Monopoly Madness

I recently purchased Monopoly after a tour of all the charity shops in town, I finally found it , its an old version but still the same as the modern day version. I played it with me and four friends; only the iron was left, after we were a good way through the game (a few houses here and there but no hotels yet) a friend landed on one of my properties; he couldn't afford the rent, so instead of selling houses and mortgaging properties (like in the rules) he did a deal with another player, to loan him a few hundred to pay the bills in return for a 'free' pass giving immunity to his properties. Despite mine and others outrage at this, there was nothing we could do, (without it turning into a physical fight) so instead we decided to also, totally ignore the rules and team up as three and pool our resources together, which also helped to complete some broken sets of properties. We ended up helping each other out of payments, and buying each other houses, eliminated one player from the enemy team, leaving just one. There was also an argument at that point about the properties being donated to their team mate, even though they were out because of my/our properties, this issue was soon resolved, we then owned about 75% of the board, and the demise of the remaining player was inevitable, although he survived for quite a while, thanks to us landing on his property, although we owned a good part of the board, we were only waiting for one player to pass, whereas he had a smaller part of the board but the traffic going past was 3 times of ours. Anyway our team soon won and the game finally ended.

In conclusion; although that the game rules went completely out of the window, playing as a team was actually quite enjoyable as you had someone else to help you out of situations, and could build a bigger empire. Monopoly is a ruthless game but playing in teams made an interesting twist. We agreed we would play again in teams, from the start but only with all player positions filled.

On a side note the free parking rule, where fines can be won when that space is landed on, was also in play, which helped to prolong the game even further.

Liars Dice Iterations

The basic rules of liars dice is; everyone has five dice, everyone rolls their dice, but so no other players can see, someone starts of with a bid of how many dice with a certain value there are in play, for example: a bid of six 5's means a total of six dice with 5 as their value. In the game ones also count as neutral. The bet must also always increase each round, the next player can then decide to up the bid, or if they think the previous bid was incorrect, they can challenge the bid and all dice are then counted , if the challenge was correct the bidder loses a die, if incorrect the challenger loses a die.

I played the game in a group of seven, I found the game very simple, but enjoyable, partly because of its simplicity. After a complete game the iteration made was designed to create a possible feedback loop, the decision was to grant a bidder with a chance to regain a die, should his bid be exactly as bid, when the dice are counted after a challenge. With this iteration, dice were regained twice in a game, so didn't have a huge affect on the game, although it would have helped those players a dice or more down. Something I have learnt from iterating games is it is best to work backwards by making the iteration extreme to start with, if it is too extreme, tone it down in the next iteration, but if the balance is good it can stay.

Players Who Suit MUDs

After reading this article, the main points I extracted from the article were the classification of the character  traits of people that play MUD's, I would agree with the types that Bartle defines which are: Explorers, Socialisers, Killers, Achievers. All of these categories have very obvious meanings behind them:

Explorers - Like to explore the world and interact
Socialisers - Like to talk and interact with other players in the game world
Killers - Like to other players, and talk very little
Achievers - Like to play to achieve in the game

As discussed in class, some people may differ slightly but they can still fit in or between one of these base categories. For myself, I have never played a MUD or a similar; MMORPG, but I think these categories can expand into some other games, especially those that use a sandbox technique for the game, when defining myself I find it quite difficult as I feel my playing style varies depending on my mood, but as a general default I would say the explorer category suits me best.

Richard A. Bartle Players Who Suit MUDs http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm