Rani Ban/The Falcon Freshmen Joe Starmer and Kyle Rickards carry Nerf guns around campus while participating in their Hill Hall game of Mafia. Some Hill, Ashton and Emerson floors play Assassin, while Fifth Hill plays Mafia and Moyer Hall plays Stratego Live.

Mafia
It was nearing midnight on Thursday last week and the lights of Martin Square lit up the faces of the Mafia. About 15 alumni and 11 freshmen and sophomores from Fifth Hill stood at the ready. Nerf guns were drawn, and the final shootout began. Darts flew. Man after man died until only freshman Anthony Jones was left. He too fell to the alumni.

The alumni reigned victorious.

The game was "Mafia," Fifth Hill's quarterly, 24-hour game--a real-life game played outside at all hours. Fifth Hill's game started Monday night last week.

Back in the 1999-2000 school year, J.J. Kissinger, the Fifth Hill Peer Adviser (PA) at the time, now Residence Life Coordinator (RLC) in Emerson, mandated a video game fast for his floor. That was the week Mafia was born.

The game of Mafia splits up the men of Fifth Hill into teams. The goal is to "kill" members of the opposite team, or teams, by shooting darts at their heads with Nerf guns. Raiding parties are organized to ambush opposing players outside of Gwinn Commons or class-- anywhere outside works.

"A lot comes down to communication," Fifth Hill freshman David Rowan said.

This quarter, almost 80 people played Mafia, Rowan said.

"It's the only floor activity our entire floor has participated in," freshman Nate Corley said.

Rowan explained that there are different versions of Mafia every quarter. In fall quarter, Fifth Hill was split up into two teams. This quarter, there were three teams: freshmen, returners and alumni. This quarter, the alumni outnumbered the freshman and sophomores by so much that the freshmen and sophomores made an alliance for the Thursday shootout, Corley said.

Sophomore Peter Meerdink thinks that Mafia is the greatest real-life game on campus. "I don't think there's anything not to like about it," he said. "It's a great bonding experience hunting your fellow man."

Corley agrees, calling it the "best floor tradition ever."

"I think it appeals to the savage, animalistic heart of every true man on Fifth Hill," junior Josh Small, who was shot, last Wednesday, said.

Assassin
Last quarter, two floors down, the Third Hill men played "Assassin." Unlike Mafia, Assassin is played on college campuses nationwide. According to an article in USA Today from April 24, 2007, the Web site http://campusassassins.com was keeping track of 50 Assassin games in the United States, Canada and Great Britain.

There are varied rules to Assassin, since the game has no official publisher. The basic rules are that each person is assigned another person to eliminate. After the person assigned is eliminated, the assassin receives a new assignment. Attacks can be made with Nerf guns, socks or markers, among other things. It involves stealth because the person being pursued can run if they know a certain person is trying to attack them. Attacks are only legitimate if there are no witnesses.

It is a 24-hour game and certain boundaries are made as to where it can be played. For Assassin games on the SPU campus, the players' floors are safe zones.

"The way we did it was everyone got a marker and you also got a slip of paper with someone's name on it," Third Hill freshman Noah Simpson said.

Eliminations were made by drawing a line with the marker across the other player's throat.

Third Hill's version of Assassin lasted for three days and was played everywhere on campus except on the Third Hill floor itself.

"It was really intense," Simpson said. "We were real paranoid for three days." Simpson wasn't sure whether they would play Assassin again this quarter.

Last quarter, freshman Chester Pineda organized Assassin for the men of Second Central Emerson. Each person was assigned a person to kill, and when the person died, received the victim's assignment. He said he plans to try to do it again this quarter and possibly get the rest of Second Emerson involved.

Similarly to Hill, kills were made with markers, only, in Emerson, they were made with lines on the back of the neck.

Pineda said it was a "great way for the guys to get to know each other more."

Fellow Emerson resident freshman Kevin Moxon called it, "another level of male bonding."

Last quarter, sophomore Theodore Pulver brought Assassin to Ashton, where the men of Fourth West and the women on their three sister floors--Third West, Fourth East and Third East--played.

To encourage participation, Pulver created a monetary prize. Each player donated a quarter. "The winner of the game would get all those quarters," Pulver said.

Instead of elimination via a marker, the attacker had to hit the assigned person with a sock.

The winner of Ashton's Assassin, sophomore Christalyn Steers, killed five people before she won the $30-worth of laundry money.

"I liked the strategy and I liked the break from the typical college life," Steers said. "I think it's a great way to build community, build friendships," she said of games such as Assassin.

"I know who a lot more people are because of it," sophomore Crissy Kirklin said.

Assassin may not have had the team-bonding of Mafia, since each person played for him- or herself, but it did encourage walking places together because a person couldn't be killed when others were looking.

Steers said she would call up her "dead" friends to walk with her on campus.

"I couldn't have won Assassin without friends and floor-mates," she said.

Pulver hopes to play Assassin each quarter and has toyed with the idea of playing with another hall somewhere else on campus.

Stratego Live
Last November, Moyer Hall resident freshman Caleb Richmond began talking to his floor-mate, freshman James McDonald, about starting their own 24-hour, real-life game for Moyer Hall. Richmond said they wanted to do a game like Ashton and Hill did, but they wanted to be original.

After some brainstorming, the two agreed on inventing a live version of the board game "Stratego."

In Stratego, players control pieces representing an army of soldiers and officers, from Sergeants to Marshals, with different numbered ranks. The rank of a piece is hidden from the opponent until the player moves a piece onto a space occupied by an opponent's piece, initiating an attack. The value of each piece's rank determines whether it is able to beat the opponent. The goal of the game is to move a piece into an encounter with the flag of the opponent's army and "capture" it.

While most encounters result in a higher-ranked piece beating a lower-ranked one, some pieces have special abilities, including pieces representing bombs that can only be removed by a Miner, and low-ranked Scout pieces which have great freedom of mobility on the board.

With the help of freshman Scott Michaelsen, they came up with rules for a version in which students from all three floors in Moyer would represent each piece in the game.

Unlike the board game, in which the strategy mostly comes from the initial placement of pieces, the strategy in their live version came from the players using logical deduction to determine an opposing player's rank before attacking him or her.

To attack opponents in an encounter, their version, "Stratego Live," borrowed the idea of using socks to hit the opponent from Ashton's version of Assassin. The Moyer players tried everything from stuffing their socks with other socks for weight to swing them, or balling them up to throw at opponents.

The game began with rank assignments being drawn randomly out of a hat on Feb. 1 and lasted until the flag was "killed" on Feb. 12.

Co-founder McDonald ended up playing the game as a Sergeant and winning the game upon identifying sophomore Michael Chew as the flag of the opposing team and attacking him.

Like other 24-hour games on campus, all attacks made against opponents in Stratego Live had to be made outdoors and without any eyewitnesses around except the attacker and the target. Richmond said this was to get players to "walk with people to class [and] get people to bond with each other."

"I've seen a definite impact," Michaelsen said of the game's attempts to get students interacting with their teammates. "Those relationships have actually continued beyond the game. Some relationships have strengthened."

Richmond and Michaelsen participated in the game as administrators, overseeing the whole process.

"Before the game I didn't know anything about Stratego...I just did it because it sounded interesting," freshman Brad Foreman said.

He said he definitely wants to play it again in future, as it will likely be played once each quarter.

"I liked the whole element of stalking people and jumping out at them" to achieve "kills," he said.

Though most of the game went smoothly, it started off a little rough in the first week, with some rules needing clarification and some players using "questionable" methods to "kill" their opponents.

Foreman admitted that he got "a slap on the wrist" from the administrators while playing. He said that he would claim to be a member of the opposing team so that they would entrust him with rank information on their teammates, which he would then relay back to his own team.

The administrators penalized him by prohibiting him from relaying any more of the info he learned to any of his teammates.

In the end, though, Michaelsen and Richmond said they felt the game was a hit.

"It appeared to be a huge success," Michaelsen said. "We had 71 people that signed up for it, which is over half the dorm."

"It ended up working better than we expected, with less glitches," Richmond said. "If we're lucky, this will become a Moyer tradition."