Also, lots and lots of gratuitous nudity-One of the game’s most popular victors was massively charismatic, and one of the keys to his victory was the obscene amount of parachutes he received based on being a memetic sex god. As far as I’m aware, he was the only tribute who ever raised enough sponsor cash to be given a weapon.
As soon as the whistle blows: kill Boston Rob.
You fool! Without him to distract Parvati, she’ll murder us all! 
This. Or at least, “ally and don’t betray,” if you can’t get at the organisers. The other competitors are not your enemy unless they make themselves your enemy.
Dude, did you see the way Parvati was looking at me? She’s totally into me, and we have a real bond. Isn’t that right Parvati? Where’d you get that knife? No, Parvati aaaargh.
Man, that was scary. I lucked out though, good thing Parvati really has a crush on me… death gurgle
And I do think there’s some legs to the idea of setting up a decent alliance:
(book 1 spoilers)
[spoiler]One reason that the Careers (district 1, 2, sometimes 4 kids) are so successful is because they receive military-like training specifically designed to prepare them for the games, like other people have noted. Another big reason, however, is that their mentors almost always instruct them to ally with the other careers. They tend to be pretty indoctrinated and loyal by this point, so they usually stay together until all the non-careers have been killed.
Katniss reminisces that almost without exception, the years that a career doesn’t win are when they fail to take or hold the cornucopia, or when a freak accident devastates their numbers early. In that vein, I would be very comfortable trying to make alliances during the training period along the lines of “the six of us agree to work together until the careers are dead and we’re all that’s left- then we give each other a quick head start, and no hard feelings”. If I was particularly twitchy, I’d leave shortly before the planned dissolution, assuming that anyone who was going to betray the alliance would wait until the last possible minute to do so.[/spoiler]
I’m thinking, if, on day one, you set up a beginning alliance with your own district partner, and get the lumber district on your side (big strong kids, usually), and possibly one agriculture kid, if they look competent, then maybe, just maybe, you could pry one or both district 4 kids off the career group. At that point, you have them seriously weakened before the games even begin. If you could just plant the idea to district 4 that they are the weakest link in the career group, but the strongest members of your alliance, and that after the careers are gone, their chances are way better than in an endgame with only careers.
I forget- does District 4 have an academy like 1 and 2?
I thought they didn’t, because Finnick was tribute when he was only 14, and SOP for the academies was for 18 year old tributes to volunteer.
I ask because I was always under the impression that one of the reasons that Career alliances were so strong was because after all the training and indoctrination, if their instructors told them to form alliance X and stick with it, they would basically refuse to deviate from that in anything but the most egregious circumstances.
Step 1
When the game starts, run the hell away. In the first book
Peeta signals for Katniss to run away, rightly, she complies; mostly
Step 2
Do what Foxface attempted to do in the first games. That is the only realistic way to survive. Occasionally try to ambush and kill some other competitors to keep the gamemakers happy.
Step 3
As my entire district whether or not they can get together and send a .50 Browning as a sponsors gift. Or failing that, a vasoconstrictor, a heart attack has to be an easier way to go.
Unlikely, gifts are extremely expensive:
Rue was from a well-liked family in a huge district, but when her whole district put together everything they could to help her out, all they could afford to buy was a tiny piece of bread early in the game, when food was cheap. When a large number of the richest people in the capitol pooled their resources, it bought their favorite a trident
I’m pretty clumsy and not a great fighter, even when I was 12-18. I don’t think I’d make it. Given that I’d like to think I’d go in front of a camera, spread my arms, and say “I refuse to kill my brothers and sisters for the corrupt Capitol! Down with the Capitol! Long live the free districts of Panem!” Then hope it was quick.
Failing that, I’d study up on traps and poisons, seek the high ground, find water, lay low, and use traps and poisons to eliminate as many people as possible.
Just out of curiosity, what happened to the cannibal(s)? :eek:
You’re stuck in a prisoner’s dillemma, though; in fact they ARE your enemy, at all times, and like the two prisoners, it is invariably to your immediate benefit to be the first one to betray the other if you can’t guarantee the other one won’t betray you. And you can’t guarantee that, so it’s always to your benefit to kill them, and to theirs to kill you. If not now, then sooner or later it will be, as the number of opponents dwindles and the calculus changes.
The problem with alliances is exactly that; sooner or later someone’s going to slit the other’s throat, and you’re better off doing it tonight in case your partner does it tomorrow. Collins wanks this away with the Career tributes by saying they’re taught to stay allied, but even that strikes me as dubious, because they’re also taught to be ruthless killers and the reality of the situation is what it is.
The fact is that there’s no good strategy to win the Hunger Games. There’s no way to play the system. The game is rigged. The most logical way to survive the contest at its most basic level is to play turtle and let the other 23 competitors kill each other until your odds are better - but because that is what most or all of the other 23 will also conclude, the game is designed so that if you try to do that, either they’ll kill you with a natural disaster or some horrible trap, or you will be severely disadvantaged as the active players get goodies that you don’t get.
You’re going to win the Hunger Games with tactics. You’ve got to pick your battles, and once picked, beat people. Get fit, train like a bastard, be stealthy and be utterly ruthless. If you lose a fight, well, you die, but that’s how it goes.
No, those other kids aren’t my enemy-- The organizers are my enemy (and theirs). They’re the ones trying to get me and others like me dead, so they’re the ones I try to kill.
Which is exactly what happened in book 2
Well his name was meaningful: Titus and
He was killed in an avalanche. It’s generally accepted that he was offer by the game makers in a case of “even evil has standards”, as the place where he was when ut hit him was no where near a mountain.
What AK84 said. There’s still no official rule, but:
Spoilers for first half of book one
Basically Titus was incredibly horrific to watch. Katniss described these almost comically horrible scenes that she used to watch on TV whenever someone made a kill on his game- usually there are these hovecraft which wait until the killer has departed the body’s immediate vicinity and then swoop in to collect the body, but in the case of Titus she used to watch them rush the hovercraft in and immediately fastrope small armies of police with nets and cattle prods that would desperately try to defend the body long enough to get it into the hovercraft without Titus grabbing and eating it. Apparently this was a lot harder than it already sounds, since he was a psychotically aggressive fighter. He was utterly uncontrollable, and his actions were really, really frightening, so it’s generally assumed that the gamemasters declared Rocks Fall, Titus Dies as a last-ditch measure to keep a complete monster from becoming the country’s champion. There was no formal rule change in response to him, but after watching how the gamemasters responded to the whole debacle, most canny tributes have concluded that absolutely any cannibalism will result in immediate and brutal assassination via DM.
I’m not trying to win the Hunger Games. Like Shinji from Battle Royale, I have a bigger goal.
If you took my mind now and put it into my body in that age range? Possibly either day-1 suicide (run from cornucopia, climb the highest tree I can find, and jump down headfirst–or maybe even jumping onto a landmine from the start), *or *I’d play the coy temptress who murders her allies in their sleep. I can’t say which way my survival instincts would fall.
But simply having to put my own teenaged self from 10ish years ago into the ring? I’d be a goner. My skillset at the time encompassed saxophony, pre-calc, and great paper-writing. I wasn’t street-smart in the slightest. I grew up fairly poor, watching my mom get battered about by the winds of fate and her first husband. Nope, I’d probably run away but still be dead by sunset (that chick who lit the fire by Katniss’s tree? No common sense whatsoever? That’d be me)
I still wonder, though, why didn’t Peeta wait for the careers to fall asleep on the first night and kill them all at once?
That’s great that you’re thinking so nobly, but it’ll get you killed, and I’m trying to answer the OP.
The kid who doesn’t think like you will kill you. So you won’t win, so it’s not an answer to the OP.