I’m trying to organize a good game of Assasins for my friends and I to play but I’m not too sure on what to make the point of the game to be or how the rules should be set up. If anyone can give me an idea or a form of the game they have played, I’d really appreciate it.
Assassins is a LARP, in which you use various devious methods to “kill off” friends and strangers.
The way we used to play in high school:
The game leader makes it know that the game is being organized. The more players who do not know each other (or at least do not know who else is playing), the better. Between 10 and 20 players makes for a good game.
Each player is given a slip of paper with the name of another player. The player’s job is to find the person on that slip, and “kill” them.
There are many ways this can be done in many ways:
–Simply walk up to the person, “shoot” them with your finger, and declare them dead.
–Make a cassette tape of you saying “Boom! Your car just blew up…you’re dead”, and place it in their car stereo so it plays when they start their car.
–Stick a note inside their sandwich informing them they’ve been poisoned, and are now “dead”.
Basically, any way you can convey the message that you just “got” the person will count. However, the target should always have a chance to survive if they just exercise due diligence (or extreme paranoia). The target could check out their sandwich first, or notice the cassette in their car before it “goes off”. We had one guy in high school that would walk around with a large piece of cardboard stuffed inside his jacket. When he got “shot”, he unzipped the jacket revealing the cardboard with the words “bullet-proof vest” written on it. The game master happened to be nearby, and he ruled that the would-be killer had to walk away and try again another time.
Once a player has been “killed”, they must turn over the slip of paper naming the target they were hunting to the person who “got” them. That player now has a new target to “kill”. Play continues until there is only one person left.
A good game is built around the creative methods of “killing” one another. Yes, walking up to someone and saying “I just shot you, you’re dead” is legal, but it’s much more fun to get a call from another player saying “Ok, the lethal rubber spider you hid in my bed got me…I’m dead”.
The key to this game is the honor system. If you didn’t actually take that cassette tape out of your car and play it in a containment unit (i.e., your home stereo) before it goes off in your car, then you’re dead and you’ll just have to deal with that fact. However, if you really did notice the tape before starting your car, and you “diffuse” it, then call up the game master and have him pass along a “nice try, sucker” to your would-be killer. It all comes down to being honest. Cheating is easy to do in this game…but it makes the game suck.
Also, it’s a good idea to keep the game master informed of what you have planned. His rule is law in this game, so give him a head’s up before doing something stupid (note: if your going after a smoker, do not place a bang-charge in one of his smokes…if he happens to have that smoke while driving, the game can take on real-life themes).
Something else to note – I played this game in 1983-84…we’re talking a much different age than we live in today. When we “shot” someone, we made sure to pull out a toy gun to do it. This is NOT recommended if you’re playing in anything like a high school atmosphere these days. You’d probably be lucky if you were only suspended.
Hmmm…it seems Steve Jackson formalized the rules. Looks like you can order a game book here.
In Yavneh (the Orthodox student group), Columbia/Barnard Hillel, 2004 (after I graduated, but a friend forwarded them to me for old times’ sake), the official rules were [my notes in brackets, like this]:
The judges arranged the teams in a giant circle if you charted it out, such that A was hunting B, who was hunting C, who was hunting D, all the way out to Z, who was hunting A. If A killed B, they inherited B’s secret assignment to kill C.
The two keys to being successful were a)being insane (my team had that down - we were willing to infiltrate major corporations, climb fire escapes, stalk people in the underground tunnels, etc.,) and b)having a good information network, such that you could figure out who was hunting who was hunting who, and everybody on each team (not my specialty.)
The Penn Orthodox student group also played assassins, with very different rules (involving either assassinations with no witnesses at all or very public ones with a long, embarrassing declaration made first, poisonings, etc.) which I can try to dredge up if you’re interested.
One other thing - I never liked that there was no defensive killing in our version of Assassins. If someone you knew was hunting you got near you, the only thing to do was run. I’d add something that would allow you to kill someone trying to kill you.
Good point, Hal. I doubt that even the Chiquita .45 (an ordinary banana) would be tolerated by high schools these days. Play the game over a weekend instead.
Or just have the school be a no kill zone.
Wow what memories. Mid 80’s we had those toy guns that shot yellow plastic bits about BB sized. I remember having a pump shotgun in my locker. and having a firefight in a hallway. All we got was a stern “stop that” from the teachers. Now it would be handcuffs.
We allowed defensive moves, if you see someone drawing a weapon on you, you can shoot back. You may or may not have been their target, maybe it was the person next to you. Too bad they are now dead and you get their name. Bombs can have the same effect. If other players are in the area they are all dead too. This can lead to you having several targets worth of names at once.
We had to have a rule about subcontracting out hitmen. A minor ledgend was born when one player got a teacher to play a hitman to get a very elusive target.
My favorite kill was taking out a baseball player during the middle of a game. The look on his face was priceless.
Boobytraps… oh the imagination runs wild.
Have fun.
Steve Jackson also published a book of rules, Killer, in the eighties. While we only played a couple games in Junior High, I was fascinated by the complex rules he came up with for it.
Daniel
Pssssst! Last line of Post #2. 
This game was constantly being organized by different groups in my dorm freshman year. Inside the dorm was off limits (no one could come shoot you in the shower) but the porch and anywhere else was a-okay. It was all done with water pistols.
My advice if you do it with water… don’t miss and shoot the people standing at the bus stop. It pisses them off.
The Columbine shootings happened my sophomore year and the hall administration put a stop to assassins games for a while after that.
I also played it in high school in the early 1980s. We had an ongoing debate over which was better, the guns that shot the little yellow pellets or the ones that shot the spinning plastic disks. We’d run through the school and the town going after each other.
One night I was staying over at the house of a buddy of mine whose father had a night vision scope – pretty darn cool for that time. We used it to watch some friends on the another team sneaking up on the house through the back yard. We were waiting for them to approach so we could ambush them. At this point, my buddy’s father stupidly decided to help us out (knowing we had the scope) and turned on the back yard floodlights, spooking the enemy and ruining the ambush. We did not let my buddy’s father live that one down.
There’s nothing like the expression on someone’s face when he realizes that the back of the padlock on his locker is coated with vaseline, and he’s just died from contact poison.
Anyway, I strongly suspect if we even thought about playing it were we in high school today, we’d violate about sixteen zero tolerance policies and be shipped to Guantanamo Bay as potential terrorists before we could even choose a game master.
And GilaB, I can’t really imagine you playing Assassins, much less doing a serious undercover job at Morgan Stanley. You must have been the one that nobody ever expected.