Replacing Jenga in Dread
- Thread starter Nagol
- Start date
HandofMystra
First Post
A good question but I cannot think of an answer.
Pbartender
First Post
Not really... The nervousness, stress and tension created by having to pull a block from a nearly toppling tower is pretty integral to the ambiance of the game. You'd effectively eliminate the whole purpose of the game, if you got rid of that.
Although, thinking about it, you could probably replace it with a similar type of "remove (or add) bits until you crash" sort of game -- [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Mattel-37092-Ker-Plunk-Game/dp/B0000205X3/ref=sr_1_2?s=toys-and-games&ie=UTF8&qid=1313504582&sr=1-2]Ker-Plunk[/ame], [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Pressman-Toy-9026-Topple-Game/dp/B00000IZEL]Topple[/ame] and [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Milton-Bradley-04785-Spill-Beans/dp/B00000IWDP/ref=pd_sim_t_4]Don't Spill the Beans[/ame] come to mind -- that takes a little less motor skill and a little more luck to play.
Although, thinking about it, you could probably replace it with a similar type of "remove (or add) bits until you crash" sort of game -- [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Mattel-37092-Ker-Plunk-Game/dp/B0000205X3/ref=sr_1_2?s=toys-and-games&ie=UTF8&qid=1313504582&sr=1-2]Ker-Plunk[/ame], [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Pressman-Toy-9026-Topple-Game/dp/B00000IZEL]Topple[/ame] and [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Milton-Bradley-04785-Spill-Beans/dp/B00000IWDP/ref=pd_sim_t_4]Don't Spill the Beans[/ame] come to mind -- that takes a little less motor skill and a little more luck to play.
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Having not played Dread, I would tentatively agree with this. There are probably other "kid's" games that would emulate the effect as well ("don't break the ice", etc).
Maybe stacking blocks upward, instead of removing would be a less physically daunting in this case.
Also, a card deck mechanic might work, but may not have quite the same ambiance:
1. shuffle a deck.
2. split in half and shuffle a joker into the lower half.
3. object: if the desk runs out, you lose (die, fail, etc.)
4. if you pull a jack, pull one extra card.
5. if you pull a queen, pull two extra cards
6. if you pull a king, pull 4 extra cards
7. (the above can either be secret pulls (just discarded) or live pulls that stack.)
8. if you pull the joker, discard remainder of the deck. (i.e. you lose)
That should give you some risk with every pull (more so with live pulls), with exponential risk as the game progresses. (eventually the cards WILL run out)
Good Gaming!
Asmor
First Post
As has been noted, you lose a lot by not having the actual, physical tower there.
That said, your 1% idea does lead to an interesting curve.
You've got a 95% chance of surviving 5 rolls, a 59% chance of surviving 10 rolls, 28% chance of surviving 15 rolls, and a 10% chance of surviving 20 rolls. (source)
That actually feels a little high to me. YMMV.
That said, your 1% idea does lead to an interesting curve.
You've got a 95% chance of surviving 5 rolls, a 59% chance of surviving 10 rolls, 28% chance of surviving 15 rolls, and a 10% chance of surviving 20 rolls. (source)
That actually feels a little high to me. YMMV.
jaerdaph
#UkraineStrong
This all depends on someone having a laptop or tablet with a connection to the Internet, but this might be a solution:
Jenga - Free Online Games (FOG)
Edit: Do a Google search for "jenga online", "play jenga online" because there are other versions of the game out there.
Jenga - Free Online Games (FOG)
Edit: Do a Google search for "jenga online", "play jenga online" because there are other versions of the game out there.
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Cerebral Paladin
First Post
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. 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).
Other ideas I've considered:
1. A progression of dice rolls: first 5 draws you roll a d100. Next 5 draws you roll a d20. Next 5 draws you roll a d12. Etc. Any one, on any die, equals tower falls. When "the tower is reset," you eliminate a number of dice equivalent to the number of draws you would make (e.g. if the tower has fallen twice, you would pull six times before it goes live, so the next "pull" is the second d20 roll).
2. Take an opaque bag of beads. It starts out with, for example, 100 white beads and one black bead. On a pull, you draw a bead. If it's white, great, but it doesn't go back in the bag. 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 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.
Like with the cumulative percentage chances or card draws, you can fine tune the curve however you like with either of those options.
I think any of the purely random options would in a sense work, but they all lose something.
Jenga has, in my mind, five main advantages in Dread over a random system with similar characteristics (probability of collapse, etc.)
1. Jenga is visceral. 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. The fact that the player's tension increases the difficulty of the task also plays into this.
2. Different towers are different. In a purely randomized system, the 10th draw always has the same odds of collapse. 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. That makes it a more interesting process. (This could be summed up as "playing Jenga is more fun than 'roll a die, don't roll a 1'")
3. Jenga allows strategy in pulls. 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). Working as a team? Pull in ways that make the tower stronger, and avoid the easy pulls that make the tower weaker. In my experience playing Dread variants, this came up regularly.
4. You get information from the tower as you try to pull. 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. That process of investigating the tower, tapping blocks and so forth, is part of the fun, part of the tension. There's nothing comparable in a random mechanism. (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.)
5. The big one: people systematically misestimate the odds of failure in Dread, because Jenga gives you information, but the information is opaque. I've run something like 15 or 20 games using Dread or variants on Dread. 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 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. 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. You can see this in Asmor's comment that a 10% chance of surviving 20 pulls seems high to him. My estimate is that, in fact, you have something like a 90% chance of surviving 20 pulls in a Dread game. I would guess that something like 30 pulls is the median pulls to failure, although I haven't gathered systematic data about that. But people are scared as heck by the time they've made 15 pulls. Pulls feel more dangerous than they are, and that's good. It increases the tension, it makes people more likely to voluntarily knock over the tower before it's necessary, and it means that heroic efforts (maybe if I can pull four more times from this rickety tower I can destroy the vampire!) succeed more often than you would expect but still feel heroic. It's true that over time players will get a more accurate sense (and take more risks), but I view that as a feature, not a bug. The problem with randomized methods is that they are too transparent. "Oh, I only have a one in six chance of failure? No problem, let's roll the dice." Instead of the equivalent Jenga tower, which is something like twenty pulls in (maybe more), and where the player is thinking, "wow, every pull is hard." That also means that unsatisfying, "I thought my odds were good so I took the shot" failures are less common in Jenga Dread, and would be more common in randomized Dread.
If you do try out some alternative, I look forward to hearing how it goes. But sadly, despite my best efforts, I haven't been able to get to a good solution.
Other ideas I've considered:
1. A progression of dice rolls: first 5 draws you roll a d100. Next 5 draws you roll a d20. Next 5 draws you roll a d12. Etc. Any one, on any die, equals tower falls. When "the tower is reset," you eliminate a number of dice equivalent to the number of draws you would make (e.g. if the tower has fallen twice, you would pull six times before it goes live, so the next "pull" is the second d20 roll).
2. Take an opaque bag of beads. It starts out with, for example, 100 white beads and one black bead. On a pull, you draw a bead. If it's white, great, but it doesn't go back in the bag. 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 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.
Like with the cumulative percentage chances or card draws, you can fine tune the curve however you like with either of those options.
I think any of the purely random options would in a sense work, but they all lose something.
Jenga has, in my mind, five main advantages in Dread over a random system with similar characteristics (probability of collapse, etc.)
1. Jenga is visceral. 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. The fact that the player's tension increases the difficulty of the task also plays into this.
2. Different towers are different. In a purely randomized system, the 10th draw always has the same odds of collapse. 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. That makes it a more interesting process. (This could be summed up as "playing Jenga is more fun than 'roll a die, don't roll a 1'")
3. Jenga allows strategy in pulls. 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). Working as a team? Pull in ways that make the tower stronger, and avoid the easy pulls that make the tower weaker. In my experience playing Dread variants, this came up regularly.
4. You get information from the tower as you try to pull. 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. That process of investigating the tower, tapping blocks and so forth, is part of the fun, part of the tension. There's nothing comparable in a random mechanism. (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.)
5. The big one: people systematically misestimate the odds of failure in Dread, because Jenga gives you information, but the information is opaque. I've run something like 15 or 20 games using Dread or variants on Dread. 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 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. 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. You can see this in Asmor's comment that a 10% chance of surviving 20 pulls seems high to him. My estimate is that, in fact, you have something like a 90% chance of surviving 20 pulls in a Dread game. I would guess that something like 30 pulls is the median pulls to failure, although I haven't gathered systematic data about that. But people are scared as heck by the time they've made 15 pulls. Pulls feel more dangerous than they are, and that's good. It increases the tension, it makes people more likely to voluntarily knock over the tower before it's necessary, and it means that heroic efforts (maybe if I can pull four more times from this rickety tower I can destroy the vampire!) succeed more often than you would expect but still feel heroic. It's true that over time players will get a more accurate sense (and take more risks), but I view that as a feature, not a bug. The problem with randomized methods is that they are too transparent. "Oh, I only have a one in six chance of failure? No problem, let's roll the dice." Instead of the equivalent Jenga tower, which is something like twenty pulls in (maybe more), and where the player is thinking, "wow, every pull is hard." That also means that unsatisfying, "I thought my odds were good so I took the shot" failures are less common in Jenga Dread, and would be more common in randomized Dread.
If you do try out some alternative, I look forward to hearing how it goes. But sadly, despite my best efforts, I haven't been able to get to a good solution.
Asmor
First Post
You misunderstand me (I suppose I wasn't terribly clear). I think the mortality rate of the die seemed high.
I agree with you, most people are terrible at judging Jenga.
I don't think I'm especially good at it, but I've played a normal game of Jenga with a friend before and we actually got to the point where there were literally no more moves (i.e. every layer was either the two side blocks or the single middle block).
Choose your block with care, pull it with speed and confidence, and you'll be fine.
Plane Sailing
Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
I agree with everything Cerebral Paladin has just said.
I think the best solution is to allow that person to have a 'designated puller' on their behalf, someone to be their hands for the actual pull. That would be miles more exciting than any randomised alternative, because it still allows advantages 1, 2, 4 and 5 from CP's list.
Cheers
I think the best solution is to allow that person to have a 'designated puller' on their behalf, someone to be their hands for the actual pull. That would be miles more exciting than any randomised alternative, because it still allows advantages 1, 2, 4 and 5 from CP's list.
Cheers
Plane Sailing
Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
I wouldn't recommend this option though 
Wooden Jenga Gun for Spectacular Cheating | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9BmTmMEOhQ&feature=player_embedded[/ame]
Wooden Jenga Gun for Spectacular Cheating | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9BmTmMEOhQ&feature=player_embedded[/ame]
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