Assassins games with a small number of players are pretty easy to run by hand. But once that number grows beyond ten or so, things get difficult. Some of the difficulties you encounter are disputes, target reassignment, bookkeeping, game dropouts, privacy, and messaging. In this article, I will address how Sassins solves these problems, and thus provides a scalable solution for assassins games of any size.
Probably the most common problem with a big game is disputes. When an elimination occurs in a big game, targets will sometimes claim that they were not eliminated, or the targeter might falsely claim that he eliminated his target.
Normally this results in a lot of wasted time trying to sort out what happened. You have to determine who is involved and get in contact with them, and try to learn the truth, then resolve it. Having handled assassins games for over three years Sassins has learned to solve this problem. When a targeter claims to have eliminated his target, the target is immediately notified via email. If the target doesn't dispute the report in 24 hours, we assume they agree with it and it is ready to publish. But here's where the magic comes in: if they dispute it, you get notified, but so does the targeter. In fact, Sassins makes a nice little forum where targeter and target can go back and forth about their dispute without your intervention. Of course, you can always send messages to the targeter and target through the same forum that they are using, and only they will get emails about these messages.
When an elimination occurs or someone drops from the game, you have to reassign targets. This can be a complex process. You have to make sure that everyone still has the correct targetings, and that no one is targeting the leaving player. Sassins handles this automatically for you every time you publish an event. If the event involves elimination, Sassins automatically reroutes a person's targets no matter how complex the targeting matrix is. For example, if 10 people are targeting someone and they are targeting 5 people themselves, the 10 targeters would now automatically be informed that they are targeting those 5 new people. To do this you literally only click 3 times. You can even publish multiple events at once that involve eliminations that interact with one another and Sassins simply and automatically figures out how to reassign the targets.
Do you really want to keep track of the scores of 128 people? Do you have the time? Whenever someone eliminates someone you'd probably like them to get a point, and display their ranking on a public scoreboard. The more people there are the more often you'd have to update the rankings and scores. With Sassins, scores and rankings are updated automatically when events are published. There is not extra work to be done. Your players will immediately see the updated scoreboard.
When you have lots of players it's hard to maintain their privacy. It becomes tempting to use someone's name in an email to everyone rather than fish out his specific email address. Also, it's hard to post results about a game while keeping the identity of players a secret. Sassins solves these problems of scale by always doing the right thing when it comes to privacy. When a player has not been eliminated their real name is kept a secret from the other players. Players can still track each other's actions by their secret aliases. When a player is eliminated they are unmasked but only to the players in the game. A person who is not logged in will never see the real names of the players, only their secret aliases.
Keeping track of email addresses of all of your players, making sure they all know the rules, and all know who their targets are is made much easier with Sassins. You can send an announcement to all of your players without any effort and you can be assured that it will go to all of them. Also, Sassins lets you make your own unique rules that are visible to all of the players. Players can always log in to Sassins and see who their target is, and it's always at the bottom of announcements or event publications.
