regardingjohn

Love Games

This week’s MadDesigners Saturday Game Design Jam was a blast. Unsurprisingly, the theme was Valentines Day. The four games included an Apple-to-Apples-styled fabulously-named “Temptation Island” game, a chess-like game of strategy that pit the Queen of Hearts and her court of assassins against St. Valentine and his Cupidian army, a drinking game of cards that, alas, I didn’t get a chance to play, and the game described below. More about the jam at SE4N’s cool site, and of course at MadDesigners.org.

When I thought of Valentines Day, I thought of what love and relationships meant to me and came up with: hard work, equally unfair, uncertain, ups and downs, and often not knowing what the other is thinking. So I partnered up with Jim Mathews and designed the following game:

The Ups and Downs of Lust N’ Love (A Valentine’s Day Game)

Guiding Metaphor

A good place to play this game with up to five teams.

Relationships involve ups and downs, trade-offs, and hard work by all parties that is rarely equal at the same time. Given the theme of Valentine’s Day, we’ve developed a quick game of relationships involving elevators and stairs. The game can have any number of players (we designed it for 6 total, and played it with 8 divided into teams of two). In each team, the partner on the stairs (StairWalker) is doing the work in the relationship, while the partner in the elevator (ElevatorRider) gets to relax a bit. Don’t worry, this switches throughout the game.

Prep

Teams start with each player holding a hand of Lust cards (all the hearts and diamonds in a typical deck, dealt among players), and 3 blood red Love beads each. The goal of the team is to build their relationship by collecting both Lust (hearts) and Love (beads).

Scoring

The couple with the highest Love/Lust quotient wins. To score, count the Lust (hearts) on cards (Aces=1, King=13), and multiply by Love beads.

Game Play

One player must be ElevatorRider (ER) and one must be StairWalker (SW). ER’s get to push buttons. That’s basically all. They must not leave the elevator, unless they meet their partner, at which point, they switch with their partner and become the SW. Meanwhile, SWs run up and down the stairs and try to:

• hook up with their partners,
• get caught hooking up with their partners,
• hook up with other SWs (it’s a bi-ambiguous game) and get caught by the others’ partner (but not one’s own partner).

Rules

Unlike the real rules of love, these are clear and spelled out. They may, however, seem more confusing in the rush of the game. 

1. When an elevator door opens and an SW meets their ER partner, “hooking up” has occurred, ER exits elevator (and SW enters elevator) and they get a Love bead.
2. When SW meets ER opponent, “temptation” has occurred, and SW gets to draw a single ER card (facedown). Cards are drawn/taken, not exchanged.
3.  If door is closing, no temptation has occurred, and no beads are exchanged.
4.  If two SWs are on platform when one of their ER partners arrives, “cheating” has occurred. The partners give up one Love bead to 3^rd party SW. (If no partners, then no foul).
5. If an SW meets with partner ER on platform, and another SW or ER walks in on them, then “PDA” has occurred, and the couple gets an extra bead. If prolonged, and caught by two opponents, then “too much PDA” has occurred, and they lose 2 of their Love beads.
6. There shall be no holding of the elevator (cards/beads must be in elevator by the time the door closes). Once a door begins to close, it must go to another floor.
7. There shall be no hailing elevator by SWs. All button pushing is done by the ER.
8. If an SW interrupts and SW opponent tempting their ER partner (drawing their partner’s card), a “rescue” has occurred, and the SW tempter must give the partners a Love bead.
9. If two elevators land on the same floor at the same time, “swinging” has occurred, and everyone can blind draw a Lust card from each other, but all lose one Love bead each.

Game Ends

• Some SWs may call it quits if they get tired running up and down stairs and don’t get enough hookups. Love is hard, ya know?
• Once someone pukes in the elevator, they may call it quits. Lovesick?
• If the police or building manager breaks up your elevator hookups, you can go to another building, or blame your loss at love on the system.
• Essentially, how long the relationship game continues depends on how much you and your partner want to work on it.