I occasionally go airsofting, which is quite similar to paintball. The organizers mainly borrow from First Person Shooters for their rules, but if you adapt the rules to something similar to Quirrell’s games in Methods of Rationality and throw in ways to do easily conceal information, you might be able to make it work.
First of all, have more than two teams. Two teams don’t allow for interesting scenarios such as teaming up, betraying, bluffing… Adding an extra one does.
Don’t have “respawns”. Failure should be meaningful and you can have “wipe out the enemy” as an objective. It also lowers the time needed to complete an objective.
Give incomplete or inaccurate information to your players about the goals or the layout of your arena. This forces them to quickly process new information they encounter on the battlefield.
There are other things you can do, but I’ll have to give it some more thought.
You can still have interesting stuff with more than two teams!
Players compete for points, and get 50 points if their team wins, but get points for other things: negative points for being killed, positive points for sub-objectives that don’t particularly help their team (picking up items hidden throughout the playing field, standing on tall things...).
For extra fun, give each player a random secret objective (including a “you actually play for the other team, and get scored accordingly” card).
Or for a totally different feel, have an “accomplish objectives” game (find hidden items, or bring back water to your jar with a spoon, the one with the most wins), but also give them paintball/airsoft guns, with rules on death/respawning etc.
I used to play airsoft a few years ago. The main problem with that would be the relatively large expense to start playing, and the need for a very large area. I agree that there should be more than two teams, as I’ve said elsewhere, and the lack of respawns would make sense.
Possibly, however, limited-range weaponry would be more fun/useful/easy to deal with—nerf/boffer swords, (which I admit I have no experience with) thrown weaponry, like tennis balls or dodgeballs, and so on.
I occasionally go airsofting, which is quite similar to paintball. The organizers mainly borrow from First Person Shooters for their rules, but if you adapt the rules to something similar to Quirrell’s games in Methods of Rationality and throw in ways to do easily conceal information, you might be able to make it work.
First of all, have more than two teams. Two teams don’t allow for interesting scenarios such as teaming up, betraying, bluffing… Adding an extra one does.
Don’t have “respawns”. Failure should be meaningful and you can have “wipe out the enemy” as an objective. It also lowers the time needed to complete an objective.
Give incomplete or inaccurate information to your players about the goals or the layout of your arena. This forces them to quickly process new information they encounter on the battlefield.
There are other things you can do, but I’ll have to give it some more thought.
You can still have interesting stuff with more than two teams!
Players compete for points, and get 50 points if their team wins, but get points for other things: negative points for being killed, positive points for sub-objectives that don’t particularly help their team (picking up items hidden throughout the playing field, standing on tall things...).
For extra fun, give each player a random secret objective (including a “you actually play for the other team, and get scored accordingly” card).
Or for a totally different feel, have an “accomplish objectives” game (find hidden items, or bring back water to your jar with a spoon, the one with the most wins), but also give them paintball/airsoft guns, with rules on death/respawning etc.
I used to play airsoft a few years ago. The main problem with that would be the relatively large expense to start playing, and the need for a very large area. I agree that there should be more than two teams, as I’ve said elsewhere, and the lack of respawns would make sense.
Possibly, however, limited-range weaponry would be more fun/useful/easy to deal with—nerf/boffer swords, (which I admit I have no experience with) thrown weaponry, like tennis balls or dodgeballs, and so on.