sandpit #1
Hide and seek games festival held a games playtesting night in shunt this week.
Me and Duncan drove up and made a long day of it. The event itself lasted about 5 hrs or rather we lasted about 5hrs before we had to split. during that time we played lots of games inc the gossip game , texas hold me, Mudlarking With Francis Barking, some paper based games I forget the name of and lots of games of werewolf a variation on the mafia game .
The gossip game was a lot of fun but the most striking thing for me was the playing style of the wining player. The game sets up an environment where players have some conflicting and some mutual interests. There are several different relationships you have with the other players. People you’d like to protect people you’d like to eject from the game and people you have some dirt on. you can either choose to be conniving and secretive or open and cooperative. almost everyone defaulted to being sneaky. But the chap who one from the outset said ok what do you want to know, and was openly sharing all the information he could access with anyone who wanted it. A triumph for the cooperative behavior model. except of course that the first thing he did was to eliminate his arch enemy.
Texas hold me is a kind of physical poker game the rules pretty much explain the game play. I would really like to play this again with a betting round built in. It would make all the poker face practice i did worthwhile.
Mudlarkin involved a walk down to the thames and then a spot of beach combing. We were looking for medium sized chalk rocks with the rock paper scissors symbols painted on them. once you found one you could challenge a player from the other side to a game. Normal rock paper scissors rules applied with two variations. You were playing with big lumps of chalk and not your hands and there was one rock that had a river symbol on it. River symbol beats all. It was late by the time we played this and people became unwilling to walk to the river beach(or to leave their drinks) this meant there were not enough people playing. only four people on each team. this made it al a bit to easy. But there was a surprise game of tug of war to spice the end of the game up and then we all shared whiskey and cakes.
The different games of werewolf were so completely different it was amazing. The games masters role had a lot to do with this. one of the games masters was dressed in a harlequin body suit and *performed* his role like a ham genius. During one of the games the tensions were so high they exceeded that which you could easily say was playful. Somrthing about this game really gets to the core of the people playing. Its a contemporary classic.
All in all it was a fantastic night. the games being playtested were all pretty successful. Excepting that the paint used to paint the rock paper scissors symbols on to the rocks for mudlarking was still wet and Duncan ended up with a coat full of it, the night was perfect. A great start to what i hope will be a great monthly event. Big up to sandpit.
/simon
