Again, anyone?

So, it's over. Final 5 were the Sara(h)s, Katy, Ian, and Sam. Then went Katy, then Sarah, then Sara, and finally it was just Ian and Sam. We never did decide whether they would fight for the one extra kill, but Ian had tons of kills, whereas Sam had been playing pure defense and had none, and so Ian was declared the winner.

Well, it was a bit more confusing than that.

Or, well, actually, it was a real botch.

I had slept through the initial call-all-the-players-together-see-who's-playing-explain-the-rules meeting, so I didn't know just how ambiguous Kate and Girl Alex had left the rules. I supsected Kate's official rule summary on the board would be a disaster, and indeed, it turned out to be. We had all sorts of rules questions coming up. That in itself wasn't a big problem since most of the questions were pretty stupid and actually would have been answered by Kate's summary, but the problem was that when there were questions when things were genuinely ambiguous, people turned to us. We were playing, remember! By this point we were long out, but still... I'm pretty sure I ruled wrongly on Ian's killing of Katy according to the recorded rules (he barged through her slightly open door to tag her; I ruled it OK). Bill and Dave were nominally the GMs, but they really did nothing but the randomization, since that's all they were originally supposed to do. Then there was the case of genuine omissions from Kate's summary - Sarah got killed by Ian thinking she was safe because she was holding a Bartlett lunch tray - the rule summary didn't bother to specify that only Pierce trays would protect you, and only in Pierce dining hall itself. As there was no official rule writeup aside from what Girl Alex and Kate announced at the meeting, people didn't know.

Then we had Mark Stankevitz. Mark thought the rule was that you're safe if you're touching someone from Pierce, rather than someone in Pierce. He didn't bother to ask about this. So he was actually killed a long time ago, but his killer apparently wasn't clear on the rules either. We didn't count this when it came out for reasons of practicality... how did it come out? The same thing happened again with Sara killing him, only Sara knew her rules a bit better. Mark meanwhile killed Sarah while already dead, meaning when we found out what happened, we had to revive Sarah (not that she was ever really dead, of course). But the real problem was that he didn't tell Sara her new target! Now, from all I've ever heard, you're supposed to play it with cards - you get a card listing your target, and when you kill someone, you take their card. We weren't handing out cards, so I figured people would make their own. But Girl Alex and Kate apparently failed to mention cards entirely, so we had to rely on victims simply telling their killers their new target. And Mark didn't. When questioned later, he gave the wrong target - that this was wrong was figured out by all the people keeping track, who figured out who her target actually had to be and eventually got this information to her, but it was pretty slow - and said he "didn't care". Didn't care?! You broke it, you fix it! I shouted at him. Not a word of apology from him.

Regardless, Ian is the winner. Other people are saying we should at least a month before doing this again; I say we should do it soon to make up for this mess. And this time, I'll write down the official copy of the rules, both a summary and a detailed version.

-Harry

Holy crap, guys!

It's official: HBO buys rights to make ASoIaF TV show

According to the article, each book will be about one season of the show.

Day 1 death report, and thoughts on the ruleset

Actually, make that life report, as, after only one day, we're already down from an initial 36 to just 9 - Sara Abarbanel, Sarah Magidson, Mark the Younger, Liz Goetz, Katy, Charlotte, Ian, and Sam. I guess that's the result of playing it with a bunch of people who all live in one house. I'm definitely getting the idea most of the deaths are due to sloppy defense rather than to any good offense. Girl Alex thinks we need more safeties, but I think people's defenses will naturally get better as we play again. Only a few people are actually racking up kills - I had 4 before I died, Sarah M has at least 5 and is still alive, and Ian has I don't know how many, at least 3, but he's clearly an effective killer. It doesn't seem there are many others with more than two - chances are Sarah or Ian will win, I'm betting on Sarah. Having not seen Sarah in operation, though, I can't say whether her kill count is a result of actually good offense or simply staying alive while all her targets have crappy defense.

Thoughts on rule changes to make next time: So, apparently, nobody bothered to tell the other players about how you're supposed to make a card with the name of your target, so when you get killed, you give it to your killer, and the number of kills you made is the number of cards you have minus 1. So instead the victims simply tell their killers their target. Now, while the only completely open information is who's still in, any amount of discussion is allowed - which has turned out to be a mistake, as we never anticipated that dead people would give away who they were targeting when they died, i.e., who their killer's first target is. That has to be banned, as it's just unfairly screwing people over.

Also, while we said, of the last two left, whoever has the more kills wins, we never specified whether it ends when their are two left or when their is one left, so if you're behind by one, you can score that final kill to tie it up; for that matter, we never specified tiebreaker, although the obvious one is which of the two survives - though that's kind of inapplicable if we end the game when it gets down to two. We kind of have to decide how we're doing this.

Also, thoughts on the three-person game make me want to change the endgame as well. Let's say we use our higher-score-of-final-two-wins rule, and let's asssume no ties or near-ties, so that scoring a single kill does not change the relative order of the scores. So player 1 has the highest score, followed by player 2, followed by player 3. There are two possibilities: 1 hunts 2 hunts 3 hunts 1, or 1 hunts 3 hunts 2 hunts 1. In the first case, if 1 kills 2, he wins, but if 2 kills 3 or 3 kills 1, he loses. In the second case, if 1 kills 3, he wins, and if 2 kills 1, he wins, but if 3 kills 2, he loses. In either case, 3 can't win, though I suppose we can't consider that a problem since we assumed that 3 was way behind, so of course he shouldn't be able to win. The real problem is that there's always someone who doesn't want to kill his target. Well, in the second case, that's not so much of a problem - kill your target and win, unless you're 3 - but in the first case, only 1 wants to make his kill; the only way 2 can win is if 3 kills 1 and throws him the game; otherwise, it's an eventual victory for 1.

One possible solution to this is to switch to free-for-all as soon as we get down to three players. Of course, then we can consider the 4-player game, and I have to wonder if a similar situation would not arise - though in the case of the 4-player game, it will not end as soon as one player dies. And to some extent this is alleviated by the fact that we have not made kill counts public information, so 1, 2, and 3 may not know who they are. Also, with the low kill counts we have had so far, ties and near-ties are probably going to be the rule, rather than the exception. Still, I have to wonder if something should be done about it.

-Harry