Every year I attend a holiday in Wales for home-educating (home-schooling) families. It is held at Cefn Lea, a conference centre in mid-Wales (see http://www.cefnlea.co.uk/ for details of the area). Generally, some people organize big wide-games in the woods, i.e. Capture the Flag, Haggis Bandits etc. These are a lot of fun, but I'd really like to organize a game that runs around the buildings and the rest of the area well (perhaps not the whole area - it's rather big. The games we tend to play are fairly simple, and don't involve too much preparation (score sheets are okay). Are there any games here that are like that? Bear in mind something like Poets vs. Policemen would be far too complicated. There is generally about 300+ people there at the event during the week. Thanks, Pe-ads
Looking down the list of games here, we've got a few that could comfortably take fifty players in a large enough environment:-
Checkpoint is a great, simple game if you can get some props together - players just have to smuggle junk and furniture from one point to another, without the "guards" spotting them. (If you've got a lot of furniture on-site, just pool some interesting items within the starting area - if you need to distinguish it from "real" furniture, put some point-scoring stickers on it.)
Day of the Thing can be fairly prop-light, if you just use a deck of playing cards (red numbers for the radio, red face cards for guns, black face cards for blood tests, and black number cards for infections) and don't mind spending ten minutes hiding a few cards around the place beforehand.
Holla-Lulu just requires a few slips of paper, and players who are enthusiastic about making silly noises.
Hunt the Scavenger adds a dimension of chasing and hiding to a standard scavenger hunt; you'll need to prepare a few signs for players to wear, but beyond that it's pretty simple.
J'Accuse isn't a game I've played, but seems like a good way to keep a large crowd amused, with hardly any setup.
Mr Smith is a great, simple chase game, if you can get a few masks, and a few volunteers to act as "Mr Smith". You'll need a fairly wide area for forty players to enjoy it, but with enough buildings and trees to hide behind, it should work.
Night Watch is a must, if you've got a woodland to hand, and are happy with players creeping around in the dark. It just needs a powerful torch.
Panther, Person, Porcupine is a simple chase-and-challenge sort of game, where players coalesce into large, rival mobs, miming at one another whenever they meet.
Come back and let us know how they went, if you run any of them. And perhaps you could share the rules for "Haggis Bandits", which is a game that Google doesn't seem to have heard of...
Thanks a lot! I was thinking of Checkpoint, as it looks freakin' awesome. And as for Haggis Bandits, well... the secret shall be revealed soon. Where should I post the rules? In another topic or actually on Ludocity itself? It's more of a widegame to be played in woods or something, but it could be adapted to play in a city I guess.
Night Watch is just Escape from Colditz but not as good. Man, Colditz is just awesome. I might have to run that one as well... Colditz is the same game but with about 4-6 guards on a larger area.
Feel free to post it on Ludocity itself - pervasive games are all about using existing environments in interesting ways, and the woods are as good as the streets. (Night Watch has only ever been played in the Adelaide parklands, and in the woods on Hampstead Heath, and probably suits those environments better than any others.)