Adapting Cranium to a two-player game?

The Game Room
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  1. Cranium is undoubtedly a wicked game. Lots of fun, especially when combined with a few beers.

  2. My partner and I are like to play board games and we’re usually pretty good at making up our own rules to games that make them good two-people games. We’ve even designed our own Master Game Of All The Universe that combines Trivial Persuit, Dingbats and some LOTR game he has.

  3. I’d like to do this with Cranium. But I can’t think how. So I turn to you, dopers, for ideas.

How to turn the teamwork sections into single-person sections? Would we need to substitute certain tasks for brainteasers?

How would you do it?

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Hey just checking in to see if you ever found out how to make Cranium a two person game! And how’s the marriage holding up?

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Please don’t respond to 20 year old threads where the poster hasn’t been here for 10 years.

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I’ve never played the game but checking the rules and a quick video demo, I think you might be able to do the following:

Definitions:
Active Player - The player whose turn it is.
Non-Active Player - The player whose turn it is NOT.

Extra Note: There shouldn’t be any visible clocks in the room.

Extra Setup: Give each player one token and setup a pool of tokens (e.g. coins).

  1. Each player is given their own character to move. However, the two players will act together as a single “team” for all challenges.

  2. During an ordinary challenge, there are three possible outcomes.
    a. Success. The active player rolls to move and the non-active player is given a token.
    b. Failed, because of the non-active player. The active player rolls to move.
    c. Failed, because of the active player or if it’s not obvious who caused the failure. End of turn.

  3. When a Club Cranium activity is pulled:
    a. Both players will secretly write a prediction of how long they expect the activity to take.
    b. When players are ready, one of the players will start a timer and quickly place the phone face down so that the duration cannot be seen.
    c. Perform the task, together, as quickly as possible.

  1. After the Club Cranium event is completed, do the following:
    a. For each player, determine if they predicted the time correctly. They did predict correctly if the actual completion time was within X amount of time from their prediction, where X is their current number of tokens multipled by 3 seconds. (e.g. if the player has 4 tokens and predicted 1 minute, then they predicted correctly if the actual time is between 48 seconds and 1 minutes 12 seconds.)
    c. If a player predicted correctly, they are given a roll (regardles of whether they’re the active player).
    d. Both players should discard back down to 1 token.

All other rules are unchanged.

You might need to adjust the 1 token = 3 seconds rule. I’m not sure how long the activities usually take, nor how closely you’ll be able to predict things. You’ll have to playtest and see what works (if anything). Ideally, one player will get it and one won’t, most of the time.

If it doesn’t play right, just post your feedback and maybe I’ll be able to come up with something else.

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Or no, actually, a better version would be that the two players each write down a secret token value (e.g. 10 seconds) and nothing else.

After you’ve completed the Club Cranium event, average the two numbers that were written down by the two players.

If you finished the challenge faster than your # of tokens, multiplied by the average token value, then you get a roll.

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Moderating: @Jay_Z, please don’t junior mod. You could have flagged the post if you thought something was wrong or at least been more welcoming. {please note, not a warning}

I’ve moved the thread from Cafe to the Game Room. There was no Game Room when the thread was started.