Sitting Ducks

Sitting Ducks
Designer:	Tom Melamed
Year:	unknown
Players:	9
Stuff required:	9 big water pistols, 9 hunting duck calls, 9 caps in three colours, lots of rubber ducks in same colours as the caps, megaphone, stuff to mark out a course in shallow water, stop watch, antiseptic wipes, permanent marker pens.
Crew required:	2-3.
Preparation:	15 minutes.
Time required:	30 minutes.
Place required:	About 10 meters square of still water where the players can move freely around the edge.
Activities:	shooting, squatting, quacking, racing
This is a playable game - it's finished, tested and ready to play.
This game is made available under an Attribution-Noncommercial Creative Commons licence. (What does this mean?)

Sitting ducks is a race game where teams propel rubber ducks around a floating course by shooting them with water pistols. But they have to sit while shooting the ducks and can only communicate with the rest of their teams using duck calls.

Game Overview

Sitting ducks is a fairly simple race game that involves shooting ducks with big water pistols around a course which is itself very fun, but it gets noticeably better when you add in the theatrical elements and the build up in how you introduce the game and get the players into the mood of the game. It's important to the enjoyment of the game that you get the players to care about their ducks. So to explain this game I'm going to try and set it out as somewhere between a piece of theatre and a game and then let you the one putting on the game to change what you like.

Notes on Equipment

• 9 water pistols,
  • You need one for each player.
  • They need to be large water pistols, of the pump action super soaker type.
• 3 ducks per session.
  • You need one duck per team per group of players.
  • The ducks need to be in team colours (e.g one read, one, yellow, one blue).
  • I did this by getting yellow ones and spraying them with acrylic paint.
  • The ducks will get "used up" in the course of a session so if you are running the game lots of times with different players then you need lots of ducks.
  • I found that 5cm plastic ducks floated highest and went fastest.
• 9 Hats
  • These make it easy for you the person running the game to tell who is on which team which is important and wil be explained later.
  • I added cartoon eyes to my caps so that they looked like ducks with the peak of the cap being the ducks bill.
• 9 Duck calls
  • These are important to the game but also kind of expensive, you will need one for each player and maybe a spare or two. I got mine from ebay for about 7 pounds each.
  • Use the antiseptic wipes to clean them between players so that no one catches anything.
• 3 Marker pens
  • However you choose to colour the ducks make sure that you find a pen that writes on it well. I went for acrylic paint on the ducks, and then acrylic pens.
• Race track
  • You need to mark out a course in the water for the ducks to race along.
  • I did this by filling plastic bottles with sand and then sitting them in the very shallow water, I then used string between the bottles to mark the left and right hand edges of the water.
  • If I was doing it again then I might have tried using chicken wire netting as walls instead but not sure how well that would work if a duck got stuck in the netting.
  • You need a water source a short distance from the main race track to refill the water pistols as players aren't allowed to refill from the race track.

Characters

Race organiser

For this game to work you need to explain a few rules to the players. They also need to be made to feel OK about being very silly so it helps if the person giving the rules is also dressed and acting rather silly. I did this by being the Duke of Duckingham a country gent who had bread rubber ducks for four generations. Dressed in tweed and waders. But you need to find what works for you.

Commentator

Durring the race itself you need a commentator to increase the fun, and add to the tension of the game. They also fulfil another very important role in stage 3 by helping the players to think of their duck as a character in it's own right.

Assistant to the teams

This character works most closely with the players, encouraging them and talking to them about their ducks. Again they are mostly about getting everyone in the mood. They also help with the giving out and taking back of equipment. You can run the game without this character, in fact I have but it seemed to run much smoother with this third person. In my version this character was a professional duck trainer who had got some of their ducks to the Olympics before.

Running the game

Step 1

When people arrive get them to get into three teams of three. Give each player a hat in their team colour.

Step 2

Explain the rules of the game. I feel that it helps a lot to do this in terms of a back story that gives the game some character, helps the players remember them and starts to slowly get the players comfortable with being a bit silly.

Rules

• It's a straight race, first duck across the finish line wins.
• You move the duck by shooting it with water pistols.
• Only shoot your own duck.
• You have to sit or squat to shoot your duck.
• Of the three players in a team at least two must be sitting/squatting at any moment in time.
• When you refill your water pistol you most do it from a fountain or other water source nearby but not from the water the duck is floating in.
• All communication within the team durring the race has to be made using only the duck calls.
• Any breaking of the rules will result in your duck "jumping backwards". (Actually you just pick the duck up mid race and throw it back about 40-50 centermeters.)

To explain these rules, I used this back story. "The ducks were bred by my second cousin once removed, who was a Eastern European count durring the cold war who used cattle prods, hormones and hypnotherapy to make his ducks the fastest. This has made them very fast but also scared of people. That is why to get the best out of the ducks you need to pretend to be a duck with the duck calls and the duck disguises (hats). And can't crowd them, hence the sitting down. The ducks also sometimes went to the toilet durring a race which is why you can't refill the water pistols from the race track." You can of course make up your own back story and way of explaining the rules.

It helps if the back story and the way it is delivered is both clear and also slightly silly, this makes the players more comfortable with being silly themselves which you will soon ask them to do. I did this by being in character and in costume.

Step 3

Give ducks, pens, calls, pistols (need to be big, supper soaker type pistols), Get players to give their duck name, personality and back story. Get players to draw on their duck, make a prize for the prettiest duck or something so that they bond with their duck. Get players into character Get team and duck names (for this stage you need at least the organiser and the commentator to go between the teams talking to them about their ducks, it's much better if you have three people in character helping the players to get excited and to care about their ducks).

S5: (3 mins per race) Get each team to signal their readiness by making duck noises, tell them that the loudest team can start on the inside line or something. Get them used to being noisy. Start race, then... Race! (Commentator with megaphone is needed and can't be the same person as the one in the water enforcing penalties) (Race course has to be long enough that the players run out of water and need to refill durring the race, this is where tactics and the only one player standing at a time rules kick in.) ( The refill point needs to be a few meters from the race but in sight.)

S5 Give them limited time for refill and tactics between heats. (Keep the pace up, let them refill and discuss but don't let it drag on) (About 3 races per set of teams seems to work)

All the best