peculiar starting player rules
i played pandemic for like 16 hours yesterday. what really tickled my crinkle-cut pickle was the rule for determining which player gets to start first. in most games the starting player is selected either randomly or who is oldest. in pandemic it is determined by who was most recently sick. orson, who had his bowels scrambled by salmonella in thailand, was the lucky person who got to start.
after re-reading the guides of other games, it seems that pandemic is not alone. here are some other bizarre rules for who gets to go first:
- alhambra · whoever has the least money
- the bridges of shangri-la ·whoever last reached the peak of everest using nothing but blue and white checkered stilts carved from the wood of a mammoth tree. in case of a tie, the wisest player starts
- cartagena · whoever looks most like a pirate
- fluxx · the first person to declare a desire to go first gets to go first
- for sale · the player who lives in the largest house
- gloom · the player who has had the worst day
- guillotine · the player with the longest neck
- settlers of catan · the oldest player
- small world · the player with the pointiest ears
- ticket to ride · the most experienced traveler
by my reckoning, i should be playing guillotine more often because my neck is so long that when hot vampire chicks are feeding off of me, they can do it in parallel and nobody has got to worry about sloppy seconds.
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believe it or not: there is an entire game that players can play for the sole purpose of determining which player gets to play first.
other peculiarities: stage directions, epitaphs
