Hey, I've recently been finding myself in situations where I have 3 players and no games worth playing.
The problem is that a lot of the free for all games we've played tend to cater to a sort of conservative opportunist strategy where the first two to fight each other inevitably lose to the unmolested third, barring some giant gap in skill between players. This either makes the game very boring or forces the players to commit to a subpar strategy in order to keep it fun (which, naturally, is abandoned as soon as the game gets close).
Golf games are fine, I suppose, though they lack much in the way of interactivity. Ditto for a lot of racing games, kart racers largely excluded. Co-op is great, but we've played most of the well-known beat 'em ups to death by now, and the selection really tapers off outside of that category (I'm aware that co-op RPGs exist, but so far we've tried Secret of Mana and one of the old Gauntlet games and they were both pretty miserable experiences).
What I'd really like to find is a good 2v1 game that either has been balanced towards that mode intentionally by the developers or has some variable balance that can be used to make 2v1 interesting. When I was younger I'd always push for Scotland Yard in situations where we only had 3 players - cat and mouse is a favorite dynamic of mine and the conveyance of information between the police adds a lot to the game. Sadly, it's both a board game and a game that I no longer have.
In terms of actual video games, the best 2v1 matches I've had have been in some Advance Wars custom maps, which took a fair bit of fine tuning, and in that fairly sub-par Dreamcast Spawn game, which was unbalanced in such a way that it could create pretty interesting 2v1 scenarios simply by limiting character choice. I've tried a few other games with handicap options (Halo, Smash Bros., a few wrestlers, etc.) but generally have either missed the sweet spot or just felt that once the 2 player side figured out what to do it was impossible to lose.
This reminds me: we used to play a version of the original Halo where one player would ride a ghost and the other two would jump in the warthog, armed with rockets and grenades, and try to tip the first. Shields were set to max and the first player couldn't shoot, he just had to stay on for as long as possible. Shit was hilarious.
So basically what I'm asking is whether you guys have any favorite games or modes to play when you have 3 players. If this requires house rules, I'd love to hear them, though ideally I like the ones that don't rely on a tacit agreement not to do X (it's fine if it's explicit and discrete like "you must pick Ganondorf" or "you can't shoot", but "don't camp" is a shitstorm waiting to happen).
The problem is that a lot of the free for all games we've played tend to cater to a sort of conservative opportunist strategy where the first two to fight each other inevitably lose to the unmolested third, barring some giant gap in skill between players. This either makes the game very boring or forces the players to commit to a subpar strategy in order to keep it fun (which, naturally, is abandoned as soon as the game gets close).
Golf games are fine, I suppose, though they lack much in the way of interactivity. Ditto for a lot of racing games, kart racers largely excluded. Co-op is great, but we've played most of the well-known beat 'em ups to death by now, and the selection really tapers off outside of that category (I'm aware that co-op RPGs exist, but so far we've tried Secret of Mana and one of the old Gauntlet games and they were both pretty miserable experiences).
What I'd really like to find is a good 2v1 game that either has been balanced towards that mode intentionally by the developers or has some variable balance that can be used to make 2v1 interesting. When I was younger I'd always push for Scotland Yard in situations where we only had 3 players - cat and mouse is a favorite dynamic of mine and the conveyance of information between the police adds a lot to the game. Sadly, it's both a board game and a game that I no longer have.
In terms of actual video games, the best 2v1 matches I've had have been in some Advance Wars custom maps, which took a fair bit of fine tuning, and in that fairly sub-par Dreamcast Spawn game, which was unbalanced in such a way that it could create pretty interesting 2v1 scenarios simply by limiting character choice. I've tried a few other games with handicap options (Halo, Smash Bros., a few wrestlers, etc.) but generally have either missed the sweet spot or just felt that once the 2 player side figured out what to do it was impossible to lose.
This reminds me: we used to play a version of the original Halo where one player would ride a ghost and the other two would jump in the warthog, armed with rockets and grenades, and try to tip the first. Shields were set to max and the first player couldn't shoot, he just had to stay on for as long as possible. Shit was hilarious.
So basically what I'm asking is whether you guys have any favorite games or modes to play when you have 3 players. If this requires house rules, I'd love to hear them, though ideally I like the ones that don't rely on a tacit agreement not to do X (it's fine if it's explicit and discrete like "you must pick Ganondorf" or "you can't shoot", but "don't camp" is a shitstorm waiting to happen).
