Round events

One rule is enough to change a whole game

The fourth round of anything is where a game starts to sag. Everybody knows the rules, the surprise has gone, and the people who are good at it are still good at it. A single rule laid over the round fixes both halves of that at once: it is new, and it takes away whatever the strong players were relying on. Answers sung rather than spoken makes a vocabulary game into something else entirely, and it costs nothing to try.

The rule has to stay visible, which is the whole reason this is a page rather than a shuffle of paper. A modifier read out once is a modifier three people have forgotten by the second turn, and then it is a source of argument rather than fun. Here it sits on the screen for the length of the round, big enough to settle the question from across the table.

Three sets, written for three different rooms

The party set is for games with answers and points, and it leans on silliness: whispering, one hand, everything sung, every answer starting with the same letter. The classroom set is written for groups and a teacher, so it is about how the answer is given rather than how loud it is: written down before it is said, one question to another group, a reason attached, the quietest group first.

The board game set is about turns and pieces: reversed order, no trades, roll twice and take the lower, the player in last place going first and last. It is written to be safe to apply to a game you did not design, which is harder than it sounds and is why none of them change what anything is worth by more than a factor of two.

Writing your own, and what it sits beside

The box takes up to sixty lines of your own, and it is worth ten minutes the first time. Modifiers written for the game you actually play are far better than general ones, because they can name the pieces and the phases. Keep them short enough to read in one glance and avoid anything that needs a ruling, since the screen cannot make one.

For surprises that land when you decide rather than every round, the event deck is the page. For the round and phase count on its own, the round marker does that with no deck at all, and the two work well side by side on separate screens. A penalty for one player rather than a rule for everybody is the penalty wheel.

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