Walkabout Card Game

[Cramulus]

This literally came to me in a dream last night. I don't have any of the details yet, just the gist of it.

You and your opponent (partner?) walk around your neighborhood / a city / an unfamiliar place / whatever

as you walk, you play cards. Certain cards can only be played in certain situations, or after certain events


Like if a car honks, you can play a certain card

Certain cards can only be played when a government building is visible, a bus is visible, etc


and then gameplay will somehow encourage you to go down certain streets, explore certain shops, otherwise explore or modify that environment



possible concepts for the game:

you and your partner are battling each other through a city
you and your partner are alien invaders, a star-trek style away team
you and your partner are shamans in the outback, tripping your faces off, hallucinating 21st century culture while looking for messages from coyote
you and your partner are monster hunters, trying to discover hidden goblins, imps, faeries, etc

[Freeky]

I like the sound of this.

[Don Coyote]

you and your partner are shamans in the outback, tripping your faces off, hallucinating 21st century culture while looking for messages from coyote

Eerie.

[Juana]

I like this.

[Elder Iptuous]

i wonder how a mugger would respond if he stuck a gun at your friends gut, and you got a big smile on your face, pulled out a playing card and waved it in your friends face, yelling "that's 10 points, sucka! i'm totally creaming you!"

[Cramulus]

 


clearly the game should involve making choices about where to go next. And if the cards suggest the item you're looking for can be found in some dangerous alley, you do have the option of NOT doing that.

Cards probably shouldn't force you to interact with anybody or spend money, but it's always an option

[The Johnny]

ICards + walking around seems  hard to do.

How about something like Post Its along with a notebook for each?

Or somethign.

[Cramulus]

ICards + walking around seems  hard to do.

How about something like Post Its along with a notebook for each?

Or somethign.

Interesting idea! I like the idea of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs which other people can follow as you plot your route

as for walking + playing cards.. It is kind of difficult to play poker or whatever while going for a walk. This might be something simple like just drawing two cards from the deck and then choosing between them..




Here's a pitch: you and your friends are walking around. you have a choice between a few different routes.
  -let's walk down main street   vs
  -let's walk down broadway     vs
  -let's go into that store over there


so you draw three cards, one for each direction

according to the cards:

-main street is dangerous. If you go that way, somebody might get injured
-broadway has a treasure hidden somewhere along it. If you go that way, and you see something which might be one of the objects you're looking for, you can take it.
-the store is safe. If you rest there for at least 10 minutes, somebody's injury gets healed


something like that

[Triple Zero]

Here's a pitch: you and your friends are walking around. you have a choice between a few different routes.
  -let's walk down main street   vs
  -let's walk down broadway     vs
  -let's go into that store over there

so you draw three cards, one for each direction

according to the cards:

-main street is dangerous. If you go that way, somebody might get injured
-broadway has a treasure hidden somewhere along it. If you go that way, and you see something which might be one of the objects you're looking for, you can take it.
-the store is safe. If you rest there for at least 10 minutes, somebody's injury gets healed

I like it! It's kind of like an RPG in a dice-generated dungeon, of sorts. The paths and spaces are determined by the real world, but they are "coloured" with a fantasy finish by drawing cards.

One thing though, making people wait 10 minutes in a store could be kind of boring. I understand it's analogous the the RPG concept of "downtime", but the advantage is that you generally don't have to play out that time Maybe (even though I understand you don't want people to spend money) you can heal an injury by EITHER resting 10 minutes or buying some small item at the store (can be the very cheapest thing they have). That way people can treat themselves to a delicious Icecream of Healing, or Spongebob keychain puppet or something.

Oh! Do you also have those coin slot machines out on the street, the ones that get you either a coloured rock hard chewing gum ball (that you should never eat) or a plastic egg with some kind of ridiculous toy in it. Because the ridiculous toys are high powered magical artifacts.



I have an idea, or ideas, I'm just writing down my thoughts as they come, about half of them might be useful:

maybe to multimedia it up, by using a bunch of MP3s to go with the cards. At a 128kbps bitrate you can carry 9 hours of sound on 512mb, which should be possible for most people to carry on their MP3 player, cause it's less than 5 albums worth at a decent high quality bitrate.

Most of the time the mp3 would just be a looping ambient theme soundtrack, possibly depending on the type of "terrain" you're on--dungeonforest, underwater graveyard, spacemountain--but at certain points (every 10-15 minutes?) they are interrupted *BONGGGGG* gong-hit, or eerie-spooky twinkling sound, announcing a voice which will tell give you a quest, a task, to draw a type of card or inform you that you are under attack by dire pigeons, that all the NPC people on the street wearing glasses are in fact enemy robots to be avoided, or that first the red car will point the direction to go next and find the treasure.

thoughts:

- switching tracks on some (cheaper) MP3 players is a hassle which distracts from gameplay so should be minimized.
- with two players, each would have their own MP3 player. synchronizing the tracks is also tricky, but having the players receive different commands or tasks could be an interesting part of the gameplay. assume they are listening to the same ambient theme soundtrack, to give the illusion of "being in the same space together". listening to a soundtrack while walking on the city streets can be quite surreal in itself, and probably moreso if two people share the same sounds.
- (alternatively, two players could share one MP3 player, one with the left speaker in their ear, and the other the right. but that only works if we theme the game to involve the players playing horrible mutant conjoined twins.)
- Most mp3 players are capable of playing an Album or Folder on shuffle. say there's 5 albums, each for a different terrain ambient theme. Given 9 hours of sound, that's 108 minutes per album. If you split those into 10 tracks of differing lengths, each with a quest/command/event in the middle (maybe one or two without), play that on shuffle and you got a pretty cool random event generator!
- you can also offer the tracks in 96kbps for older/smaller mp3 players and 256kbps for people with a couple of GBs on their iPods.
- in  fact this concept could even be a cool one-player game, completing tasks and walking around depending on commands you receive from a set of shuffled mp3. maybe it could be adapted to aid the single-person quests in the Dreaming?

back to the cards:

random stuff in the environment.

- people wearing glasses. I never really paid attention but I sort of figure they're about 50/50 with and without glasses, no?
- coloured cars. there are statistics available on the distribution of colours and types of cars. they are different by region, of course. here in NL, most cars are grey or white, then some shade of red or dark blue. the idea being people don't often buy cars with flashy colours (except red) because people don't often buy cars with flashy colours (except red) and it'd make them harder to sell afterwards. what can you say, circular reasoning works
- keyword in this game is psychogeography. you talked about it in the other thread, I've read quite a bunch of psychogeography (and related) trip reports, they're usually kinda boring in a "guess you had to be there" sense, I heard about it years ago via the Eu-Gene Generative Art mailinglist. There's also a guy I follow on Twitter that does things related to that, although he's more about cryptoforests than psychogeography, but check it out if you want: http://cryptoforest.blogspot.com/ (seems he moved his blog, you might need to click around a bit, or google "socialfiction", also his username on Twitter)
- anyway, one variation in psychogeography is when you have cards with very simple commands on them "two blocks ahead", "first road to the left", etc. before you start the game you randomly draw 10 cards, shuffle them, and those will be your "program" to follow. when you used a card, you put it at the bottom of the stack, so the program repeats. sometimes they also do it with 5 or less cards, because the repeating aspect becomes very interesting when you do it in a live city, "second road to the right" may mean a very different thing depending on where you are!
- figure out some way to make "hooks" more universal. you don't always have cars, or trees, or lampposts. use the word "vehicle" so people can also look for a red bike or bus. use "vertical pole" (?) or something so it works for trees and lampposts.
- use the cards to define random properties: every card has four icons in the corners, this is an extra feature in addition to containing a command or treasure or action in the game. you use it when you need to generate a random object "hook". one corner has a random colour in it, another may contain a picture of glasses, a hat, bear/mustache, yet another has a shape in it (round, square, ..) stuff like that. so some action or quest in the game could be "draw a random hook. those objects are now dangerous and must be avoided". then you shuffle the deck, draw a card, decide on which of the four icons you will use (the other player gets to pick, so it is applicable to the surroundings) and suddenly all people with a hat are dangerous, or you must avoid square-shaped traffic signs. then you put the card back in the deck cause the icons are just for random thing generation.
- you can do the same for generating a random type of object (car, traffic sign, person, building, statue, living object)
- the psychogeography directions can also be represented as simple icons
- so basically all the cards can be multifunctional, depending on which bits you use. that decreases the amount of cards and different stacks/decks/etc you have to carry with you to just one (or one per player, depending)

[Tempest Virago]

I really like this idea. Are you still thinking about working on it, or nah?

[Cramulus]

yes - do you have any thoughts / comments?

[Tempest Virago]

I like the idea of deciding on three possibilities and pulling cards for each one. That's very cool. My favorites of your theme ideas are the last two.

I was wondering if it would make sense to have more than one deck, or if that would be too complicated. Like a "Location/Direction" deck, and maybe an "Objective" deck, or a deck that generates a random plot twist, or something like that.

Also important is figuring out when you're supposed to draw a card. At every fork in the road? When you feel like it? Every 15 minutes? etc.