We’re All Mad Here

[This guest post is… not by a guest: please welcome game master Greg’s first post on the blog!]

You will pardon me if this post reads as amateur, it is my first blog entry. I do not regularly write about, well, anything, but I recently had such an enjoyable time playing a game that I had to share the experience with anyone willing to listen. Or read. Or do you all have synesthesia? It would be fitting considering the subject of this post: The Hatter’s Table.

More after the jump…

The Hatter’s Table is quite simply a game recreating the Mad Hatter’s tea party from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Players continuously swap places at a table hosted by the Hatter and his friend, the March Hare, bouncing from tea cup to sugar bowl to slice of cake. The game is played in short rounds where the Hatter directs everyone to sit by a particular item or alternately by himself or the Hare. Players follow the Hatter’s directions UNLESS they have a secret instruction that contradicts the Hatter. Each player has one secret instruction (e.g., “When seated by a piece of cake, move to a seat by a sugar bowl”) that takes priority when it conflicts with the Hatter’s verbal directions. The goal of the game is to discover the secret direction of the other players by carefully watching when they fail to follow the Hatter’s instructions, while simultaneously attempting to keep others from guessing your secret.

If that sounds confusing, it is. But that’s the point. Alice’s adventures are all about seeming nonsense that upon careful inspection actually reveals a logic, albeit not your standard logic. In this game, you are constantly confronted by people who appear to be behaving illogically and the attempt to make sense of it can be extremely maddening. Let me lay out a sample scenario for you so you can visualize it better.

It’s important to understand the order of operations for a round:

1) Wait for the Hatter to speak

2) Follow your secret direction only if applicable

3) Follow the Hatter’s direction if your secret direction doesn’t apply

4) Choose your destination

5) Repeat

For the purposes of this example let us use the secret instruction mentioned above: “When seated by a piece of cake, move to a seat by a sugar bowl.”

So if you were positioned by a tea cup and the Hatter gave the instruction to sit by a piece of cake, you would do a quick mental check that your secret instruction doesn’t apply and follow his directions, moving to a piece of cake. Now that you are by the cake, on your next turn you will not follow the Hatter’s direction because you are set up for your secret direction. If the Hatter says to move to a cup of tea, you will instead move to a sugar bowl and the other players should take note. A couple more instances of you moving to the beat of your own drum, and someone may guess your secret.

Now here are the two pieces of genius in the design that make this game strategically rich.

1) Sometimes your secret direction and the Hatter’s direction align. Let us say that you are seated by the cake and the Hatter asks you to move to a sugar bowl: you have just followed your secret direction while seeming to follow the Hatter’s and your opponents are none the wiser.

2) You always have two choices when you move. At the six place settings, there are two slices of cake, two tea cups, and two sugar bowls. There are two places next to the Hatter (one on either side of him) and two next to the Hare. This simple set up yields a variety of combinations that allow you more opportunities than you’d initially think to mask your secret. For example, when seated by the cake, the Hatter may instruct you to sit next to the Hare… who has a seat with a sugar bowl to his left. In this manner, a quick thinking player can keep masking his secret for quite some time.

Eventually, everyone gives up their secret, but when you do, you’re treated to tea and cookies. At least that was the reward when I played at Indiecade. However, you can jump back in any time. Just grab a new secret card and start to move.

It’s hard for me to say exactly what it is about this game that delights me so much. (I played it for two hours straight and could have gone on far longer if they hadn’t shut it down.) I have always had a fascination with Wonderland, something about how everywhere you look there is more than meets the eye. I also used to play a fair amount of Clue as a child, finding enjoyment in the deductive reasoning, creating the right combinations, and ticking off incorrect conclusions. There’s also a great deal of joy in a game about trying to outfox other people. There is an element of luck to it - the Hatter’s instructions can totally out you - but if you play cleverly you can last a while. And if you concentrate on one opponent at a time, you will catch them when they slip up sooner or later. The greatest pleasure, however, came in the maddening itself. There are moments when, despite minutes (that seem like hours) of studying someone’s every move, every deviation from the spoken orders, their secret remains out of reach, tauntingly beyond your grasp, seemingly devoid of logic. The world is upside-down, if only for a moment, and anything is possible.

The Hatter’s Table was designed by Sean Bouchard, Logan Olson, and Elizabeth Swenson. I hope that you will have the opportunity to play soon.