Game of Squares - Turning Season 7 of Game Of Thrones Into a "High" Stakes Office Pool
If you know what television is or if you have ever used the internet, or even if you know another person, then you have probably heard of the HBO global sensation Game Of Thrones. If you haven't heard of the show save yourself the trouble and stop reading now. If you have never seen the show and never plan to, I suggest you reconsider.
For the rest of you that are counting the days until the 16th of July, 2017, this post will discuss a unique idea that my good friend presented to me about a week ago to turn Season 7 into an analog of the popular Superbowl party game, "Squares" based on character deaths!
The game that we put together is based exclusively around Season 7 of the show. Before you respond with a comment about how the books are better or how someone is alive or dead in the books, I have already read all of the books and all of the extra material. This game and the rest of this post are related to the show only. Also, I think it is implied, but SPOILERS AHEAD!!!
The Idea
Going all the way back to Will, the main character in the prolog of Season 1, Episode 1, George R.R. Martin has been killing off characters in this story seemingly at every possible chance he gets. He has taken away from us some of our most beloved characters as well as some that probably lasted a little too long, according to most. With the story nearing an end, the White Walkers and their army of wights closing in on the Wall, Cersei having completely lost her shit, and only a mere 13 episodes left, there is sure to be a lot of characters going down this season. So, if we have to say goodbye to a few more of our beloved characters, why not make a game out of it.
Traditional Squares
The game of Squares when played during a football game is usually played on a 10x10 grid of 100 squares. Players will select random squares within the grid and write in their name. Usually, each square costs a buy-in. Each team in the football game is assigned an axis of the grid, and then the numbers, zero through nine, are randomly drawn and assigned to each column, followed by doing the same for each row. This assigns a random pair of numbers for each square in the grid. Everything is now set up and everyone can just relax and enjoy the game with a little more on the line.When applied to football, winners are determined when the last digit of the score for each team matches the corresponding row and column of a particular square. Squares is usually split up into the four quarters of the game. So, say the score is Team A - 12 to Team B - 26, at the end of the 1st quarter. The person that has the square that lies in column 2 and row 6 (depending on which team is on which axis) wins the predetermined prize for that quarter.
The GoT Spin
Since this season will be broken down into episodes instead of quarters, and since there are a handful of characters instead of just two teams the traditional game needed to be changed drastically. The simplest way to implement a random draw grid was to start by changing the axes. The X-axis (columns) became individual characters that are still alive. We left out the main players that we believed were safe from getting the ax this season. The Y-axis (rows) became the cause of death. There was much discussion about how to divide this axis up, but it ultimately came down to how many people we could get to join the pool (we needed the number of squares to divide nicely).
All we had to do now was stir up enough interest to get enough people to buy in (we set the bar at a casual $20), and decide how to implement the random draw. (If everyone got to pick their squares, everyone would have gone for Little Finger. That little shit is going DOWN!) We could have gone with random draw out of a hat for 56 squares, but since we couldn't get everyone in the same room for this, the transparency didn't seem necessary. Since we had decided to host the game on Google Sheets (accessible to all players at any time), I suggested we just use a feature from the Sheets add-on, Power Tools, called Shuffle. It works just like you would think; press a button and the contents of a selected section is randomly shuffled.Because we were able to get 15 players, we landed on four death type rows and 14 character columns. This gave us 56 squares for four per player. I set up a square on a separate sheet with the 15 players names on one axis and their four "Square IDs" on the other. I filled in that square with the numbers 1 through 56, selected that range, and hit shuffle (ten times to satisfy my skeptical friends). This gave us an instant random draw and everyone was free to start speculating.
The Characters
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Cersei Lannister |
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Brienne of Tarth |
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Petyr "Little Finger" Baelish |
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Jaime "King Slayer" Lannister |
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Sansa Stark |
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Theon Greyjoy |
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Bronn of the Blackwater |
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Gregor Clegane/Ser Robert Strong "Zombie Mountain" |
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Grey Worm (Torgo Nudho) |
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Euron Greyjoy |
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Melisandre "The Red Woman" |
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Jorah Mormont |
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Sandor Clegane "The Hound" |
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Septa Unella |
Death Categories
As previously stated, there was a lot of debate on how to divide these up, and if you plan to do this with your friends I suggest getting creative because we all know George will be. For any disputes or conflicts, we will hold a vote between all 15 players and simple majority wins.
Hand to Hand / Handheld Weapon (Non-Magical)
This category includes anything from swords, rocks, strangling, getting your face smashed against a wall by zombie mountain, etc.Projectile (Non-Magical)
This one is pretty straight forward. If your character runs in a straight line instead of a zig-zag and gets shot in the back, you win.Mythical Being/Creature
This category and "Other" will likely account for a majority of the winners. This includes death by White Walker, shadowy smoke monster, or any other mythical creature, e.g. direwolf, dragon (or dragon fire), giant, etc.Other
This category is for all of the miscellaneous deaths that don't happen on the battlefield and anything that doesn't fit nicely into one of the other categories. Some deaths that would fall into this category include (but are not limited to) blood sacrifice, execution, poison, wildfire, disease (grayscale), and accidental death.The Kill Sheet!
We decided to implement the game on a shared Google Sheet. This allows us to make changes that are instantly visible by anyone looking at the sheet and allows everyone to access the sheet even if they don't have a specific piece of software (MS Office). If you decide to try this out with your friends, we would love to know how you went about implementing the board so respond in the comments.
Here it is!
As always, thanks for reading. I hope some of you will be able to take this game to your friends and try it out yourselves. I know all of us are quite eager to play now that everything is all set up. If you liked this post please vote and follow! Every vote helps!
Cheers and happy watching!