PoorVille

Get a loan for 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 acquire ressources, craft products and sell them on the market.

• Collecting ressources and crafting products. Families begin by looking around the underground world for things they can use to create new products. They can use the money from their loan to buy cheap ressources in the shops, use their own money or look for free stuff to use. From the ressources they collect, they assemble a product in one of four categories: Clothing, Jewelry, Bags, and Sex Toys.

The Evaluation Chart.

• Market access. To sell a product on the market, players must get a price tag. To get the price tag, families wait for a meeting with the Price Evaluator and show her how much money they have spent to create their product. They need to prove their investments by showing the receipts from the individual parts. The sum is the base value of the product. The family then elevator pitches the product to the Evaluator in 30 seconds. Be creative and explain exactly why your product is really good jewelry or clothing! Depending on how original the product, how convincing the pitch is and how high the base price was, the Price Evaluator looks up the market price for the product on the Evaluation Chart, writes it on a price tag and sticks it to the product. The base value is modified by up to 50% depending on your evaluation: The market price of bad products with bad pitches is less then the base value, good products with good pitches can be sold for more. If a family is unhappy with the selling price, they can always enhance their product or start a new one.

• Counting customers. With the price tag, the family now gets a pen and a selling permit for their product category from the Market Manager. As soon as the Manager announces that the market is open (use the gong!), sellers walk into the square area between the four red pillars and count people that are potential customers. The market opens and closes for several phases of a few minutes each (use this timing to balance the game). For each customer, families selling a product mark a line on their selling permit. The kind of customers to count depends on the product category. If you are selling a
  • Bag - 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 are wearing jeans.
  • Sex toys - count couples walking close together.

• Cashing in. Whenever they want, families can bring filled out cashing permits to the Market Manager and get NUGs in the form of poker chips. This cash-in depends on the selling price marked on the price tag and the number of people you counted. The Market Manager looks up the cash out value on the Cash-Out Chart. Teams can now try to sell their product again (get a new selling permit, wait until the market opens again) or make a new product.

• Getting out of Debt. As soon as a family has earned enough NUGs, they can pay back their debt at the Bank. A family can only pay back all of their debt at once. Of course, the sooner you earn NUGs, the less you have to pay back, as your debt rises at a neck-breaking rate. Families can always ask the bank how much they would have to pay back at a current moment.

After you payed back your debt, you are free to keep on playing and maximize profits. The family with the most profit after paying back their debt wins the game. When the market closes for the last time, all families that are still in debt have a last chance to pay back. Families that do not manage to pay their debt, loose the game. Optional: After the game, families that are still in debt can buy NUGs for real money at a rate of 10 HUF for 1 NUG and not walk home bankrupt.

Possible variants

• Players only use their own money.
• Only use the 100 HUF provided. 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? But beware of police crackdowns that take away your product and everything you've earned! Listen closely to the payphone ringing next to the market area - it warns you that a control imminent.
• Use a real interest rate, eg not 100 HUF 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 close by and have lots of different 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 too hard or to easy, favor one item type over the other etc.

Photos and Videos

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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.)

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Video showing the full Nyugati Game Set. PoorVille starts at 2:00.

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