PoorVille

Get a loan your family and start your own microbusiness. Craft bags, jewelry, clothing and sex toys out the plentiful resources you can find in the sprawling underground. Be rewarded for your creativity and try to keep your spirit high as your debt rises through the roof. Some families will make it and some will be broken. Being poor at Nyugati has never been this fun.

Playing area

The main playing area is the underground plaza bounded by four red pillars right in front of the entrance to WestEnd shopping center at Nyugati, Budapest.

A great place to play PoorVille.

Equipment

To play PoorVille, you need a 100 HUF coin for every player, a suitcase full of poker chips, a few clipboards, a pen for every player, blank price tags and a gong. Next to the rule card, you should also print out selling permits and price evaluations charts (to be provided).

Non-Player Characters

You need at least 2 Non-Player Characters to manage the game: A Bank Employee, a Price Evaluator (can be played by the Bank Employee) and a Market Manager.

Rules

The english and hungarian rulecard.

• The Loan. Players are assembled into families of four to six. Ask players to pick a name for their family. Each family member gets 100 HUF from the Bank. As soon as every player has received his money and everyone understands the rules, the clock starts ticking. Before the game ends, each family must pay back their loan + interest in a virtual currency called Nyugati Nuggets (NUG). See the rulecard for the extrem interest rate. In order to earn NUGs, families must acquire ressources, craft products and sell them on the market.

• Collecting ressources and crafting products

and the families will look around to find items to buy. These items they will use to craft new products. They will bring them back to you and you have to evaluate

• Bringing products to market and selling

• • The pitch

By adding up the value of the receipts you get the base value of the crafted item. The players then have 30 seconds to "elevator pitch" you the idea behind the product. Think hard about the qualities of the crafted item and the selling pitch. Modify the base value by up to 50% depending on your evaluation: The selling price of bad products with bad pitches is less then the base value, good products with good pitches sell for more. Afterwards give the product price sticker with the selling price.

• • Selling a product

To sell your product you have to measure the size of your slice of the market. To do that you will count possible customers. Mark everyone on your selling permit. The more you will count the more product you will sell in the end.

• • Bags

Count people that DON'T carry any bags.

• • Jewelry

Count people that DON'T wear any accessories on their neck and above.

• • Clothing

Count people that wear jeans.

• • Sex toys

Count couples holding hands.

• Cashing in

Bring back your filled out cashing permit to the market and get poker chips. This cash in depends on the selling price, the kind of product you are selling and the number of people you counted.

• Getting out of Debt
  • Using Chips

Every five minutes your personal debt rises by 100huf. A family can only pay back their debt all at once.

• • Using Real Money

Optional: If in the end there is any debt left, players can pay real money to get out of debt.

Possible variants

• Players only use their own money. The grant in the beginning is only symbolic. The feeling
• Only use 100huf. This levels the playing field to make it more interesting for competitive players.
• Black market with controls. The debt rises and you start to drown in it? Why not sell your product on a black market? When to cash in? Beware of the police crackdowns!
• Use a real interest rate, eg not 100huf per 5 minutes but 50% per 5 minutes.

• Play at different locations. The players need to be able to buy wildly differing items that they can dismantle and combine in crazy or meaningful ways in a short amount of time. So the shops need to be closeby and have dirty cheap stuff for sale.

Warning: For every new place and every new time you will need to rebalance at least the interest rate or else the game gets to hard or to easy, favor one item type over the other etc.

Flickr gallery

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(These are the ten most recent Flickr photos of PoorVille. To add your own, just add the "ludocity:game=poorville" tag to your Flickr photos.)

Design and Play history

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

Other games from the Nyugati Game Set

• Unwanted Entities
• Shadow Surfing
• Love at First Sight
• Sea Level
• The complete Nyugati Game Set