I want to play a game called Fix. I don’t know what it’s about! I don’t know how you play it! I know that I have a need and you have a need. I know I can’t get what I need, but I can get what you need. You can get what I need, and so can she. I don’t know if we play with cards or chips or dice or M&Ms. I don’t know whether we play at a table or covertly at a boring party, with speech or text messages or secret signals.
How do you play Fix?
To play Fix, you’ll need a tube of Smarties (or bag of M&Ms, or some other coloured tokens in an opaque receptacle).
To start, each player picks a Smartie at random from the tube, and keeps its colour a secret. This represents the Fix they need. The rest of the Smarties are then tipped out on the table and distributed into roughly even (but any-colour) piles, one for each player. Each player owns one pile.
Players may then negotiate trades of Smarties in their pile with those in other players’ piles. This continues until nobody wants to trade any more.
When everyone’s done, the players reveal their Fixes, and add them to their pile. Any player who has less than half of the tube’s supply of their Fix in their pile is then eliminated. Of the players that remain, the one with the most Smarties is the winner.
(I’ve no idea if two players drawing the same colour is Interesting or Unfair; could fix it by just putting one of each colour back in the tube after tipping out, if it’s a problem. And “fix colour counts double” might be a better variant rule, with no elimination, but elimination seems more appropriate to the theme.)
It seems to me that the game’s going to be essentially luck-based, whoever getting the most of whatever color is most-desired being the eventual winner. With possible kingmaker elements as well (”Well, there’s no way Kevan will give up enough of the Reds to keep me from being eliminated, so I give all my smarties to Brendan!”)
It strikes me that a random way to determine when the game ends might fix this problem, and a scoring mechanism of, say, each piece of your fix being worth X points, and each other piece being worth 1 point, for various values of X.
Actually, I like that random game end idea, and may try applying it to Munchkin, to avoid the whole “holding all your thwart cards until someone hits level 9″ endgame problem that it and a few other games have. Whoever has highest level when the pizza guy arrives wins, perhaps? So you have a reasonable expectation of a beginning period when you can be casual, but gradually growing tenser and tenser and getting more cut-throat as play proceeds, instead of going instantly from “all fine” to “Zomg! he can win next turn! Get him!”. And repeating until everyone but one player is out of thwart cards. (Actually, it suddenly occurs to me that that is exactly how the entirety of Kill Dr. Lucky works. Hmmm.)
Damn, now I want a game called Kingmaker too.
Mm, you might be right about the luck, although it’s probably worth playing out to see what happens - given that Fixes are secret and giving away clues is bad, people are going to be careful not to show too much enthusiasm when trading. I’d guess that most trades would be swapping equal numbers of mixed colours, that any focus or imbalance would betray desperation.
Kingmaking does seem like a problem when you’re obviously doomed, though, and the Fix-colours giving bonuses probably is a better game, albeit one with a different message. (A further twist might be to make colours which were nobody’s Fix count as zero, to demand some deduction from watching other people’s trades.)
Why is letting someone know your fix bad? It’s possible that they won’t offer you the smarties you need, but I would imagine it more likely that they will, to give you higher incentive to trade with them instead of someone offering random mix, thus giving them the color THEY need.