Zipster:

Well, you'll get caught up in the corporate plot to kill your friend's obnoxious dad..there'll be some funny FBI guys and some russian arms merchants..cops, a dog, a toad, Martha Stewart..eventually a nuclear weapon will get involved..but your nerdy dad will man-up and ultimately save the day.

Dammit, Zipster, beat me by several parsecs.

/Must... get... TF...

NAR and I played for an entire year in college. Never had a conversation outside of the game. But it was just understood, if we encountered each other anywhere, we had to assume combat positions. In this way we maintained combat readiness. Kind of like Cato to Inspector Clousseau.

Those kids are dumb.... if you are unsubtle enough that some homeowner notices you any halfway competant player will spot you from a block away, assume that they are your target, and take you out before you know what happened. Probably was dumb enough to be wearing a dark jacket and sunglasses while constantly starting at one spot. Moron wouldnt have lasted one day in a proper game.

/seriously people, subtle is good.

We used to play this game from jr. high through high school (well, sophmore year anyway). It got rid of some of the boredom of school, and taught me some skills I now use in my current line of work: pedophile.

Naw...I'm just kiddin about that last part.

When I was a junior in High School, the seniors would "kidnap" the teachers by suddenly storming into the room (during normal class time) with authentic looking uzi water pistols, and by authentic, I mean they look like actual uzis instead of actual water pitols.

By the time I was a sophomore in college, such a thing would result in arrest.

Farked up.

where was this game when I was a kid?!

We used to play a version of this, but we called it killer, and it followed the idea of Highlander - the only fights were with (padded) swords and you were only supposed to fight one-on-one (although that didn't stop people from killing their opponent while they were doing something else, including one guy who got killed while wiping his ass with his sword hand).

Naturally, there could be no combat upon Holy Ground... which we defined as any place that served alcohol.

Some of the guys in one of the high schools I went to played this game. Only they called it Judenhunt and the object was to get to the Swiss border (a local mall) before getting caught by the Nazis. The Nazis could use cars, maps, flash lights and walkie talkies. The "juden" got a map and a flashlight. This all took place at night.

As I understand it, once some of them were stopped by a cop who got reports of suspicious people lurking in bushes. He only told them not to bug the old people.

When we played it in the 80's we called it TAG (yes, Linden, like the movie). It was probably one of the safer games we played. Certainly not as dangerous as sandlot football or trying to do stunts on our bicycles. Maybe the mainstream media needs to do and expose on THOSE dangerous "new" childhood activities.

That should read "do AN expose on..." fark me, I'm going to bed.

I played that, too. The guy that drew my card staked out my house for three days, scaring the crap out of my folks.

The high point of that game was drawing my boyfriend's card. I let him take me home for a nice night of fun, before pulling my plastic disk gun and shooting him. Come to think of it, that we didn't date much longer after that.

My current husband is too paranoid to get taken in like that. He knows me too well.

Can somebody explain the actual game to me? Everybody seems to assume that the rules are common knowledge... all I got was the rules to some version that didn't involve guns...

Or this...

It was assassin when we played it ten years ago. We played with super soakers when it was hot, sometimes with nerf guns. I had the nerf water bazooka, and thought sneaking up behind someone and blasting them in the back of the head was the greatest thing ever.

As a teacher, allow me to say this: if you storm into my classroom with an authentic looking (ie: you've gone out of your way to make your toy weapon look realistic by removing all defining characteristics) and proceed to start something, you will definitely be getting in well-earned trouble.

If you try to take me hostage in said manner, I will be losing my job as you will be losing an eye.

That being said, it sounds like an incredible game and would be quite fun and acceptable in my classroom if done in the notecard fashion mentioned earlier in the thread. I particularly like the locker "bomb" idea.

Hell, I might even join in.

In short...Everyone draws a name of who they're supposed to "kill". Nobody knows who anyone else has drawn. If you get killed, you're out. If you kill, your next target is whoever the person you just killed was supposed to kill next. Last person alive wins. Something like that. I'm sure the details vary from place to place and time to time, as with most classic games. We played it with those rubber dart guns, though it sounds like it's been played with all sorts of "weapons". It generally stretched out over several days or weeks, depending upon how many people were playing and how active they were.

More of it's coming back to me....I seem to recall that a "kill" had to be a hit in the head or torso. If you hit a limb that person was only "injured", and unable to use their weapon for a certain period of time. (I think 24 or 48 hours, maybe.) I don't remember what the rules were about shooting somebody who wasn't your designated target, or shooting back in self-defense. I remember there was a hefty amount of the honor system involved in rule enforcement.

Ahem..

Killer!

Oh man, I had forgotten about this game! I must try to start it up again at the university.

When I was in college, in the dorms, we called it Gotcha.

You could kill the person you got, or guess who got you. If you killed the wrong person, you were out(either the card you got, or a person who didn't have your card).

Oh good times... I remember killing this jock(i had his card). He didn't like it, so next time i was using the pay phone(no we didn't have phones in our room), he and his friends came and super-soaked me. I was drenched... but still alive he he

from the "i cant believe this hasn't been posted yet dept.

lionfish:

txGeek got it earlier, but didn't post the pic.

I'd love to play, but only if I get to be on Linda Fiorentino's team.

There are many varients on the rules, several people have described some of the more standard and common ones. I prefered the varient where you had three targets [and three people had you as a target]. You could kill your targets, the people who had you as a target [in self defense or if you found out who they were], and depending on the game other players who were dumb enough to have a visible weapon [thus making for some humerous instances of chains of kills when several people were working together and attacked someone when several other players were present].
If you killed someone not covered in the categories above, or a nonplayer, or did something particularly stupid you were put on the "wanted list" and anyone in the game could kill you and was encouraged to do so. Plus, once you were dead you could join the "Police Force" to deal with the wanted list and incompetants. There were lots of little details, like how to get off the wanted list which led to all sorts of funny rampages by criminals.

I used to play British Bulldog at my school, I don't think we called it that however.

The only exception we had was that one end of the "field" was this huge hilly area in the safety zone, the hunter could go in there as long as he was hopping on one leg the whole time.
Now that was maddness.

And the only other rule we had was no girls allowed.

FelGraf

I'm at UC, if you get something organized, let me know. This could end up being very, very fun.

I organized the first recent game of this (that I'm aware of) at Carnegie Mellon. (I know there were people who played it years ago.) The KGB now has regular games... currently we play with balled-up socks as weapons, but the rules are generally in flux (since we just started a semester ago.)

In the early days of BBSs we would set up assassin games. There were 40 or 50 of us from various schools and some out of school that would play a game a week. Considering all the stupid stunts we pulled, it's a wonder noone was arrested. Car chases, firing various fake guns (star trek type or mofo or airsoft) at each other while speeding on the highway, running through various public properties, getting kicked out of restaurants, and etc. One time I was lying on top of a car as they driver took off. At about 25mph I flew off. It was my first (but not last) case of ugly road rash.

Once we had a day long game in a hilly local park. Someone called the cops on us and as I and my friend were walking to the road a few sheriff deputies pulled up. They whipped out shotguns and told us to drop our weapons. We explained the game and they told us to enjoy ourselves but to notify them next time so they could tell the old ladies who complain that it's just a game. These days they'd probably arrest us, expel us from school and try us as adults.

We used to play car-tag. You drive through a neighborhood (or more than one) late at night, and try to avoid having someone else touch your car. Hurt some cars that way.

Also, a nice bio-weapon for Killer was always a bag of flour rigged to drop when a locker was opened. I used it on a friend once, and the next period a teacher was taking samples of it to test if it was cocaine...

We called it "Killer".

My weapon of choice - the Silenced Banana...

(A normal banana is considered a single-shot, short range pistol. You have to walk up to the victim, point the banana at them and shout "Bang!" loudly. But the ref allowed me to put a cardboard tube labelled "Silencer" on the end, just requiring a quiet "Phut" noise instead.)

I used to drive into town and tail one of my friends in my car as he drove around. Sometimes I'd follow 'em for an entire day, taking pictures. For the long stakeouts I'd have food and reading material in my car. It was so much fun showing them the pictures. The reactions ranged from "Funny" to "You're a retard with too much time on your hands".

Yep, one of the instigators of the game was Sheckley's story seventh victim.

Which I see is being remade as a movie

The last one was a bit campy

I never played that game as several members of my class carried real guns and it might have been unwise to shove a water pistol under someones nose and say bang.

Well, you would not do it twice.

Dude, we used to play this in Highschool
Friday at 5 we would randomly pick our targets and we had till noon the next friday to "Kill" him or her they were only fair game in school tho,
I even got a teacher to help,
my mark was in her biology class and I asked her to be sure to have him read a bit of a certin chapter unbeknownst to him, his biology book was the trap,
it had a rubber band with a piece of cardstock taped to it inside, wound up with a bunch of confettii around it, whenhe opened the book the cardstock was spun and it threw the confettii out.

when it happend she said, Mr. (name removed) you have just been assasinated, and she handed him his "Certificate of Death" a business card with the time and her name on it as witness.

I'm currently a PART of the game. We tend to call it 'Killer', but 'Assassin' has been tossed around too.

The most awesome kill we've had so far occurred like so:

A girl, Girl A, was to kill a boy, Boy A, after he performed in a school play. However, the plot was leaked to him and he made it home before she could catch him.

The next day, he let it slip that he was going to ambush her outside of her house after she came home that evening, and the information was leaked to her. She sent another girl, Girl B, to ambush HIM as he waited outside of Girl A's house.

The time of the ambush arrived, and Girl B, who had also brought an assistant, Boy B, and they waited for Boy A. Girl A remained safely at school, where it's illegal to kill anyone during school hours or a school activity (drama club, etc., whatever).

As Boy A stepped out of his car to move into position, he had on him a Nerf crossbow, a 10-dart Nerf gun, and a Darth Maul-style lightsaber. He was shot at by Girl B and Boy B almost instantly, emptied his crossbow and darts while managing not to get shot, and died only when all he had left was his lightsaber.

Imagine a heavyset highschool senior defending himself against nerf darts coming from two directions with a farking lightsaber.

Later the guy was hired as an assassin and strangled Girl A with floss.

Anyone else have any good stories?

I play this at school found out about it when a kid was up on the celing above the hall door and dropped down and fell on his face trying to kill me. :)

Assassin+airsoft guns=kick ass! (nothing like barging in the wrong dorm room with a colt draw while in semi-full SWAT gear)

Hall cleaning staff hate the bbs though

we play that all over campus, it's awesome.

nothing like sneaking up on someone in the quad and putting iron to their back.

I was a pretty extreme dork when I played this as a freshman in high school. And some of you played it in college?

Wow, can't believe I'm the first one

I both ran and played a game of killer back in high school. I changed the rules around a bit, so that you resurrected after a week - this was because otherwise the game would reduce down rather quickly to a few people who never interacted or even knew who each other was. Unfortunately, by the end of the semester, almost everyone knew who was playing - but it was quite fun watching the paranoia which would set in when there were 3 known players in the same class, all wondering whether the other ones had them as targets. In one case they all shot each other and were counted as being killed (negative points) even though none of them had each other as targets! Such are the penalties for itchy trigger fingers.

Since I didn't want to get left out of the fun, I made a rule that I was a legal target for everybody (bonus points), with certain conditions to keep it from being to easy. Since I was the only one that everybody knew (since I organized the game) and everyone only got one target at a time, I got killed a lot. However, I made a number of self-defense kills too - I had a tiny water gun on a hidden slide up the sleeve of my jacket, and I had practised flipping my arm to slide it into my hand quickly. More than one player approached me confident that was unarmed, only to get a quick flip and squirt.

I can't imagine playing a game of killer at any of the colleges I have attended (possibly FIT?) without someone getting killed. Heck, the lucky ones of us dodged enough bullets at Techwood without having to have a game. At least I didn't get robbed at gunpoint in my dormroom, like some of my friends.

Oops I meant to add this

Yeah, I played that in college. It makes it more interesting when everyone is "supposed" to be more adult and behave responsibly. Fun times.

First rule about Assassin: Dont tell anyone about assassin
Second rule about Assassin: Don't let innocents/mundanes know your playing assassin.

I used to keep score at my High school the results of the Assassin games. Some of the stuff was scary in how they were able to get people

yup, it was "Assassin: at our school too..

Josh C, if you read this, you owe me 110.00..you know who you are...

anyways...school grounds and school sponsored activities were safe areas, as were work as long as you were on the clock..we used rubber dart guns or rubber bullet guns/nerf guns...everywhere else was open season. We had a rule that if you shot your assassin first, he was "stunned" and had to wait 24 hours before coming after you again..Great fun..ahh..memories..

I was betting on Kancho Assassin, but I guess I'm going to continue to be disappointed.

/REALLY wants Kancho to catch on Stateside.
//played "B-Let-it", which involves getting punched for saying a word that starts with a "B" (unless you immediately say "Let-it"... it was stupid, but you got to hit people...)

I'm a jealous geek who has never heard of the game. Perhaps I could convince the director that it is merely a team-building exercise that he cherishes so much?

/remembers he doesn't work at a dot com