These are event notes for my favorite event I’ve ever run. My other competitive socializing events were the practice run for this one. The event description on Partiful:
We know in our heart of hearts that socializing is already competitive. Why not compete explicitly with prizes and award ceremonies?
The tourney:
- Everyone gets in pods of 4-5 people.
- Every 10 minutes, a random person in each pod is chosen to leave.
- This person gives a sticker to their favorite interlocutor from the pod, who also leaves with them. (The pods are arranged in a ring, so it’s clear which pod you go to next.)
- At the end, if you have the most stickers, you go up in front of everyone to get the bestest most pleasant human award.
The tricky part for me was that this seemed to require at least 20 people, and I wasn’t established enough as a weird event host in the Bay to pull those numbers. After months of wanting to do it, I finally ran it because someone who runs an event venue in San Francisco offered to co-host. We got 41 goings and 41 maybes on Partiful, and… 23 actual attendees. Headcount is a dangerous game! When I am more cloutéd I want to make this a ticketed event so it’s easier to plan for.1
The following is written for 50 attendees. It also lumps in last minute tweaks I made, and tweaks that I didn’t make but obviously should have, as if they were planned from the start.
Runtime: ~140 minutes. 20 minutes for the opening talk and answering questions, 9 rounds of 10 minutes, 9 intervals lasting 2 minutes where people need to hand out stickers, stare at the rules again, and physically relocate, 10 minutes for identifying winners and giving them prizes.
Physical prep
(Beige, in my version) Numbered cards for each participant, 1-50, to be handed out as people trickle in.
Numbered signs for pods, 1-10, to be hung in advance from ceilings / prominent furniture.
Eighteen stickers, taped to each pod sign. (Nine rounds, and two voters per round.)
10 pieces of paper, placed at every pod, containing the text of the rules on randomization and voting.
Prizes: I bought six bars of nice chocolate.
Intro talk
You will have received a beige card with a number on it. The last digit of that number is the number of the pod you’re sitting at to start. If your number is 36, you are going to pod 6 to start. If your number is 40, you’re going to pod 10.2
If you lost your beige card, sprint over to me now and get a new one. You’re going to put a sticker on this card if you win a round, so please keep a hold of it throughout the game.
Moving and randomization
I am about to explain moving and randomization. This part is the annoying part, so there’s also a printout at every pod explaining it.
There will be nine rounds, each of which are 10 minutes long. At the end of each round, I will call out a number. The person in each pod with the closest number equal to it or above it is the first mover, who is going to move one pod forward. Let’s call this person Alice. This means that if I call out 20, the person with the number 20 is Alice. If you have the number 21, you are very likely Alice. If you are 19, there’s no way you’re Alice. The numbers wrap around. Say that I call out 45. If there is no one with a number above 45 in the pod, but there is a 1, the person with 1 is Alice.
Alice is going to choose their favorite interlocutor in the group, Bob. Bob will also move, but one pod back. The pods wrap around. If you are Alice in the final pod, you go to pod 1.
Bob is also going to choose their favorite interlocutor, Cathy, and give Cathy a sticker. Cathy does not move unless she is also Alice.
Let’s run through an example. Say round 1 ends and I call out 30. Everyone in pod 3 checks their number. The person with the closest number above 30 has the number 33, and becomes Alice. Alice decides the best conversationalist in the tourney was Bob, and gives him a sticker. Bob, in turn, decides Cathy was the best conversationalist, and gives Cathy a sticker. Alice goes to pod 4. Bob goes to pod 2. Cathy does not move.
Selecting people
A note on selection. If you are Alice or Bob, you’re the ultimate arbiter of your taste. However. I want you to account for two biases. The first is status or hotness. You might be tempted to curry favor with someone who is attractive or high status by picking them. You might also be tempted to NOT pick someone who is attractive or high status, because to avoid the shame of referring someone who is statistically preferred for things. Take a second to determine which of these biases you are prone to, and tell yourself you will vaguely try to overcome it.
The second factor I want you to take into account is talkativeness. An extremely talkative person is likely to come off well in the first 10 minutes, when a group conversation is bottled back on energy. After that, they will likely become less appealing. I would prefer that people not simply select for people who talk a lot. If you think the most talkative person was the best participant in the pod, imagine the conversation being 60 minutes long, and ask yourself whether you would still find them the most delightful person in the group.
Conversational rules
I have one rule and one guideline.
The rule is to not talk about the choice of stickers. If you’re handing out a sticker, don’t make a joke that’s meant to diffuse the tension around the fact that you like the recipient. If you were given a sticker by the first or second mover, don’t ask why you were chosen or guess at why you were chosen. You can ask this after the game if you think the vibes are right, but people are forbidden from discussing the choices during the game itself.
The guideline is to not go meta. I’ve run a competitive socializing event before where a full half of the conversation was a meta conversation about the competitive socializing. I’m not going to FORBID this, but I think it’s an undesirable equilibrium and I would try not to do too much of it.
Round change
While round 1 is in progress, you need to sit down and hastily figure out what the random numbers for the next rounds will be. And, for that matter, what the number of rounds are, because you might want to tweak it based on attendee count. I ran a quick vote on my attendees after the event and the group was equally happy with 10 minutes and 12 minutes.
You want numbers roughly spaced by [number of attendees divided by number of rounds], shuffled. It’s nice to set the first ‘random number’ to 0, making it easy in the first round to compute who Alice is – it’s the person with the lowest number.
“Hello. Round 2 has come to an end. The random number is 11. If you have 11, you are definitely Alice. If you have 12, you are almost certainly Alice. If you have 10, you are not Alice. Alice, give Bob a pink sticker and go to the next pod. Bob, please give your favorite interlocutor a pink sticker and go back a pod.”
Declaring winners
Although my outline says 9 rounds, I ran 7. I had 5 winners who had 5 stickers each.
I’d start two numbers below the expected count and get people to raise their hands if they got that many – “Did anyone get four? Did anyone get five? Six? No one? Okay, everyone who got five stickers, please come up.”
Retro
The biggest problem was dispersal. Groups weren’t shuffled enough. This merely sucks if people are boring each other, and is actively torturous if people dislike each other. I want to try full dispersal for the next iteration of this event.
(I didn’t write that improvement into the outline because the best way I can think of to do it is still pretty chaotic. This is the most complex game I’ve ever run. And I think it only worked because half the attendees arrived earlier than I expected and we all sat around reading the rules handout in advance and getting on the same page.)
My best idea for full dispersal is that everyone in a pod moves a different number of pods. So, of the five people in a pod:
-The first person moves forward one pod. (And for the rest of the game, they always move forward one pod.) -The second person moves forward two pods. (And they only ever move two pods.) -The third person moves forward three pods. -The fourth person moves forward four pods. -The fifth person doesn’t move.
But I haven’t sat down and figured out how this interacts with some pods only having four people, whether this guarantees all pods will have 4 or 5 people, etc.
It would also have helped if Bob moved two or three pods back rather than one, so people don’t shuttle back and forth between the two groups.
Footnotes
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Man, this experience really made me want more status/popularity. 23 attendees was fine – in fact, it would have been rough running this for the first time with 50 people – but the uncertainty gives me chills. ↩
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This means that groups of 5 will all be concentrated at the lowest number pods. If there are 45 attendees, there will be five people in pods 1-5 and four in pods 6-10, so before the first round begins, it’s likely worth grabbing e.g. one person from pod 2 and one person from 4, and putting them in 7 and 9. ↩