Home - Field Owners - Game Notes - Intel (Observations & Suggestions)
Game Notes: Team Deathmatch
I love running Intel. It's a great game invented (so far as I know) by Rex at First Person Sports. It can be classified as a variant on the Bomb Plant theme. It isn't necessarily very fast-paced but feels very intense to play. Get a chance to play Intel as soon as you can, because play experience will greatly aid your ability to suggest strategies and responses to players that ask.
Observations
Good placement and hiding of the laptop is critical and also very tough. You want people to have to look carefully for it but you don't want to force people to comb your field. Our first game the laptop was hidden 5 feet off of a trail in brush that was so thick that you needed to be farther from the trail than the laptop to see it. This might have worked if...
Equidistant placement from both bases is of relatively low importance but that said, you don't want one team to be able to see people decoding the laptop from their spawn point. In the first game my wife put the laptop in such a location (remember the 5' off the trail placement?) that you had to turn your back on the red team's base (while in very clear line of sight) to see the laptop. Once the red team found the laptop the green team never again got close.
I think that ideal placement has the laptop hidden somewhere that it can be seen from the trail, but maybe only in a small angle. I recommend that the angle is straight out from the trail and not at a crazy oblique angle. Also, it's nice if the location has paths that are easy to ambush during extraction.
The codebreaker job is unusual. Most of the game the codebreaker is going to hide. It is DEADLY for your success if your codebreaker dies, so you spend a lot of time trying to prevent that, especially at the start. (There was some back-and-forth in one game, but usually both teams just worked very hard not to let their codebreaker die in the first place.) Once you find the laptop the codebreaker still isn't likely to be engaging opponents but taking and keeping cover. Decoding is a thankless task because you have your teammates yelling out the inbound vector of tangoes to each other and yelling at you to go faster or asking for progress estimates. Finally, the codebreaker gets escorted back to base (or is crazy and runs solo) but they don't really get to look around; they're just fleeing to extraction. In many ways it's closer to a VIP escort than anything else.
Communication is really important and at some point you have to be willing to shout to your teammates just to get the job done. In a game I played in (without radios) I had sent a teammate up a hill to retake it because I had seen several opponents trucking up the far side. Suddenly I saw the opposing codebreaker crashing down through the brush with his cipher unrolled. I shouted for my teammate to check where he'd been for the laptop and opened fire. Unfortunately, I couldn't get him. Fortunately, one of his teammates thought it was my teammate that was crashing down and killed his own codebreaker with friendly fire!
Intel is an interesting mix of "hide, hunt, search, escort," which is, interestingly, the same as a VIP escort. Overall I think I like Intel better than VIP escort for most events. Players have an easier time looking for the laptop than looking out for an ambush and it's easier to understand hiding one person than it is to try hiding your whole team (or even chunks of your team). Even better, both teams are hunting the codebreaker on the other team and escorting their codebreaker at the same time. It keeps everyone much busier on more concrete tasks for the whole time.
I've found that teams often wanted their second-best player as the codebreaker. They wanted their best free to hunt down the opposing codebreaker but wanted their codebreaker to be a skilled player for the hiding and running aspects. This put some great pressure on the less-skilled players to rise to the challenge, which they often did better than they'd expected of themselves.
Teams tend to search the same general area at the same time out of fear that the other team will find the laptop and they won't know. Here, "general area" refers to any space that's relatively easy to mentally delineate (surrounded by one circuit of trails, for instance) but is small enough that you can run to any other space and fire on an enemy within a short (~30 seconds) time frame. This game would be VERY difficult to run successfully in a park without much brush cover.
Back to the top.
Administration Suggestions
I require that both teams tell the other team who their codebreaker is. That makes it possible to know who you were looking for and prevents people from getting frustrated.
I've coded the messages "incorrectly" in the past. I used a dingbats/wingdings font to code four 4-letter words and forgot to include the numbering step. I think it worked better overall because it made the decoding a little more immediately sensible but increased the number of characters that codebreakers needed to deal with. I used real 4-letter words, but I might use random 4-letter sets in the future for games with very experienced players. I also recommend changing the font periodically or shifting the letters (so that 'D' stands for 'A,' for instance).
Instead of quarterback wristbands I just make some small, tightly rolled cipher keys that have to be held open or they tend to roll back up. They work great and when rolled up were only about an inch and a half long so I can stuff plenty of spares in the breast pocket of my BDU.
I'm going to be making a wooden prop laptop for this game. I'll DEFINITELY be painting it in a day-glow color, though. It's CRUCIAL that players can see the thing or they get frustrated. It's hard enough to see the laptop when it's hidden well if it's a garish color. I can only imagine you'd have to hate your players (and your business) with a passion to paint it camoflage.
If players are totally clueless after 15-20 minutes of searching give them a hint on where the laptop is (or isn't). If they've been looking in the wrong place then telling them relieves the stress of wondering if you've missed the stupid thing.
Back to the top.
How do you run your Intel games? E-mail mike@mikescombatgames.com and let us know.