one side is trying to kill the VIP of the other side. The two player version of this game would take away the sort of not knowing who is on your team aspect of the game. Each player will know all of the people on their side. At a high level, this is a little like Stratego (I even thought prototyping with it would be a good idea). The idea being that both players have a number of pieces in both rooms (probably some rule about keeping the numbers balanced). The gameplay would involve using the powers of individual pieces to both figure out who is who and to move pieces around. The trick being that using a power reveals that piece, giving information to your opponent. So the VIP player is trying to find and possibly remove the assassin(s) and the assassin player is trying to figure out where the VIP is to kill them.
So given that high level concept, here's various specific details I've mulled over.
Bomber Version: The bomber player would have to choose a room the bomb is in during setup. The bomber needs to be in the same room for it to go off. It would probably be after a certain number of rounds or some other condition. I don't want the bomb going off round one turning the game into a coin flip.
No Bomb Version: Even though it's based off a game with a boom, this could be replaced with individual assassins. Basically, characters that can only kill one other character. This would help drive the search/reveal aspect of the game more.
NPCs: I think it would help if there was a certain amount of characters that have no powers at all, just neutral pieces. Each player would place half of these and they would know the ones they placed.
Character Powers:
Switch two characters in two different rooms.
Bring a character to the other room.
Pull a character into your room.
Reveal an enemy character. (possibly blocking their power)
Take the place of a friendly character when they are targeted by a power and in the same room.
VIP Player:
-Remove an enemy character from the game.
-Bomb technician can disarm the bomb if in the same room.
-Find out which room the bomb/assassin is in.
Assassin Player:
-Kill an enemy character in the same room.
-Bomber has to be in the same room as the bomb for it to trigger.
-Find out which room the VIP is in.
A lot of the 2R1B game roles are around misinformation and giving people custom objectives, so most of them don't translate well. You could, however, use some of these to change the larger objective. Maybe instead of killing the VIP, you simply have to reveal two specific people and have them be in the same room. I also thought this might be fun as a four player game (2 per team) where you could get into each player not having all the information again.
The number of people in a room would be fairly low to make the cost of revealing one of them mean something. If I have 10 people in a room and reveal one, I still have 9 secret people. If I only have 4 people in a room then each reveal is significant. Sure there is some chance involved, but my hope is that you'd be able to play mind games. Like the players knew that the assassin and VIP were both in room 1. The blue player just moved someone from 1 to 2. Did they move the VIP? Was it a ploy? The red player attempts to reveal a blue character and the bodyguard blocks the reveal and is revealed instead. Was that original target the VIP? Things like that. Anyway, feel free to brainstorm around this concept if you want.
