A Trio of Games
- Listening to:
- Mozart, violin concerto #5 in A major, K219. This concerto has
the moniker "Turkish" because of a very rhythmically exciting
episode in the final movement. It's not really Turkish at all,
but it sounds quite exotic. It's certainly very appealing.
A couple of links today. The first is to a description of a game
called
Mafia. It
sounds like a neat game, one that requires little more than
people in a room (i.e., no fancy equipment). The many possible
variations one can make to the rules also make it appealing.
Of course, it can be very hard to judge these things
from the rules alone. You really need to try playing games
like these to
see how they fare in practice. I'd also like to get an opportunity to
try it with a bunch of people I knew reasonably well so that I'd be in
a position to judge whether people were lying or not.
My second link is to another social game, invented by a quartet of
researchers in game theory (including the famous John Nash), called So
long Sucker. This isn't as obviously interesting, but it might
work quite well. Being perfect information (unlike Mafia)
makes it more like that other classic, Diplomacy.
(Oops! That was a third link. Well hey, Diplomacy deserves
one.)