Blog - Fun With Time Pressure

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

An old trick for making game play more emotionally intense is to add time pressure.

As a fun example, my sister and I for a brief time enjoyed a variant of chess we invented, and it used this technique. The core rules remained the same, although we did experiment with new starting locations of the pieces. For the most part, however, it was the normal game of chess but with one new rule:
For every 1 second you had not yet moved one of your pieces on your turn, your opponent was entitled to slap you in the face.


It turns chess into a rather different game.
Analysis Paralysis is long gone, replaced with panicked, rash decision making.
The anger and fear of being slapped tumbles together with your amusement at the hilariously stupid moves you're making to avoid the slaps. We also blasted high bpm trance music to keep the energy levels high and the heart racing. It's a strange roller-coaster of emotions all at once.

I don't know if too many more people are insane enough to try it, but at least it amused me. And yes, we actually did play this more than once. :)

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 1:42 AM  0 Comments Links to this post