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Friday 22 March 1968

82nd day - 284 days to come


Rcd. a call from Wes Sayre from Queens (LA 5-2718). He rcd. my name from Gamescience and he asked me if I wanted to play CONFRONTATION by mail. Told him, regretfully, no.

Called Jules Cooper. They will try keeping the detective games for another year. They will do more radio advertising. Last year they used radio in New York and that is the only place the games did well. He told me about the new game AND THEN THERE WERE NONE. When 4 play there are 8 cards, from 1 to 8. Each player is dealt two cards [sentence crossed out] and the one who received #1 (the character who is the murderer in the book) is the murderer. In turn the players ask the other players questions (one question to a chosen opponent). Questions are about the numbers, such as "Is your lower card less than 3?" - "Is your total odd?" - but cannot be a direct question such as "Do you have no. 4?" The murderer may lie if he wishes. Others must tell the truth. The mur- derer wins if he correctly determines the numbers that each of the other players have. One of the other players wins if he determines who is the murderer and what his two cards are.
When 3 play a 9th card (#9 I suppose [crossed out]) is used and each gets 3 cards. The murderer may not lie about his middle card.
Only 4 or 3 can play.

Played 5-hand FAIR TRADE with the family and Joe. They felt that there was not enough incentive to try and get a set of 12. We tried the game with a set of 10 required to win instead of 12. This seemed to improve things. Later I thought of the idea of having two winners. The first to get a set takes 60 chips out of the pot. The winning cards are removed from the game and it then continues until another set is formed. This player then takes the remainder of the pot.