[Mexican Standoff] I shot Peter Adkison... but he shot me back

[timfire]

So Sunday at GenCon Peter Adkison did his usually rounds at the Forge booth, buying pretty much every new game on the shelf---my little party game Mexican Standoff included. Then, at about 6:00pm, after we were done tearing down the booth and whatnot, I got an email (having placed my email address in the book)---Peter wanted to play my game, and asked if I would come to the official after-GenCon party and "run" it for him.

So I did, and it went really well. We had 5 players, myself included. When I came to the part where I explain that we needed to put real money on the table, Peter said, "Why don't we all put $20 dollars down?"

I'm actually glad he said that, 'cause playing for that much money definitely changes the game. When I played in the past for small amounts, I was felt fairly free to swing my gun around according to what happened in the narrative. But with $100 riding on the game, I found I was very aware of who was pointing at me, and when I ran out of tokens, I made sure to keep pointing at someone who still had tokens (so if someone fired, that person would interrupt).

We blew through all of our tokens with BANGS. When that finally happened, we all just kinda looked at each other, for the first time feeling a true Mexican Standoff. It didn't take very long before someone suggested a STAND DOWN. Two people held back, three fired (me, Peter, and a third player). When the dust cleared only me and Peter were left standing. We then went a second round of STAND DOWN, and we both fired. We lost out, and the other three got to keep the money. From what I could tell, everyone really liked it.

I noticed something about the game, as I also did one "demo" of it during the Con. At first, everyone is throwing out ideas and twists in rapid succession. But after 7-8 minutes or so, people start running out of ideas, and the game starts slowing down. It gets hard to keep the pace going. I don't think this breaks the game, I think it's just something inherent to this type of play. I also suspect it depends on your personality, I can think of a few people I think could rattle things off for hours.

One of Peter's friends also suggested a better technique for STAND DOWN's. You keep pointing your gun as normal. Then, you take a token and place it under the table or whatever. If you DON'T want to shoot, you leave the token and just make a fist with your second hand. If you DO, you palm the token in your fist. Then, you bring your fist back up. When SHOW IT is called, everyone opens their fist. If a token falls, you shoot.

[John Harper]

No replies? Crazy. This is super awesome. I bought Mexican Standoff on a whim at GenCon (sight unseen) and this made me pick it up and read it. Very cool. I'm definitely bringing it out at the next party.

Thanks, Tim.

[Lance D. Allen]

Someone in another community I occasionally post to mentioned going to GenCon, and visiting the Forge booth. He said he demo'd Mexican Standoff, but wasn't too sure about it, so I responded and told him how you'd been asked to run the game for Peter Adkison, and that $100 was riding on the game.

[timfire]

I should have done a better job pushing the game at GenCon. I'm quite proud of the game as a pick-up-and-go "non-rpg". I think I'm going to do a better printing of the book and start selling it off IPR.

[Keith Senkowski]

Awesome Tim.  But the important question is did they like the cover... ;)