PoorVille
| PoorVille | |
|---|---|
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| Designer: | Invisible Playground & Balint Fazekas |
| Year: | unknown |
| Players: | 8-50 |
| Stuff required: | poker chips, 100 HUF, gong |
| Crew required: | For every ten players you need two marketeers. |
| Preparation: | 15min. |
| Time required: | 30 minutes. |
| Place required: | Market area with lots of cheap stuff. |
| Activities: | Buying, crafting, counting, selling. |
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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.
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
Players will act in families of four to six. Each player gets 100 HUF from the Bank 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
- The Loan
- Be a Family
- Money
- Crafting
- Buying
- Dismantling
- Crafting
- Idea
- Evaluating
TODO: Embed Evaluation and Selling Charts
- Receipts
By adding up the value of the receipts you get the base value of the crafted item.
- The pitch
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.
- The Market
- Counting people
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.
- "Debting out"
- 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
<flickr size="t">ludocity%3Agame%3Dpoorville</flickr>
(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.
