A ludic spin on the surprise party

Besides our work for clients we enjoy mak­ing small odd games as exper­i­ments. Today we’re pub­lish­ing one such exper­i­ment for your enjoy­ment. It’s a party game, sim­i­lar to clas­sics such as Mafia, Were­wolf and The Resis­tance. But we’ve tried to explore the notion of per­for­ma­tive games too. As the game pro­gresses, play­ers make actual prepa­ra­tions for a sur­prise party. When the game ends, the party is all set.

This game also marks the first col­lab­o­ra­tion between myself and Tim Bosje. Tim is an inde­pen­dent designer of role­play­ing games, social games, per­va­sive games and so on. We share a lot of com­mon inter­ests so it seemed nat­ural to see what we might come up with together. Work­ing together was a lot of fun so I’m pretty sure we’ll give it another go some time.

Here’s Tim’s run­down of what the game is like:

‘The Cer­e­mony of Sur­prise’ is our ludic spin on the ‘sur­prise party’. This game tasks you to organ­ise a sur­prise party for one of your fel­low play­ers. The prob­lem is that at the start, no one knows who that player is. All you know is one name of a per­son who isn’t “it”.

But this game is also about build­ing a real party. Through­out the game you have to decide which ingre­di­ents – real ones, brought to the game by the play­ers – are used in the party. Propos­ing that per­fect acces­sory – that one per­fect party song, your favorite drink or dec­o­ra­tion – and get­ting it into the party, will reward you with new oppor­tu­ni­ties to retrieve infor­ma­tion from your fel­low players.

No party is com­plete with­out a deli­cious cake. In this game, you will have to earn your piece of cake by sur­pris­ing the cor­rect player. But don’t spoil the sur­prise, because if the player who is “it” guesses right, the whole cake goes to him.

If that has wet your appetite, head over to the rules page for all the details. If you decide to run a game don’t hes­i­tate to share your expe­ri­ences with us. Enjoy!