I looked up tag on Wikipedia to see if there was a name for the variant I have in mind, but it’s not listed. I know from experience that it’s like blob tag:
What I have in mind is that, rather than having to hold hands, whoever gets tagged is on the “it” team and can move independently of the other people who are “it.” Once everyone has been tagged, the game is over. With a time limit, the winner could be determined by whoever has more people on their team.
I thought of this while playing Unreal Tournament tonight. This would be a pretty kickass mode of play, where every person you kill joins your team. As such I have two questions. Is there a name for this version of tag, and does anyone know of a game mod for UT like this?
I never played any kind of variant like this, but IMHO it should be called Zombie tag. Before playing you would have to decide on fast or slow zombies though.
I’ve played that game under the name of Hound and Hare. “It” is the Hound, and everyone else starts off as a Hare. Any Hare tagged by a Hound becomes another Hound, and play continues until there’s only one Hare left. The last Hare wins, and becomes the first Hound for the next game. This is most commonly played by teenagers in the woods at night (I played it in Boy Scouts).
A related game (also played in my Boy Scout troop) is British Bulldog. One player starts off as a Bulldog, in the center of a gym, with all other players lined up along the walls. At some signal (I don’t remember what it is), all non-Bulldog players run across the gym and try to tag the opposite wall (at which point they’re safe for that round). The bulldog or bulldogs try to catch anyone in between; if you can hold your victim off of the ground for long enough to say “British Bulldog”, the victim becomes a new bulldog (the bulldogs can and often do cooperate on this, especially for larger targets). Again, the game is over when there’s one non-bulldog left, and he becomes the first Bulldog for the next game.
The scoutmasters forbade playing British Bulldog after a set of injuries, after which point we started playing a completely different game called Shetland Shepherd. You start off with one guy (the Shepherd) in the center of the gym, with everyone else lined up along one wall. At some signal, everyone tries to run across the gym, and the shepherd(s) try to catch them. If you hold someone off the floor long enough to say “Shetland Shepherd”, that person becomes another shepherd. Obviously, this is a completely different game than British Bulldog, and therefore not covered under the ban.
I’m not sure these would make a viable FPS mod, though… The game would end when one side completely assimilates the other, correct? Well, at that point, who’s on the winning team? I don’t think that a game style where in the end everyone wins would be popular among most players of such games.
Initially, I thought British Bulldog was the answer. On reflection, I think we might’ve played the game described in the OP and called it British Bulldog, but the game described by Chronus sounds familiar… so I’m not sure. I think we called the game described in the OP Gang Up at some times and British Bulldog at others, though I grew up in Australia so YMMV.
PS When talking of the game described in the OP, I meant the non-linked-hands version. Also, I think the idea is that the last guy not to become “it” is the winner, so its not like everybody wins.
I played the variation described in the OP (i.e. the one where people didn’t link hands) when I was a child. The winner was the last one to be caught. We called it chasings.
Yes, but in a UT version, presumably both sides can “capture” (kill) the other. In this case, if your victory condition is “last man standing”, then the strategy would be to try to get your teammates killed. If you’re on the Red Team and there are two guys left on the Blue Team, you have no motivation at all to try to kill one of them, and in fact have a motivation to try to get killed (so as to switch to the team that’s almost at Last Man). If you end the game with the death of the last man, then you’ve got the “everyone wins” problem. And if you just set a timer or fragcounter or something and call the person (not team) with the most frags the winner, then it’s just like an ordinary deathmatch, except your list of eligible targets fluctuates (and again it’s advantageous to be on the outnumbered team, to give you plenty of targets).
We had a version of this game called Johnny Bulldog. It sounds identical to **Chronos’ ** British Bulldog, except that it was played on the outdoor basketball courts.
Upon reflection, I don’t think we ever actually *played * Johnny Bulldog. It had long since been banned for precively the reason that **Chronos ** mentioned. What we actually played was called Johnny Cross. In this version, instead of tackling your target, you only had to tag them. This made for a much more friendly game.
Of course, there was nothing in the official Johnny Cross Rulebook that specifically forbade tackling. And the participants seemed to have a tendency to run into the posts holding up the backboards. Johnny Cross was quickly banned as well.
Then we settled for playing “team tag”, which was an *entirely * different game.
