Hide + Seek DC: Multi-Seeker Test Game
This past weekend I ran another game of Jet Lag’s Hide + Seek Transit Game in the DC area, but this time we were testing an experimental multi-seeker game mode. Unlike my previous (one, two, three) posts, this will not be a play-by-play, and instead primarily a post mortem and my thoughts on our rules ahead of the second multi-seeker game I have planned in a week and a half
The game zone remained the same as always: the original DC square, minus Pentagon station, at a ‘small’ game size with hiding time extended to 40 minutes and a start position of Metro Center. The various maps and resources we used to play the game are linked at the bottom of the post!
The Game
You can read my (very work-in progress) seeker rules here, but to briefly summarize, multiple seeker teams compete to find the hider first. Seekers draw cards and cast curses against each other, and the hider is neutral and manages game logistics, including seeker hands.
I wrote up a few custom cards to test (noted in the doc), including curses that let you access other teams’ questions/answers, hand size shrinking, forced discards, and the ability to disable trackers (seekers can all see each others’ locations).
We had 10 people including myself, so we split into three teams of three, with myself being the neutral hider. I originally had someone who was going to hide with me and help, but she had something come up last minute, so solo it was! That turned out to be a mistake.
We started at Metro Center at 10:47 with a 40 minute hiding period, and off I went. I had a cheeky little spot in mind: there’s an unobtrusive door by Exit B (11th and G) of Metro Center that leads into a hallway and escalator up into Washington Center and the Grand Hyatt hotel. My idea was to hide in the hallway just past the door, tucked along the side so that you really had to come all around to the wall to be able to see me. The downside, of course, would be that I would be in endgame at the very start and unable to move.
An aside: apparently, the official rule is that once endgame is triggered, it remains on, even if seekers leave the station, but endgame is only triggered once seekers disembark—passing through a station doesn’t count (per Ben on Reddit: 1, 2). I think this is unintuitive and a little silly, so we don’t play with this rule, and treat endgame as a toggleable state. If the seekers leave the hiding zone, endgame is no longer on and the hider can move freely. We play with a few other exceptions too, you can find those in the Game Reference linked in the resources at the bottom.
Anyways I find a nice couch in the Grand Hyatt lobby to chill on and wait out the first wave of questions. This turned out to be a very good decision because I quickly needed the table space. For future games, I recommend one hider per seeker-team, and each hider manages their own team’s questions and resultant draws. Doing it all solo was just insane, especially when multiple questions came in at once, since each question results in two other draws. And since most questions require selection, you have to send a picture of the draw to those two seeker teams and hold those cards separate while you wait for a response of what to draw. (In the future, building out some helper app might be really nice.) It’s worsened when photo questions are asked, because then you’re hustling around to try and get a photo while also resolving card rewards for other players. I’m thinking I might allow pre-taking photos for multi-seeker games?
Around 13 is when I think teams are starting to get a sense of my location and when I see teams on their way back towards Metro Center, so I hustle into my little hallway and sit on the floor.
I would be sitting on that floor for a long time. Mistakes were made, and regrets were had. By 14, I think most teams were reasonably confident of my rough area, and there was at least one time always in Metro Center, though evidently there was some confusion as I saw a team spending nearly an hour in Farragut West. I found out later that there was a building that looked exactly like the photo I took over there.
Look at all those seekers enjoying the sun and having a good at time. Wish I could relate.
Suffice to say that the endgame was truly miserable, but a team did finally find me at 14:42, so a 3h15m time plus 34 minutes for a final score of 3h49m. Unfortunately, another team had a whopping 55 minutes of time bonuses, and so by the rules I wrote we would continue playing until it was impossible for them to win. I had the seekers turn their tracker off and waited about 5 minutes before notifying teams they had another ~20 minutes before we called it. In the end, neither of the other two seekers managed to find us in time.
We gathered up, I showed everyone the hiding spot, there were lots of appreciative groans (including from several people whom I had told about the spot abstractly before—I really did think this was gonna be a shorter run) and we headed off to Shake Shack for… is it lunch or dinner at 15:30? Whatever it was, I desperately needed food, and the bathroom
Post Mortem
So, what did we learn? Well, the big one, at least one hider per seeker team seems like the sweet spot. A single person definitely can’t manage it solo, though maybe digitizing the deck would make that viable. Multi-seeker does make the scheduling a bit more viable, though not because it’s substantially shorter but just because it means we only run one round instead of two for a ‘normal’ game.
Additionally, since there were three teams not everyone got a rulebook, and the rulebook is ambiguous in a lot of spots anyways. One of the other big takeaways was for me to finally put together a game reference doc with clarifications and notes on any places I changed rules to better suit our game map and our group. I already had the seeker question reference doc with annotations and irrelevant questions removed, so I just renamed the doc and added a bunch of other reference material on top.
For multi-seeker specifically, the custom cards I wrote were meh. The one that let you learn a past question was not super useful, though the ‘wiretap’ that let you hear their next question/answer was pretty nice. The tracker disable powerup might need to be a bit longer, and I don’t think anyone really used the discard effects. I think I will up the duration of the tracker disable (I started it at 10 minutes), add more wiretap cards, and axe the discard effects. Maybe a Thoughtseize would be fun? Make it cost a card, so you’re spending two to get one but you get information and a curated selection?
I do want to come up with some DC-themed curses as well, but so far haven’t thought of anything great that wouldn’t be horribly annoying or impossible to do if you happened to be in Virginia or Anacostia instead.
Speaking of curses, curse flow felt a bit high, though I need to check to see if my seekers felt the same way. If they do, I might lower the selection on the card rewards (though, really, by endgame teams were starting to farm time bonuses instead of curses). Also, Curse Of The Endless Tumble is going to need a nerf—100 feet is way too far, I might just bump it down to 50 or 25 feet but require specifically a 6 (instead of a 5 or a 6)
Finally, endgame. This is by no means a unique problem, we ran into it in nearly all of our other games as well, but endgame on this map has been an absolute slog. I have a few ideas for additional questions that I’m going to try for the next game. You can find these in the game reference doc also, at the bottom under ‘Experimental Seeker Questions’.
- Add the medium game (1-mile) tentacles, and add a Foreign Consulate tentacle category to the tentacles. To be honest, I have no idea how well this will work, but it’s an obvious thing to try. Besides adding the embassies, I’m not otherwise modifying the question category.
- A ‘block radar’, instead of a mile radar. This will basically serve as a second custom radar to give teams some more options in endgame. It’s clunky and I don’t love it, and it’s basically an endgame-only question, but during this game a team accidentally asked a block radar and I accidentally answered and it seemed fine so it’s worth a shot. I’ve started off with both a 2-block and custom-block option, which is possibly too generous, but we’ll see what teams actually use. These are costed same as radars, draw 2 pick 1
- A ‘fence’. The seekers have to state they’re starting one, then physically trace out a boundary, upon which they learn if the hiders are inside or outside. I think this one maintains the transit ‘spirit’ of the game, might encourage bus use more, and I’m hopeful that it can be used in a granular way for endgame as well as be an interesting option in the macro-game. We’re starting this off as a draw 2 pick 1 and might make it cheaper, it’s a more flexible radar but with a significant travel cost, though the travel cost is less in endgame when its most useful.
- A ‘tripwire’. Basically a variant on the ‘same street’ matching question, but instead you can pick either three or five parallel streets, and hiders say if their closest street is any of those. I’ve tentatively costed this one as a draw 4 pick 1, as slightly better than the street matching question, but it might be able to drop down to draw 3 pick 1. My hope is that this can be used to help chop up an endgame hiding zone, especially with DC’s odd pseudo-grid. I don’t anticipate it being too useful in the macro-game
Anyways that’s all! If you have any ideas I should be considering please shoot me an email at [email protected]! Or just if you wanna chat! I love yapping. You can message me on Discord or my other socials too, if you prefer, I’m mweepigeon everywhere.
If you happen to be in the area, I’ve spun up a Discord server for organizing games within my group. Feel free to join!
Resources
These are the maps and documents I’ve compiled for playing the game. I’ve cleaned things up finally and put a lot of our various customizations and references into a single doc
- DC + VA Game Map. Includes waypoints for question POIs (except parks)
- “Printable” map. It’s a JPG with a downtown inset and legend, I print it as an 18x24 architectural diagram from FedEx
- DC + VA Game Reference. Contains our customizations (such as hiding time) and various clarifications, as well as an annotated seeker question reference that clarifies and removes irrelevant questions.
- Multi-seeker Rules Reference. The doc defining the rules for our multi-seeker game. Very much a work in progress
Here are some helpful links from other people: