Walking Across a Bridge, Trying to Formulate One Clear Thought

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Walking Across a Bridge, Trying to Formulate One Clear Thought
Designer: Invisible Playground
Year: unknown
Players: 10-50
Stuff required: blond wigs, sunglasses, headphones, buttons, flags
Crew required: 2
Preparation: 20 minutes
Time required: 8 minutes
Place required: Bybbølsbro or similar bridge
Activities: following pedestrians,
This is a playable game - it's finished, tested and ready to play.
Cc-by-nc.png
This game is made available under an Attribution-Noncommercial Creative Commons licence. (What does this mean?)

Walking Across a Bridge, Trying to Formulate One Clear Thought is a game about immersing in the flow of people crossing a bridge and reacting on peoples features like a an impulse is reacting on other impulses in the flow of thoughts.

Preparation

To prepare the bridge, mark five turning points on the bridge by attaching flags on the railing. The five turning points should be distributed on the bridge evenly. Get buttons to identify the teams. Every team should have an own motive and every team member will wear the button of his/her team.

The game works with 5 person teams. There should be two blond wigs, two headphones and two sunglasses for every team.

2-3 teams consisting of 2-6 people. It is very helpful if players carry their figures in transparent plastic cups and distribute them evenly inside the team at the start of the game. Teams communicate amongst each other and with the referee through walkie-talkies. Set the walkie-talkies to a different channel for each team. Not every player in a team needs a walkie-talkie. If you don't have enough walkie-talkies, make sure that players with walkie-talkies are not also carrying the playing figures, so that no one is left out. 

The referee needs a timer, a walkie-talkie set to each of the teams channels and a clipboard for counting the points in the end.

Level Design

Use an bridge with lots of pedestrians and narrow sidewalk. Ca. 200 meters is a good length.

Rules

The rulecard for Unwanted Entities in English and Hungarian.

The players goal is to earn more points than the other team by trying to occupy higher value properties with their own Figures. Part of the strategy is cleaning high value properties from Gray Figures by displacing them onto properties with lower value or placing them onto the other team's property and outnumbering their figures with grey ones.

You claim a property by placing your figures on them. You can place each of your figures only once. If they are kicked out of a property by a pedestrian, you will loose that figure, you are not allowed to place them back in. Tip: Use your body to protect your figures from pedestrian. You are not allowed to remove the other teams figures or ask non player pedestrians to do so. Play fair!

You can move the Gray Figures freely from one property to another. Players must not carry more than one Gray Figure at a time. You must not place any of your figures until you have placed the Gray Figure in a new property.

Every Team has one special figure, represented by a larger game piece: The King. The King counts as 5 little figures and doubles the value of the zone it is placed in. For example, if there is a red King and three green figures on a zone valued 50 - red earns 100 points. If there are six red figures and a green King on a zone valued 30, read earns 60 points. If two teams place their King on one zone, the value is doubled only once.

Playing time is around 8 minutes after which points are counted. The team who has the most figures on a property cashes in the points for the property. In case of a tie, no-one gets any points. If there are more Gray Figures in a zone than any other colors, the Gray Figures cash in the points. The Gray Figures can win the game.

The referee and her helpers can celebrate the counting of points by doing a procession from property to property, collecting the figures and announcing the points through walkie-talkies. It is also very nice to have some music to go along with the procession.


Photos and Videos

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(These are the ten most recent Flickr photos of Walking Across a Bridge, Trying to Formulate One Clear Thought. To add your own, just add the "ludocity:game=unwantedentities" tag to your Flickr photos.)

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Video showing the full Nyugati Game Set. Unwanted Entities starts at 0:30.

Design and Play history

Unwanted Entities was created in 2011 as part of the Nyugati Game Set by Invisible Playground, working out of Field Office Budapest at PLACCC Festival.

We have also played a variant of this mechanic as Tiny Urban Game without Gray Figures and on traffic islands with a system of traffic lights in place. Only one team is allowed on each island at a time and you are only allowed to cross the street at a green light, so that you have to use the traffic lights pattern strategically.

Other games from the Nyugati Game Set