Talk:Panther, Person, Porcupine

Old forum comments

(The Ludocity website previously had integrated forums, but they fell into spam-covered decline and were shut down in 2015. The comments in this section have been automatically converted from that forum.)

We played this as a something quick and easy to grasp at mozcamp (a series of presentations from web/social media type folk) and as a means of getting people away from being sat down in front of a projector listening to stuff.

We started off with a 5mins presentation following the same format as the other presentations: talking first about barcamps and werewolf and then going via kittens to Animal Face Off (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KhAY5Ql-hA&NR=1), through to roadkill ... at which point I asked people to stand up, allocated different areas of the room to 3 groups and asked them to meet me at the Triangle, a few minutes' walk down the road from the pub venue.

When we got to the outdoor location (luckily we didn't have the thunder storms predicted in the met office's severe weather warnings!) we assembled the 3 groups, introduced the rock-paper-scissors concept and the basic rules.

Each of the 3 groups was given the responsibility for deciding the action for one of the creatures and after sharing these we started playing... (aided by a loud whistle to compete against the traffic noise.)

We had an extraordinary number of drawn rounds and players soon requested that we increased the number of bodies won by any winning teams from 1 to 2.

After about half a dozen rounds I went to the smallest group and suggested they might like to "come to an arrangement" with one of the other teams.

Nobody really followed through on this in time to do anything within the next few rounds, so I suggested it to one of the other teams too.

Maybe a few more rounds and then at some point I turned around and the first team I approached had just decided to all defect to winning group! Only 3 brave souls were left behind!

It had been quite slow moving because of the draws and I guess the lesson learned for organisers is to be *very* specific when you introduce the idea that teams can send representatives to other teams to make deals. AND COME BACK AGAIN AFTERWARDS!

Anyway, we took that as a sign to let everyone go back to the pub and check out the catering :)

I was later told by one of the players that people had sussed that one of the teams was letting the kids decide and therefore to watch them to figure out what action they should do to beat it. (I *think* it may have been the acquisition of a player from that team that allowed the sussing...)

Bloggers are a sneaky crowd ;) so it became apparent during the initial instruction explanation phase that we had to add in another rule that teams had to loudly shout out the name of the action they were doing as they made their move - this was to prevent vague actions that could be interpreted as more than one creature.

There's a blog post at http://barg.org.uk/make/persons_panthers_porcupines_bloggers/ where links to any documentation will probably be collated. --genzaichi (talk) 2009-06-29 16:43:57