Snowball
Snowball is a one-page game about about changing your mind to change the world. You play to reach agreement as a group, even when people are trying to stop you from doing that. You win when you all know you've won.
Three hundred climate activists are surrounding an oil pipeline. The pipeline is heavily guarded by elite corporate agents, so unless almost all the activists act at once, they will not succeed in demolishing it safely. They all need to decide if they are acting today at solar noon or not.
But the activists have no leader. They have no way of convincingly tallying a vote. There may be corporate shills planted within their ranks, armed with highly advanced Strategic Services Field Manual No. 3 tactics, like “Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible”, trying to confuse the group.
Snowball is a game to blow up that pipeline.
It was made before bed (but after bedtime) for TTRPG Collective Presents: Hope Jam!, and covers the theme of:
Radical Kindness: Rejecting Individualism. Pushing back against the system. Fighting oppressive infrastructure.
Print it out, play it in the middle of a field. Play it with your friends, play it with your enemies. You'll come to agree.
Snowball is half of "Snowball to Avalanche" consensus, implemented on humans, with the serial numbers not even filed all the way off. I ran more or less this one time a long time ago and it mostly worked, so consider this Playtested(TM).
Snowball is licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0 and uses a beautiful CC-BY-SA 2.0 photo by Bastian Greshake Tzovaras.
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Comments
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is this resistant to a bad actor lying and claiming their count reached 5?
I think for just one it is; you don’t announce your count but just your current value, and everyone else will still settle on something. But you won’t necessarily come out agreeing with everyone else if you don’t follow the rules, and you can push the system towards your preferred decision by cheating.