Guest Post: Designing and Running Buttle

Red Bow Tie by cspiegl.

This post was written by Nick Howard to share his experiences of running Buttle at the Liverpool Sandpit. Nick’s new game Manifesto will be running at the BAC Sandpit on Monday 19 October.

I’m honestly going to start this by saying that if I can run a Sandpit game, anyone can. Plenty of what I’d planned for my game (Buttle, at the Liverpool Sandpit on the 24th September) ended up changing before or during the show. I didn’t plan to wear a cummerbund and drink brandy. I didn’t plan to ruin a fictional engagement. I certainly didn’t plan to present anyone with a plastic leg.

I’m an English student, in my final year, at the University of Liverpool. I’ve directed a little student theatre—enough to know that bossing actors around is good fun. It’s probably no wonder then that my first game for a Sandpit involved bossing around the audience as well.

The idea was simple. Four actors pretend to be 1920s Wodehouse-style aristocrats, while fifteen players pretend to be butlers (complete with bowties-on-elastic). The actors give tasks to the butlers (’get me a drink!’, ‘find my umbrella!’) and, for their pains, the players receive tips: vast quantities of play money. The player with the most cash at the end of the game is the winner.

To keep things fun, we also wove a few hidden plots for the players to find: two of the boys were competing for the love of a beautiful débutante; everyone was trying to weasel into the will of an elderly, eccentric uncle, that sort of thing. The players could uncover these problems, and—Jeeves-like—help the aristocrats in solving them.

As I said, I had never run a game before, or anything very similar. I didn’t know anyone involved with Hide and Seek, or even know anyone who might know anyone involved. My first contact with the group was sending them an earnest email with a few game ideas optimistically attached. At most, I hoped that I might get a reply saying that they might get tried out (on a rainy day, possibly). Picture my surprise when an email came back saying that there was an event in Liverpool later in the year, these are our rates, would I like to run a game? Secretly, I did a little dance.

I still didn’t have a clue, of course, about the practicalities of running a game. I didn’t have a whole lot more than a game concept and the obligatory, embarrassing quantity of general enthusiasm. Thankfully, Hide and Seek stayed in touch, helping to flesh out the original idea, and generally providing a sounding board for my ridiculous suggestions. Without that support I’d have been completely lost—it was reassuring to know that someone was around to keep an eye on whether my game would be in any way, you know, fun.

What I learnt from the planning stages was how fluid any final structure has to be—I had no idea how a playing audience would really react, although that might come with experience. For example, early on in the game the actors stopped wandering the area, as we quickly realised that searching for aristocrats to pester was just boring for the players. We also quickly dropped the generic tasks we were planning to build around, because the players were much more interested in following up on the subplots, and the relationships between the characters.

This sort of improvisation was particularly relevant to me, as one of the actors had dropped out at the last minute. I’m no actor, and had planned to stay in the background, lending a hand as a ‘Head Butler’ if need be. Instead I had to jump in as the eccentric Lord Tennanby, wandering about being loud, arrogant and rude to everyone I met, whilst gesticulating wildly with a glass of brandy (all of which, as a friend pointed out, wasn’t exactly acting. Wait, did I say a friend?). We’d hidden a plastic leg in the vicinity for an adventurous player to discover and, if they picked up on our clues, to return to me (the last memento of Tennanby’s late wife, of course!) for vast rewards. Similarly, I got to mastermind the breaking-off of an engagement, sending out butlers as eager pawns. Inevitably, it was great fun, and I now can’t imagine having run the game in any other way.

Without any doubt, though, the most excellent part of running the game was seeing how the players responded to it. Not what they thought of it afterwards, but how they played it. Like the butlers who started informing on other players, trying to discredit them, or the ones who redirected the notes they had been asked to carry between lovers for personal gain. Then there was the player who—tasked with finding an umbrella that I’d ‘lost’ in the area—chose not to laboriously search the place, but to borrow one from a stranger who was having a drink nearby. Generous tips for all!

The best was saved for last, however. When, at the end of the game, I was trying to find the winner, I encountered one player with a suspiciously large amount of tips. Noticing the two other, sheepish-looking players hiding behind her, I cottoned on to a rather wonderful fact—that these three had formed a syndicate within my game, combining their tips and sweeping the board. I could have disqualified them for cheating, but in fact they’d done the opposite: played the game world more effectively than anyone else, in an entirely unplanned way. I didn’t plan to present them with the plastic leg as an impromptu reward. It just turned out that way. Brilliant.