Come Out and Play in NYC
So I flew out to NYC this weekend to check out the games at the Come Out and Play conference and wound up falling into an abyss of espionage, betrayal, sleepless nights and otherwise ruthless behavior. In other words, I took the top honors in Frank Lantz's Identity Game along with my friend and compatriot in social engineering gone wrong Vincent Lacava, who took spot number two.
The game began innocently enough -- I'd played a similar system from Eric Zimmerman way back in the R/GA days called Suspicion, so I kind of knew what to expect. Vincent and I signed up early and made an alliance right off the bat. We switched identity cards to fool everyone we met at the opening party ... that sort of backfired and we made some fierce enemies right away. At the end of the night, I was hanging out at the bottom of the top scores, and Vincent had fallen off the board entirely.
The next day, we got a lot smarter. With a bit of clever Illustrator work, Vincent made us both fake identity cards for all the organizations. Now, we could approach everyone. "What are you," people would ask. "What do you want me to be?" was the standard reply. We also enlisted the help of several other friends to gain "brute force" to our growing organization.
Vincent, who was still "losing," pretended to give up -- offering his "id" openly to everyone he met. (It wasn't real info, of course, but they didn't know that). I played the role of being somewhat "finished" playing because there was a rumor going around that the then-top-scorer David Van Duzer had "cracked" the game and was a sure win. In this way, we were both able to get a bunch of pity info breaks. David himself gave us an important clue as to how he had "cracked" the system when we handed him a false card and let him mull aloud over why it didn't fit into his system!
By the end of the night, we were ready to have a "cabal" meeting at Pop and Co to organize our info. With the info we had gathered, we were finally able to positively id the organizations of every single player as well as 27 codenames (which is how you score the most points). At this point we realized the only way to benefit from this info was to stay up all night entering turns into the website. (You only got 5 turns on the website per hour, and the game was due to end at 3PM the next day.)
Suffice to say, it was a pretty exhausting night of play. In the very best Huizinga-esque sense of the phrase, we were "carried away by the game." I set my alarm to wake me up every hour all night long as each set of turns was released. I ground through the night, watching anxiously as other players moved up and down the list. When Vincent finally moved into 2nd place behind me, pushing the previous 2nd and 3rd place players below him, I started to believe we could really win it. (In fact, I had a suspicion that Vincent might make a play for first at the very end, which put an additional twist on the tension.)
The whole thing came down the early hours of the morning when Vincent heard that one of the other teams was about to release all of the code names for my team in a last ditch effort to bring it down. We responded by having him "leak" info about the two top threats to several players slightly lower on the leader board ... after that it was pretty much over.
As I trudged over to Eyebeam to pick up my prize -- a copy of Steve Jackson's Illuminati -- I felt like I'd been through a wonderful little war. Of course, I've played a lot of great games that I've been caught up in over the years. But I realized as I sipped my coffee "regular" -- the way that they only make it NYC -- that I've been playing more "reasonably" lately. I've been working a lot and it's hard to let a game sweep you up when you have to be coherent in the morning.
At any rate, this was a great experience, and an exhausting bunch of fun. The final wrap-up saw all the "hard core" players showing up to Eyebeam to compare strategies and set bloodshot eyes on each other one more time, as we made our final moves. Oh, and I want to send out my special congratuations to Wyatt Head -- a youngster who played so hard during the opening party that he didn't fall off the leader board until late in the process. Because he couldn't attend the critical networking parties later in the game, he wasn't able to win, but I so enjoyed his spirit of play that I'm sending him the prize copy of Illuminati. Way to go Wyatt!!!
Pictures and more on the festival to come on Flickr once I get home ...