Best of the Year

Published
1 February 2020
Tagged

Happy new year!

Our new year's eve party this year featured a party game called Best of the Year, based on Caramel Column Inc.'s game Fictional Masterpieces which they exhibited at Is This a Game? 2019. I made this game based on the GameHungry post above, and it turned out pretty well. This is a record of the rules, and the results.

The rules

The goal of the game is to create a set of eight tracklists, one for each of the eight provided albums. There is no win condition.

The game features eight fictional albums, each of which has an artist and album name. Each album has an "A" side and a "B" side, with each side featuring six tracks (which start the game unnamed).

Each turn consists of two steps:

Step one: Take a piece of paper, and write down the name of a track that comes from one of these albums. Fold it up and place it in the bag provided.

Step two: Take a piece of paper out of the bag. If it’s one of your suggestions, put it back in and draw another piece of paper. Place the piece of paper in an empty slot, where it belongs.

This is it!

The results

When I made this game, I was concerned that there wouldn't be any interest from the attendees at our party. I thought perhaps I'd end up with one or two tracks per album, but not really enough to produce something of value. Turns out I was wrong: either I'd picked the right game for the right crowd, or I'd put enough effort into my album covers to make it compelling, or perhaps people just like making things. Either way, this became an involved one- or two-hour game, with a core group of about eight people bouncing off one another and building a coherent (mostly) track list for each album.

The album list near the end of the game

The album list near the end of the game

For posterity, here are the eight albums I provided my guests with, and the track lists they produced:

Ain't love at all | Beatrice of Savoy
Side A:
  1. A terrible thing has happened
  2. Tears of plutonium
  3. Doin' it country style (ft. Mulligan & O'Hare)
  4. Wash the horizon
  5. Fallin' of the cliff (with you)
  6. Grand Theft Autopsy
Side B:
  1. Mother's Ruin
  2. I love you, Yes hurry
  3. This might be a thing
  4. Complete my me
  5. Finality
  6. Hey, are we related?
Attitude of Gratitude | Spoon River
Side A:
  1. Flip, flop, flap
  2. Dibs on your face
  3. 22 two little ducks
  4. A little bit of salami
  5. Beans, glorious beans
  6. I can't stop stalking you
Side B:
  1. Only room for one
  2. Tacky toes & jams
  3. Tittybiscuits
  4. Mops
  5. Fruity space magic
  6. Toot snoot flutes
I taught her that | Kožušice
Side A:
  1. That's what she said
  2. You caved
  3. A way to get it in there
  4. Suffer my fate
  5. It got in the cake!
  6. Salivation salvation
Side B:
  1. The Fighting Ferret's Revenge
  2. Merry Meerkats
  3. See me out with fireworks
  4. Time in a tolbox
  5. Cheese alert
  6. Where did you put my lingonberry jam after the trip to IKEA? (ft. Kanyé) (Remix)
It is too late | The Bone Bed
Side A:
  1. Long Night
  2. Hitting the ground from great heights
  3. Too serious
  4. Your therapist is an alien
  5. I found a potato (& brought it home)
  6. Drinking cardboard soup on the highway
Side B:
  1. Gary the Gibbon
  2. King Arthur lives in my nightmares
  3. Check out, ace
  4. Just come off
  5. Robots stole my mum
  6. So. Many. Bones.
Keep your mind even | Thorsteinsson
Side A:
  1. The anxiety of awkward social situations
  2. Lost a finch?
  3. Unionize
  4. #hashtag
  5. Lycanthropy ahoy
  6. No, not my eye
Side B:
  1. Find the finch
  2. Toss a coin to your fitcher
  3. Too far to port
  4. Caramel
  5. Zombiemania
  6. Life threatening life
Materials of one's chosen form | The Fighting Heart
Side A:
  1. Can you keep a secret?
  2. Get that bread
  3. Lost in Finland
  4. Live & Death in the time of the tornados
  5. Don't hold your breath
  6. The bee whisperer
Side B:
  1. Gidday, Steve!
  2. In for port, out for sherry
  3. Circular saw
  4. Will you help me hide a body
  5. More than ape
  6. Not a real album
Suffer on the heights | Condemned Hole
Side A:
  1. Butter my fly
  2. Lickin' ze elbows (ft. Insanity Prawn Boy)
  3. Echoplex - Goddess of the Reverb
  4. Tears of Ophelia
  5. Endothermic Reaction
  6. Fly my butter
Side B:
  1. Don't breathe
  2. Hydrophilia
  3. C6H12O6
  4. Calcium (milk it)
  5. How to scream underwater
  6. Terrifying reverberations
The entire catalogue | Black Cove Formation
Side A:
  1. Scab
  2. Best of the year
  3. All alone, by myself, self-absorbed
  4. Write me a letter when you wake up
  5. Last night I thought you were pretty
  6. Please take my plums
Side B:
  1. Over under inside death
  2. &
  3. Sunday in sorrow
  4. Is this too much?
  5. Topsy Turvy Trev
  6. Less than human

The albums

These albums were generated using a forum game from 2009, that I had to look up because 2009 was ten years ago. To generate your own album using this algorithm, follow these steps:

  1. Go to The Flickr Interesting page and pick the third photo on the page. This is the art for your cover.
  2. Go to Wikipedia and click “Random article” in the sidebar (fifth link down). Take the title of the page. This is the name of your band or artist.
  3. Go to The Random page on Quotationspage.com and take the last quote on the page. Take the last three or four (or five or six or seven...whatever works) words of the quote. This is the name of your album.
  4. (optional) Spend a few hours fiddling around with fonts and layout in your preferred image editor programme to make the album look proper.