Love at First Sight

Love at First Sight
Designer:	Invisible Playground
Year:	unknown
Players:	Even number. Best is 24. But it scales well from 12 to 40
Stuff required:	Pens and cardbox stripes with numbers and ribbons.
Crew required:	One.
Preparation:	Less than an hour.
Time required:	15 minutes.
Place required:	Small to medium sized outdoor area with poles or hedges. Benches and some real couples on it are a plus.
Activities:	Hiding, running, lurking, sneaking, flirting, sitting, holding hands.
This game's status has not been specified.
This game is made available under an Attribution-Noncommercial Creative Commons licence. (What does this mean?)

You're a lonely number looking for that special someone. Find your true love, have as much sex as you can, but don't let your heart be broken too often.

Preparation

//TEEEEEEEST Choose a large area with clear boundaries. A big park or a square mile of city streets with explicitly defined boundaries is suitable. There should be a base camp within the area, ideally with a roof, at which the helium balloons can be safely kept; and a finishing point, some distance from the base camp.

In addition to 10-30 players you will need one Stag, to walk around the playing area wearing the hat; one Stag Warden to guide and assist the Stag; and one Balloon Warden to guard the balloons.

Instructions

Set off ten minutes before the scheduled start of the game, and head away from the base camp. Throughout the game you'll need to walk around the playing area, being careful to stay within the boundaries, while the players chase you and try to tie balloons to your antlers. For a harder game, you can sneak and try to stick to alleyways; for an easier game, or if nobody's found you in the first fifteen minutes, you can walk across more open spaces and down more roads. The less silly your hat, the harder it will be for players to find you, and the more important it is for you to give them a decent chance of doing so.

When players find you they will try to stop you so that they can tie their balloons to your antlers. You only need to stop and let them do this if they show you three balloons at a time, in a triangle configuration. Bear in mind that each player should only be carrying one balloon, so you don't need to stop for, say, a single player who's somehow managed to get three balloons: just three players with one balloon each.

If the players are taking more than about thirty seconds to get their balloons attached, or you sense that they're dawdling deliberately to allow other team members to catch up, feel free to stand up and move on.

During the game, you should walk at a steady pace, not too fast, and try to cover as much as possible of the playing area, making sure you visit each quadrant. If you wish, you can switch to a faster jogging pace, if you feel at any point that a loud noise or a large cluster of balloons has "spooked" you (this can help break things up, if you find yourself surrounded by a large number of players all jostling to offer their balloons). Towards the end of the game you will head to the predecided finishing point.

You should not speak during the game.

Possible variants

• If the players are of the minmax type affairs will always end badly. In that case use a static outcome of +2 for affairs.
• Use three identical numbers instead of two, to twist the true love meme: One third will find their true love too late. This will accelerate the first phase of the game.
• Use less starting hearts to enhance the difficulty, use more to encourage casual players to experiment more.
• The "referee" should never take the time to seriously. this is no sport. The time constraint is in here to create a flow. If the players need a little more time or a little less, give it to them. Just remember to announce the last two "minutes" and the last 30 "seconds".

Other games from the Nyugati Games Set

• Unwanted Entities
• Shadow Surfing
• Sea Level

• The whole Nyugati Set

Flickr gallery

<flickr size="t">ludocity%3Agame%3Dloveatfirstsight</flickr>

(These are the ten most recent Flickr photos of Love at First Sight. To add your own, just add the "ludocity:game=loveatfirstsight" tag to your Flickr photos.)

Design and Play history

Love at First Sight was created as part of the Nyugati Games Set by Field Office Budapest aka Invisible Playground Field Office Budapest.

It is based on a Hungarian youth camp capture the flag game "War of Numbers".

Rulecard

Download Loveatfirstsight_rulecard_english.jpg

The english rulecard.