For those of you have been asking me to somehow relaunch the old The-N.com game Slasher!, which as I’ve said I have neither the authority nor technology to do, here’s some good advice from a couple of former The N users, Autumnforte and Lillian Noe:
The beauty of Slasher! is that it’s based on a set of rules that are very malleable. You can adapt it to play in person as a group, in a chat room, via text, over email, by spray-painting messages onto the sides of livestock, or by any other method of communication you can think of. My more nerdish friends and I sometimes use this play-by-email system called Werewolf, and you can buy card sets for home play.
But it’s just as easy and cheaper to make your own version. Using text messages like Autumnforte does gives players the benefit of being able to play at their own pace while they’re doing other things or are trapped under storm debris. The trade-off becomes that it’s harder to prevent cheating, but one could argue that if everyone’s cheating equally and well, the game becomes more fun.
Any chat room that allows private messaging between people is a good place to start trying to create your own game.1 Combine that with a site that lets you create your own polls, and you’ve got a voting mechanism. Try it.
If you have a particularly creative way of playing Slasher! or its ilk, lemme know in the comments, and I’ll share the good ones in a later post. I do not recommend developing any versions that involve actually killing your friends, unless you own a carpet steamer.
----- It’s particularly enjoyable if you don’t use your real names, so no one knows who’s who. The nerds and I like to run theme games and play in character: cereal mascots, tabloid celebrities, presidential also-rans, diseases, furniture, holy mother of ham are we ever losers. [↩]
