A “conspiracy night” is a game where teams are given cards, a general objective, and have to build a conspiracy together to explain just what happened. In my case, Santa’s workshop had missed quota, so a department was going to get cut. I’m sure this could go the cooperative route as well, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
If you’d like to run something similar, here are the rules my friends and I came up with:
Have 4 - 8 teams (2-3 people each) where each round they get 3, 2, and then 1 card. They go in a circle putting up their cards, tying it to previous cards, and making a case for how their connections and evidence incriminate or exonerate a team.
At the end of each round, rank each team based on how suspicious they are with points being equal to their rank. For later rounds, add a multiplier so that they hold more weight. (In hindsight, I’m not sure the points were very important. as people just wanted to have a general feeling as to who was most to least suspicious between rounds. You could always have an internal score of teams but not tell them)
Have a good time?
Here are also a few more miscellaneous tips:
1. Playtest.
If you aren’t play-testing, you’re going to be scrambling the day of. We only had about a week to put everything together and since the game required 20+ people, we just went into it blind, but this was a horrible idea. Even if you can’t play-test the whole game, try and run it with a few friends and find obvious pain points.
2. Assemble a team
Without my friends who helped run this (thanks Olive, Nick, and Rodrigo!), this would’ve been truly impossible to run. Even at the scale of 20ish people, it was a lot to handle. Storyboarding took us hours and creatively, I never could’ve come up with have the threads by myself. If you want some inspiration, feel free to contact me on Twitter and I can send you the board we used for drafting cards :)
3. Avoid perverse incentives
For a competitive setup, I would recommend a story where only one team can win. Initially, our game concept was that only one department was going to get cut, but that meant that all the teams instantly jumped on a scapegoat team and ensured they would come last. Would not recommend.
4. Maybe don’t use tackboard
Since I had impulsively bought a tackboard and hundreds of yards of red string, I was stuck using it, but you shouldn’t. Putting pins and string up is slow and makes the interesting part of game (defending your position and creating a story) take a backseat to the physical challenge of trying to connect all the dots.
If you have a television or projector, having physical index cards might work to give teams their individual cards to play, but then you could use something like Miro or another online whiteboard that lets you connect sticky notes to create the conspiracy board. Whatever medium you choose, I would suggest making the player storytelling take the most time rather than the act of creating the board itself.
As you can tell, our attempt was an absolute mess. The cheap tackboard is falling apart almost as quickly as Earth’s climate and the frazzled but put together look of red string everywhere has been mediated by dozens of pieces of tape. Nonetheless, I think people really enjoyed themselves and at least got to try something novel. (If you do end up trying this, do let me know how it turns out!!)
P.S. If you’re looking for another fun event to host (and what I stole this title format from), you should check this out: