Bullies
Congratulations to the very first Bullies Winners! Norna (Left) ended up in a kingmaker position, she couldn’t win but she could possibly swing the winner one way or the other. However neither Jun (her boyfriend) or GirlWhoseNameIForgotSorry we’re able to convince her to help them win. So the very first bullies game ended in a 2 way tie.
When working on client projects you sometimes feel like you don’t have any “design juice” left over for your own projects. At least that’s how I felt the last 2 months. As soon as the steam let up though I had my own idea for a game heavily inspired by playing too much Resistance Avalon and a bit of Coup.
I’ve only play tested Bullies twice so far. Already people really enjoy it and it has some interesting meta-game like mechanics that shift around depending on how many players there are. We started with 8, and of course since I taught the game everyone made sure to knock me out first; despite having exactly the same amount experience they had with it….which is to say none. But that never matters in a political player elimination style game. You teach it, you die. However because the first test had similar amounts of gaining and losing life (1 and -1, -2) knocking out remaining players tended to drag out and take longer than anticipated.
Still people heavily enjoyed the concept of the game. As the game whittled down to 5, then 4 players everyone was worried the game would “fall apart” once it reached 3 players. I was fairly certain that this would not be the case and rather than fall apart at 3 players it would in fact become a lot more intense. I was correct. People began talking about how the end game reminds them of Game Theory concepts especially The Prisoners Dilemma. Now I did the entire play test with just 2 decks of playing (poker) cards, and 2 dice per player. The dice were just a way of keeping track of life for each player and we’re a simple way to go up and down instead of writing and rewriting life totals.
Now that I know the concept works I’ve taken the time to create a better prototype; which also makes it easier to begin tacking on more elements. The game is fun, but it feels like it’s missing that 1 or maybe 2 more elements to flesh it out.
