Survivor is a classic Game Show with the famous tagline ‘Outwit, Outplay, Outlast’. It’s been wildly successful since its US premier in 2000, perhaps because of the unique gameplay that arose from having negotiation be a core game mechanic. If you are unfamiliar with Survivor, the premise is simple - players get eliminated through ‘Tribal Councils’, where each player can cast a vote for another player, and the player with the most votes leaves the game. Players can gain immunity to these votes by winning Immunity Challenges. The objective of the game is to avoid being voted off until the very end, and then the eliminated players will vote for who they think should win (out of the remaining 3).
It essentially boils down to a free-for-all Mafia game where every player is a Vanilla Townie. There’s quite a lot more to it than that to make it more interesting, but that’s a good way to think about it for strategic purposes :) If you’re a fan of the show, you’ll know that it doesn’t tend to be the popularity contest everyone thinks it would be at first glance.
The format for the WebDiplomacy version can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ENzih_4AB1muqACJSFnbWrFcGVnkXOaNTy9GqJ3lW78/edit?usp=sharing
The major differences are:
- The phases are 48h (meaning the full game will last a little under a month), and you can vote at any time (as opposed to only at Tribal Council)
- Immunity Challenges have been removed, since with the issue of timezones traditional challenges don’t work well online.
- To make up for this, special events will happen fairly frequently throughout the game. Some of these will reward players or tribes with immunity as a challenge would.
- Lastly, also to make up for the lack of immunity, every player is given an immunity idol (described in detail in the doc).
So - let’s see if there’s any interest! Feel free to ask questions if you want. Ideally we start within a week, but it depends how signups go.