Blog - Weekly Game 7: Casually Devious
Tuesday, April 21, 2009Introduction: In this party game, players attempt to complete secret missions during the course of their normal conversation and behavior, all while preventing opponents from completing their missions.
Players: 2+
(game meant to be played with a group of people at a small, casual party setting)
Materials:
-index cards or paper
-pen/pencil
Setup:
On index cards (or small, identical slips of paper) everyone should write down 1"mission" for another player to complete during the next 15 minutes of the party.
These are the mission cards.
Example missions could include:
-"Get someone at the party to bring you a drink"
-"Get someone at the party to tell you what time it is."
-"Change the channel on the TV."
-"Enter and Exit the bathroom."
-"Make at least 2 people laugh simultaneously"
-"Tell a story involving a school bus."
etc.
Once all players have created a mission card, have one player collect all the mission cards, and after shuffling them face-down distribute one random mission card to each player.
Once all players have their mission cards, begin a new round of play, which lasts 15 minutes.
How to Play:
At any time within the 15 minute round, a player can attempt to complete the secret mission they have written down on their card.
If the mission was completed successfully, the player announces that their mission has been completed, and reveals their mission card, which is kept as one "point" of score.
Once under suspicion that another player is attempting to complete a secret goal, players cannot touch, trap or bind the opposing player in any way when attempting to stop that player's completion of a goal. The only way of completely stopping a player is to make an accusation against that player.
Making an Accusation:
If a player thinks they know what another player's secret mission is, that player may make an accusation at the risk of losing their own mission card.
The accusing player must declare their accusation to all players, stating what they think the accused player's mission is. The accused player must then reveal to all players their mission card.
- If the accusation was correct (the accused player's mission was approximately what the accusing player stated) then the accusing player collects the accused player's mission card as their own point.
- If the accusation was incorrect then the accused player gets to collect the accusing player's mission card as a point!
Group consensus shall be used in case of doubt as to whether the accusation can be considered accurate or valid. If no consensus can be reached, the accusing player is given the benefit of the doubt and earns the mission card as a point.
End of a Round:
Once the 15 minutes are up, players can decide if they want to play another round.
If so, new mission cards can be created to replace the ones that were collected as points. Once the new mission cards are distributed, another 15 minute round begins.
Mission cards collected as points are kept as an indication of total score.
Winning the Game:
The player with the most mission cards collected as points when all players have decided to cease play is the winner.
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Designing the game:
I thought it'd be interesting to do a party game, and thought the idea of blending the game play into what players are already doing at the party was an interesting twist.
As I've mentioned before, I really like working with hidden information in my designs, and this can clearly be seen in the design of Casually Devious.
It's a completely last minute addition, but I really like the way the missions are created and distributed (each player creates one mission, and players get a randomly selected mission from the entire set created by all players) because it means your particular mission is only known by you and the original player who created it, which could be hypothetically the same person.
This leaves what most missions even are completely unknown to most players, and as the missions are designed to be blended into the normal behavior of the players, one has to question any activity the players are engaging in as a part of the game even if the action was not intended to be.
It allows players to still be free to engage in normal interactions/behaviors at the party, but makes all of those activities a part of game.
Because this game is so open ended, this was another game that needed a tie-breaker system of some kind. I like to try to tie such systems to the other mechanics/materials used in the game itself. For example, in Pennies and Dimes, a game played mostly with coins, the tie breaking mechanic was the flip of a coin. So, for this game, I decided to use group consensus since the game is meant to be played at a party, with a large group of people, and meant to be a very social game. (Again, the mechanics of this game are entirely built around the social behavior players are normally engaging in at a party.)
I feel this one is still pretty rough and messy and could use some play testing and more iteration to clean up the clunkier elements of the design.
Labels: weekly game
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 10:47 PM
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