8/14/2023 0 Comments Online jenga gamesPulls feel more dangerous than they are, and that's good. But people are scared as heck by the time they've made 15 pulls. I would guess that something like 30 pulls is the median pulls to failure, although I haven't gathered systematic data about that. My estimate is that, in fact, you have something like a 90% chance of surviving 20 pulls in a Dread game. You can see this in Asmor's comment that a 10% chance of surviving 20 pulls seems high to him. When a player estimates that there is a 50% chance of failure, my guess is that there's actually more like a 10% chance of failure. "I think there's about a 50% chance of the tower falling on the next pull." "I think there are two, maybe three pulls left before it falls no way we're getting five." Those estimates are almost always wrong, and in my experience they're systematically pessimistic. In pretty much every one of those games, we hit a point where players were making estimates of the likelihood of the tower falling. I've run something like 15 or 20 games using Dread or variants on Dread. The big one: people systematically misestimate the odds of failure in Dread, because Jenga gives you information, but the information is opaque. (I suppose you could use a blackjack like mechanism, where there's information gained but a chance of failure? But that would be complicated to design.)ĥ. There's nothing comparable in a random mechanism. That process of investigating the tower, tapping blocks and so forth, is part of the fun, part of the tension. Often, in a Dread game, a player will want to make two pulls, but will test the tower a little and decide not to pull at all, or to pull only once, because the tower seems too dangerous to risk another pull. You get information from the tower as you try to pull. In my experience playing Dread variants, this came up regularly.Ĥ. Working as a team? Pull in ways that make the tower stronger, and avoid the easy pulls that make the tower weaker. In competition with the other PCs? Maybe you should make a nasty pull that makes it more likely that somebody else will knock down the tower (like leaving only one block in a layer very close to the bottom of the tower). (This could be summed up as "playing Jenga is more fun than 'roll a die, don't roll a 1'")ģ. That makes it a more interesting process. In an actual Jenga tower, sometimes you have a really wobbly, off-balance tower with lots of stuck pieces, and sometimes you have a really solid tower with lots of easy draws at the same point in the game. In a purely randomized system, the 10th draw always has the same odds of collapse. The fact that the player's tension increases the difficulty of the task also plays into this.Ģ. Maybe drawing from a bag of beads would get some of this, but in a traditional Dread game you have this physical experience of pulling on the tower that increases tension in a way that is, I think, greater than the tension of a high-stakes die roll or the equivalent. Jenga has, in my mind, five main advantages in Dread over a random system with similar characteristics (probability of collapse, etc.)ġ. I think any of the purely random options would in a sense work, but they all lose something. Like with the cumulative percentage chances or card draws, you can fine tune the curve however you like with either of those options. If you like, you could start with an all white bead bag, and have the first pull (or the sixth pull, or whatever) be the addition of a black bead. If it's black, the "tower falls." After a black bead, you reset the bag, but pre-pull the same number of beads as pulls in the normal game. If it's white, great, but it doesn't go back in the bag. It starts out with, for example, 100 white beads and one black bead. if the tower has fallen twice, you would pull six times before it goes live, so the next "pull" is the second d20 roll).Ģ. When "the tower is reset," you eliminate a number of dice equivalent to the number of draws you would make (e.g. A progression of dice rolls: first 5 draws you roll a d100. The best I've come up with is "if one of the players really doesn't want to draw from the tower because of shaky hands, they can delegate their pulls to another player (but still take the consequences)." That works, but it's a little frustrating all the way around (and it depends on player-player trust-you have to be able to rely on the physically drawing player to not throw the other player's character under the bus to reset the tower).ġ. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this problem, for much the same reason as Nagol, but I haven't come up with any good solutions.
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