February 08, 2005
Surround
In the style of PacManhattan, City Surround. This is also a game which is like largescale Tron's Lightcycles.
The basic idea is multiple teams move around the city or a city area. Each team has a home base coordinator who has full view of the play area. The teams carry a hand held device which uses Placelab software which reads gps based on 802.11 accesspoints in the city. This is useful because placelabs shows position in New York well, where standard GPS fail regularly due to lack of view of the sky.
As the teams move they start with a tail which the length of 5 city blocks. The tail is used to enclose the other teams.
-Team cannot cross the tail of another team or their own tail.
-If another team's tail is on a street block, and a team goes down that street, they loose.
-If a team crosses an intersection and cut through the tail of another team the team cutting through the tail looses.
-If a team leaves the play area they loose.
As the team moves through the city and they pick up unique APs. For every 1000 unique APs found by a team, increases the teams tail by one city block.
A team starts with one escape and can find ramdomly placed escapes in the game area. Escapes are the ability for a team to enter the subway and go one subway stop in any direction allowing them to cross anyamount of tail they would have otherwise hit and lost.
At the control center there is a person who directs the team running on the streets. Those on the street and also adlib cutting through buildings communicating via audio or IM.
Each team has a palmtop, a cell and a map of the area of play
Posted by dimitri at 08:54 PM | Comments (0)
January 26, 2005
BigGame
Chasse, as it was explained to me when I was a child is the best present a child could ever have. My father would spend the month before my birthday creating my birthday party. Kids would be divided into teams and we were given five pages of the Trivial Pursuit cards and a first hint to figure out where to go to first. The kids would move by train around Boston and get different clues leading them around the city.
The game came from the experience my father had at boarding school. Yes. today you an see it on TV... The Amazing Race.
My father bumped into a classmate of mine a few months ago and he said, "Dimitri's birthday was the most memorable thing I can think of from school." It was a total experience. We would have to use public transport. Our group used the people on the trains to answer all the Trivial Pursuit card pages. It was great, each time we got on a train the whole bus would get involved and by the time we would get off, there would be some much energy, the people wouldn't want us to get off, All the people would cheer good luck.
As a big game, this is a good example of seeing the city board and interacting with the people in it. A game is a story that people live in for a period of time. Big games, when the space is physically big, allows none participants to effect the game and the players, sometimes even the outcome. The winning group was ours, but only by a few points, why? Because we got the trains and bus riders involved and they helped us. Those point got us the extra point enough to beat out the competition.
Posted by dimitri at 11:04 PM | Comments (0)