In this video, my wife Becky, son Harrison and I play Midnight Party (technically the German version, Mitternachtsparty). The total video represents about 30 minutes of real time, capturing a full three-round game. The time lapse captured a frame every four seconds.
The game represents an excellent family/party game in which the players control revelers at a grand ball in a haunted mansion. The ghost, Hugo, is awakened by the revelry and heads upstairs to chase the party-goers into the various rooms of the mansion. Those who don’t make it to safety are chased into the basement and their controlling players suffer penalty points.
I (turquoise pawns) was well ahead after the first round, suffering few losses while my wife (blue pawns) was 33 penalty points in the hole. My son, (red pawns) was squarely in the middle.
In the second round, I suffered major losses, but was still a couple of points ahead of the wife. Harrison was in decent shape, and we were all in contention. This round featured an amusing chase all around the board of one of my female pawns, whose flight was eventually unsuccessful.
Heading into the final round, there’s a bit of game education going on as I explain to the others why the order of taking turns positioning pawns each round is important.
In the final round, Harrison’s pawns were gobbled up and thrown to the darkest parts of the basement. Becky managed to preserve a good many of her pawns and I suffered enough that I fell to her by one point, 58-57. Harrison brought up the rear with a whopping 80 point cumulative total thanks to that ill-fated final round.
At the end of the night, a fun time was had by all. Midnight Party is out of print in the English version but Funagain Games sells the German version with a printout of an English translation of the rules. No components of the game are language dependent.
Lego Batman toys are not included.
** I'm hoping to post more session videos, video reviews and other fun stuff on my game blog http://www.nonstoptabletop.com. Feel free to let me know what kinds of multimedia content concerning our hobby you'd like to see.
You could easily slow down the frame capture rate by half or 2/3rds, and still have a short playtime. The way Hugo was flying by at times made it hard to follow. But your wife committed suicide in the 1st round by placing 4 of her figures right in Hugo's first 3 spaces.
It was funny seeing the way they learned to keep their people FAR away from Hugo's starting spots by the 3rd round.
And your son looks like he may have gotten gobbled in the last round because of the all-too-common "all I rolled was Hugos this round" phenomenon.
Try it some more times, and see how their approach in player placement changes. I have a key and shield variant that kids like to play (I'll post soon), and I'm trying to get an opportunity to try out the movement-card variant.
Thanks, John -- you're right about the frame rate. When I time lapsed Fury of Dracula with the 1 frame per 15 second rate, it worked pretty well for a four hour game (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/345827). When I chose 4 second intervals for this one, I thought I was compensating within the right range, but upon viewing I realized the same thing you did -- that it would have made for more a more "animated" experience if I'd even gone so low as a frame every one or two seconds. I'll probably give that a whirl soon.
And your eye for the game is excellent. You nailed our play experience exactly. What's funny is that we had been orienting the board 180 degrees differently in the past, and my wife thought she was positioning her pawns well away from Hugo's danger zone. She didn't realize until he made it to the gallery what had happened. And you're right on about my son only rolling Hugos for a nasty stretch there. That die seems to get stuck in an odd groove, sometimes.
Posted Wed Oct 15, 2008 2:35 am
