2005-02-16 RussCon Report

Game Results

Jeffles made a giant Ico set (perhaps inspired by William recently bringing his standard sized set, which sadly has a broken joint). This artistic icosohedral creation is apparently actually the medium sized one, for he plans to create a much larger one for Flipside. Or, if you prefer marketingspeak, this one is the large one, with the supersized one still to come. It is odd how this quirky little game Ico has reappeared in my life due to various friends. If I recall correctly, my ex-Kinesoft-cohort JeffW knows the guy who created the game.

I just received a complimentary copy of a new edition of Rigamarole, the social/party game we've played a few times, so we gave this new set a try. It feels very similar to the first edition. For gamer geeks like us, there are a few annoying ambiguities in the rules (which explain that you're not supposed to rules-lawyer - naturally we regarded that as cheapout cop-out to justify unclear writing on a few of the cards!) However there is some undeniable fun in the game, once you get into social/party game mode. It can't be taken seriously as a competitive game. E.g. Fina/Jeffles/Russ's team was way ahead, but in the final challenge, if you fail it, the other team gets to try it, thus snatching victory unexpectedly even though they were fairly far behind score-wise. Their final challenge was impressively played - we thought we'd stump them with the question (find a food in 60 seconds with a tough list of ingredients for them to guess). Jeffles picked a soda, reasoning that it would be clear it was a soda, but hard to guess which one out of the many diverse brands that people have brought to RussCon. As soon as Jeffles read the list, Wendy immediately said "I think that's Sprite" and she was right, thus gaining victory for the Clayton/Wendy/William team!

The Bluff game had an exciting finale, with William and I each down to one die. I rolled a one. He started the bidding with a star, and did his usual williamlike patter about whether he was telling the truth or not. I pondered: if he is telling the truth, then I should raise to two ones. If he is lying, then I should call. I could glean nothing from his williamlike patter, so I decided to just randomly decide if I thought he was lying or not. I gave it 50/50 either way, and ended up deciding he was telling the truth, so I raised to two ones. He looked speechless a moment, and revealed that, amusingly, he had lied but actually had a one, so my raise was still good, and I won! This led to a discussion of optimal play and how it seems like the endgame of Bluff should be mathematically solvable without too much trouble.

After the regular games wound down, we played a couple of social "figure out what the game is" type games. First William started the game where you pass a pair of scissors to the person on your left, saying "This is open" or "This is closed", and he tells you if you're right or not, until someone deduces what's going on (since it doesn't seem based simply on whether the scissors are open or closed). I remembered having seen this trick years ago, but couldn't remember what the secret was, and it took some of us a while to figure out, but eventually very demonstrative clues were given...

Then Sarah proposed the psychiatrist game, which I'd never heard of before. It was pretty cool. Kind of cross between a "figure out what the game is" game and a truth-or-dare game. A few people (in our case 2, but preferably 3) start out as "sick", and the rest of the players are psychologists who simply ask them questions until they figure out what's going on, in which case they join the sick and are interviewed by the remaining psychologists. It is meant as a fun social excercise more than a deductive challenge, and you are encouraged to try roleplaying a psychologist asking general questions, rather than obsessing about "figuring out the rules of the sickness" or whatever. It could be fun to play as an exercise in another language, too...