Assassin (game)
Assassin (also called
Assassins, Paranoia, or
Killer) is a game commonly played on college campuses. Assassin is, essentially, a
live-action roleplaying game where players' goal is to "kill" each other, and to be the last surviving assassin.
Assassin is described as a "lifestyle-invading" game in Salen and Zimmerman's
Rules of Play. Play is not restricted to a specific time interval, but is integrated into the players' everyday activities. A game will last for days or weeks, and while the game is in progress, all players are targets of some other player, and have targets of their own. The game is intended to induce an atmosphere of paranoia, since an assassination attempt could occur at almost any time.
Assassin is not a published game (although
Steve Jackson Games has published a booklet on it, under the name "
Killer") and rules vary considerably from group to group. There are certain common elements, however. At any given time, each player has a "target" (or possibly more than one) that he or she is trying to kill, and each player is in turn the target of another assassin (again, or possibly more than one.) Players are assigned their targets by the game's coordinators, but do not know the identity of the person assigned to target them. In larger games, players may not know the identities of
any players other than their target or targets.
Kills
"Kills" are made by various means, as defined by the rules of whatever variant is being played. Some games have only one way to make a kill, or have a short list of well-defined methods. These may involve the use of fake weapons such as
water guns,
Nerf weapons, or balled-up
socks. Other games allow more creative means like "poisoning," "mail bombs", "knives", or even "bombs". Still other rules require some item such as a clothespin to be stolen. An additional method is for the assassin to grab his or her target's butt - a two-handed, palpable, simultaneous squeeze which must be agreed upon as legitimate by both killer and victim. The key is that all players agree on what methods are legal and how they can be implemented.
If playing in Couplets, both members of the couplet must be present to Kill or be killed.
Witnesses
Some variants restrict assassination attempts made in the presence of witnesses. Kills made in the presence of witnesses (or in the presence of a sufficient number of witnesses) may be disallowed or may result in the publication of the assassin's identity (in games where the players do not generally know each other).
Safe zones
During required activities like classes and work, a player is required by outside obligations to be at a certain place, at a certain time. For assassins to approach them in these environments would be unfair, especially, say, in classes where the game would be disruptive and unwelcome by the professor. Hence, places associated with these activities are "safe zones". Typical "safe zones" include classrooms, while class is in session, places of employment, places of worship, and, more rarely, dining halls, and libraries, among others. Places of residence are typically
not safe zones, and some games may explicitly allow entering a target's dorm room, house, or apartment without the target's knowledge.
Other variations
There are numerous other possible rules. Some games have "police forces" or "death squads", often composed of eliminated players, whose job is to track down rulebreakers. Some require each kill to be made within a time limit, or penalize players for not making assassination attempts. Others allow for non-players or eliminated players to participate, for example as informers or bodyguards.
In a variant called "Godfather", play is a competition of several teams. Each team has a "Godfather", in the sense of a
Mafia clan leader, who assigns each of his players a target on an opposing team. There might be a "package" involved, whose capture may be a secondary objective.
There was also a set of 'undead' rules used by the Oxford Guild of Assassins in which players could sell their soul and become resurrected as vampires on being killed. Other players were werewolves with special abilities at the full moon or could choose to be priests who could make holy water.
A variation at
Cambridge University designed specially for its
May Week festivities incorporates a point scoring system to decide the winner of over 50 participants after just 6 or 7 days. Whilst the scoring rules have varied over time to prevent abuses and loopholes, the general theme is that all players start with the same score and players accumulate further points for each kill, with points being reversed from the victim's score. There are incentives for killing better players, such as receiving a percentage of their score, which will be higher than average. Victims are only "dead" for a period of time, and re-enter play when this time has elapsed. The player with the most points at the end wins.
As Assassin is mainly a tradition on college campuses, where turnover is high, it is not known precisely when and how the game originated. The
MIT Assassins' Guild was reportedly running games as early as 1983 and possibly before. KAOS, in New Zealand, was founded in 1981, when the founders heard about the Assassin's Game being run elsewhere. By the early 1990s, there were groups operating regular games at a number of colleges including
Cambridge University and
Hampshire College, where the game is known as "Wassassins".
A simple version in which an assassination was performed by saying, "You're dead," was mentioned in
Harpo Marx's autobiography,
Harpo Speaks!. This particular part of the autobiography covers the late 1920s.
The idea for the game is essentially that detailed in the
1953 Robert Sheckley short story "Seventh Victim," which was filmed in
1965 as "
The Tenth Victim." The "game" is established as a replacement for large-scale war, as an outlet for violent tendencies, which are inherent in people, and without which we would become soft and retrogress. Those who desired could sign up for one-on-one legalized murders. In Sheckley's vision, "At least there weren't any more big wars. ... Just hundreds of thousands of small ones." As further described in the story: "Anyone who signed up to murder, under the government rules, had to take his turn a few months later as Victim. ... The Emotional Catharsis Board picked the Victims' names at random. A Hunter was allowed two weeks in which to make his kill. This had to be done by his own ingenuity, unaided. He was given the name of his Victim, address and description, and allowed to use a standard caliber pistol. He could wear no armor of any sort. / The Victim was notified a week before the Hunter. He was told only that he was a Victim. He did not know the name of his Hunter. He was allowed his choice of armor. He could hire spotters. A spotter couldn't kill; only Victim and Hunter could do that. ... There were stiff penalties for killing or wounding the wrong man, for no other murder was allowed." Reference: The Collected Short Fiction of Robert Sheckley, Book One, 1991, Pulphouse Pub., p. 114-115.
For the sake of brevity, the game Assassin is played with each Hunter simultaneously a Victim, without a time gap between turns as Hunter or Victim.
One of the more popular games of Assassins occurs yearly at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Each year between 50-100 students partake in the game, which is allowed to run for no longer than two weeks. If there is no winner at the end of the two weeks, all money is donated to charity.
Media influence
Interest in the game also spread when similar games were used as a plot device in various films and a computer game, including:
*
Tag, the Assassination Game (1982)
*
Gotcha! (1985)
*
The Ship (2006)
Assassin variants differ widely in the types of weapons are allowed. A few examples are listed below. These are by no means exhaustive, and some games explicitly allow creativity.
Guns
Various types of guns are used. The most common are probably
water pistols,
Nerf weapons, and
rubber band guns.
Tracer guns have also been popular.
Pellet guns and
BB guns are generally considered too dangerous.
In the Steven Jackson rule book, one of the guns mentioned was the ".45 Caliber Banana".
Knives and Swords
"Knives" may be either toy knives, or other objects that approximate the size and shape of a knife. The same goes for swords.
Ice cubes may be used for knife kills in some Assassins variants. A common item which is used as a knife is a black permanent marker.
Poison
Some variants allow "poison", which can be implemented by adding strong flavors such as
Tabasco sauce to the victim's food. Rules might also cover "poison gas" or contact poisons.
Bombs
Many variants allow "bombs," which may be implemented in various ways. Some require the bomb to "go off" in some way, and hence might use alarm clocks or other timers. Another technique is the "car bomb" where the assassin puts a tape or CD in the victim's car audio system. When the victim starts the car and audio, he will hear the assassin saying that he was just "car bombed."
Another type of bomb is to place a balloon under the fan belt of a car.
Clothespins
In this variety, strictly physical, players clip clothespins to themselves in agreed-upon places. These must be stolen, much as a flag is stolen in
flag football.
Ass-Grabbing
This variation plays on the title of the game, often capitalizing it as AssASSins. The assassin must grab his or her target's butt with both hands, simultaneously and palpably. Both the killer and the victim must agree that the grab was sufficient; a one-handed grab or a grab where both hands were not simultaneous is incomplete, and if the victim contests, the kill may be appealed to the game's authorities. This method of play adds a dimension of difficulty to the game, requiring assassins either to approach their targets with extreme stealth or be prepared for a wrestling match.
Collusion
In older collegiate universities, sub-university tribal instincts can cause informal teamplay to emerge, where members of or within a college or several colleges band together in "no-kill" agreements or higher levels of co-operation. The advantages of pooling information on targets include the possibility of joint operations, added tactical information on geography or simply greater ease of identifying targets, e.g. where one member of the "Mafia" personally knows the target of their colleague. Co-operative play enables greater offensive and defensive co-ordination, the latter especially where mafiosi live near to each other and are able to communicate by instant messaging.
These groupings can improve gameplay by formalising a learning system where experienced players mentor new ones, and can add a humorous flavor to the game. However, eventually a large group which includes several talented players can exert a stranglehold on the course of the game. Whilst this can be highly amusing and challenging for experienced players, it can strain friendships and is often off-putting for newer players. In extreme cases, the later stages of play can descend into farce where only members of one group are left alive, eliminating the excitement for all others.
Excessive collusion is difficult to control, and is best dealt with by an experienced umpire, who can take emergency measures such as licensing the execution of some of a group's key members. Over time, the process is self-regulating as most communities consist of students, who experience a rapid turnover of membership and will go through lean periods. Some universities prefer to formalise the teamplay system as alluded to earlier.
Security Fears
Due to increasing security worries since the
World Trade Center attacks, the participants can find themselves restricted in their behavior and choice of weaponry. In the
United Kingdom, gun laws were changed by the Anti-social Behaviour Act of 2003 to make the carrying of an imitation firearm in a public place illegal. After a couple of low-key incidents involving arrests under the amended Firearms Act of 1968, and possibly other public order legislation, guilds had to re-consider which kind of toy gun could safely be used. This is in addition to tight regulation of the use of imitation "bombs" and suspicious behavior generally.
Despite security worries, members of assassin communities tend to show good accountability and responsibility to avoid jeopardising their games.
*
Street WarsAbout the game
*http://people.freenet.de/assassins/ - a page about the game, with photos and lots of links to other sites.
Example rules
*http://www.dur.ac.uk/assassins.society/rules.php
*http://wso.williams.edu/~kaos/rules.html
*http://www.srcf.ucam.org/assassins/archive/2005-lent/rules.html
*http://whsassassination.com/ - Weston Connecticut's 'Assassination'
*http://www.freewebs.com/swassassins/ - Southwest High school's game in Minneapolis
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Campus Assassins' Guild default ruleset*http://www.geocities.com/waglc/
*http://threeleggedlegs.com/killer/viewforum.php?f=1 -Otis College of Art and Design LA... killing by design
*http://kaos.org.nz/assassins_guide/ - Killing As Organised Sport (KAOS), New Zealand
*http://www.geocities.com/cityscapegames - A website that has example rules, as well as organizes similar games for the Ventura County, Ca Area
*http://www.kbkonline.tk - A website in its infancy stage, but the forum has a set of rules you may use as an example, as well as other ideas. The game runs in Jefferson City, Missouri, U.S.A.
Organizations
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Campus Assassins' Guild - A site for hosting and automating assassins' games, started at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign*
Shadow Government - StreetWars - An organization that runs city-wide assassination games, world-wide
*
Killing As Organised Sport (KAOS) - An assassin game founded at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, which now has branches in most major universities of New Zealand.
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Eden Prairie, MN Assassins gameIn the News
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Police douse wate pistol kill game
