Tag Archives: themed thursday

Themed Thursday: Betrayal

Betrayal: the Kiss of JudasOh, dear. Even when this site tries to do a Themed Thursday, it comes out looking like a Mechanics Monday that missed the boat.

Themed Thursday is an exit game blog initiative whereby anybody who feels so inclined is invited to propose the contents of an exit game, in some way, shape or form, prompted by a specific topic. Last week, the topic proposed at QMSM for discussion this week was betrayal and has brought forward a thought from the back burner.

This will be a relatively rare supposition, but imagine that you are with an experienced team of exit game players and you have played most of the games at your favourite site. You’ve deliberately chosen which one, or ones, to leave because they’re advertised as being towards the easier end of the scale, and you fear that you won’t get your money’s worth. How can you make an easy game more of a challenge?

Many of you may remember The Mole, an originally Belgian constructed-reality game show in which a team take on a succession of challenges. However, one member of the team is the eponymous Mole and attempting to betray the others into not completing them successfully, while also attempting to keep their identity secret. The show has been running for a good fifteen series in the Netherlands and yet is as popular as ever.

Putting it together, is there a way to make an easy exit game more challenging by introducing a teammate who is incentivised to betray the others while keeping their identity secret? Here’s an attempt to codify one. Much as the individual challenges in The Mole only really worked in context of the overarching metagame, this needs some out-of-game structure to implement it, and here it has been posed in the reasonably familiar context of a gambling game with drinks at stake. As ever, don’t bet with money you can’t afford to lose (but if you can afford to play an exit game, you evidently do have some resources…) and this site doesn’t endorse drunkenness. Here’s a bombshell: I don’t even drink.

To play an exit game with a betrayer, you need at least a team of at least three players. Tear a sheet of paper into a number of roughly identical pieces, one more than the number of players. Mark one of these pieces with a cross and the rest with circles. Screw up all these pieces of paper and jumble them in a container so that it is unclear which one has the cross. Each player takes a paper, leaving one left over.

All players secretly look at the symbol on their paper, then keep hold of it until the end of the game. The player with the paper with the cross is the betrayer. (It is quite possible that there may not be a betrayer.) The team then play this ostensibly easy exit game and the betrayer’s aim is to prevent the team from succeeding in time, without being identified as the betrayer. Every player who isn’t the betrayer wants to try to convince the others that they are the betrayer.

Once the game is complete, every player individually votes as to who the betrayer was, then every player reveals their vote and their piece of paper. Any player who cannot present their own paper at the end of the game has lost and must buy the others a round of drinks. Trying to make other players lose their papers is slightly too dirty play for even this game… unless there has been acceptance beforehand that it isn’t. Voting for yourself, not voting at all, or any other sort of voting malpractice, are also offences that are penalised by buying a round of drinks.

If the team succeeds at the room, each player bets one drink against the betrayer as to whether their vote can identify the betrayer’s identity correctly or not. A correct identification earns the player a drink from the betrayer, an incorrect identification earns the betrayer a drink from the player – and the player must also buy a drink for whoever they incorrectly nominated as the betrayer.

If the team doesn’t succeed at the room, the bet is shifted in the betrayer’s favour. If more than half of the non-betrayers identify the betrayer correctly, the betrayer buys the others a round of drinks. (Exact 50% splits are broken in the betrayer’s favour.) Otherwise, every player whose vote does not correctly identify the betrayer must buy a drink for the betrayer and another for whoever they nominated – and a successful betrayer who isn’t voted for at all deserves to be bought drinks all night.

If the team doesn’t succeed at the room and it turns out that there wasn’t a betrayer at all, you’d better all just drink to forget…

Themed Thursday: The House is Watching You

An assortment of green eyes laid over each otherWell, there’s the creepiest image that this site has yet used; it’s as if Argus Panoptes suddenly was badly afflicted with jealousy – and now it becomes clear how Brighton, Newport and Bradford’s local newspapers got their names.

Themed Thursday is a series of posts originated by Toronto Room Escapes, but extended by other blogs, in which underused concepts for exit game rooms are kicked around to see whether they might bear fruit. This instalment was inspired by the thought that there hasn’t really been a reality TV-inspired exit game in the UK (or elsewhere…?) and yet the genre is sufficiently familiar, and with sufficiently many tropes, that people would be able to latch onto the references immediately. It’s also hopefully clear which reality TV show the references concern – the one that probably has got most traction in the UK – while still skirting around trademarks.

The storyline: the team represent a single contestant on an unnamed (but nevertheless very familiar) TV show that is referred to as being In The House. In the pre-story, it is warned that the team are very unpopular with the other housemates and that if even a single housemate nominates them for eviction, then they will be evicted. The team then have (e.g.) one hour to “win the other housemates around”; it turns out that each housemate can be won around in a different way, which effectively involves completing a different series of challenges/puzzles for each housemate.

The setup: around the walls are painted a number of generic housemate images. These bear resemblance to some of the most (in?)famous reality TV contestants of the show in question, or at least the recurring stereotypes. Interacting with them also triggers pre-recorded voice clips, which again bear accent resemblance to, or evoke phrases famously used by, those contestants. Completing the chain of puzzles relating to each housemate will trigger a clip from the housemate suggesting that they won’t nominate you. (It’s also possible that there might be lighting cues to make it clear which housemates have been won over and which are yet to be won over.)

The setting: tropes that could be expected to be referenced might include a diary room, in which a player might interact with an unseen voice (either a recording, or the gamemaster watching from outside), a “hidden room”, probably behind a mirror, because more series have hidden rooms than not these days, a very small bedroom with insufficiently many beds, very, very many cameras, a puzzle that can only be solved by going to the area where there aren’t cameras (thematically, a fictive toilet) and strong Geordie accents.

The denouement: at the end of the hour, or as soon as the last housemate has been won over, there is a set-piece in which lighting effectings highlight each housemate in turn and a voice clip “asks them” who they nominate for eviction. After the question, a voice clip is played of the housemate either nominating another housemate (if they have been won over) or nominating “You” (if they have not been won over). If all the housemates have been won over, then they will each nominate one of the others, which will leave “you” to be the only housemate not nominated for eviction, so you are declared the winner of the game, which is the happy ending. Alternatively, if a housemate nominates “you” for eviction, then the game concludes with the losing decision ending in which you are evicted from the House.

It’s also the case that the referenced show has changed in nature over the years, from what started off as a relatively upmarket, played-straight social experiment (and took several series to go from merely good viewing figures to great ones) and what has become something more of a “watch bad things happen to good people” / “it’s funny because it isn’t you” freak show. It could be possible to reference the unpleasant nature of the challenges, or to theme more strongly on other reality TV shows which award food only for successful completion of aggressive tasks, but that would surely lead to people remembering the game for the wrong reasons…