Light Fight
Light fight is a turn-based 4-player team game for night time. 4 players split into 2 teams, each player armed with a flashlight. The goal for each team is to get at least 3 of the other team’s feet illuminated. A judge helps decide if a foot is “illuminated”. Players can use cardboard boxes in the middle for defense. Players can also win by having both members of a team reach the opposite side of their starting positions, although this only ever happened once the entire day (during one of the games I played). Another twist — when shining your light, you have to aim it before turning it on — once it’s on you can’t adjust it. This adds an element of skill in addition to the strategy of the game. There’s also an element of luck in the configuration of the boxes.
It’s a pretty neat idea. Light fight is pretty reminiscent to the game Ninja, in that it’s physical and turn-based, but it’s also very different in a few ways: shining lights means the angle between players matters first, and then distance; having no physical contact makes it less violent and react-time based, and more strategic; having teams also contributes to that. However, the team-based aspect was in the background for most of the time. You really can’t effectively “attack” 2 players, so the game mostly splits into two 1-on-1’s. The “judging” part was also very tricky, since it’s a very fuzzy line what constitutes shining light on someone’s foot or not, and even moreso hard to tell before shining a light. I like how the game has a lot of room for strategizing: I stuck one foot out to another player, but they were far away, so they stepped in towards me, thinking their partner would get my partner’s 2 feet the next round. But in doing so, she perfectly exposed herself for me to shine light on both of her feet.
Scattershot
In Scattershot, up to 4 teams compete to control ships on a 2D field. Each player on a team  uses their phone to open a web browser and control a single laser on the ship, and nothing more. Ships move around based on propulsion caused by firing lasers; firing all on one side at the same time lets you move forward; or just firing one causes you to rotate.
The idea seemed interesting. The movement mechanic is a good way to represent how “in-sync” two players can think together, and compete both in that and strategy-wise. However, to me, the game was pretty hindered by high and unreliable latency (~3-5 seconds) between firing and shooting. I’m not sure if this was a technical issue, an intended mechanic, or both. This made it pretty-much impossible to strategize, but my partner and I ended up just independently trying to fire, accounting for the delay, and hit enemies from wherever we are, because the shooting distance made position pretty irrelevant, since there weren’t any strategic obstacles. It did remind me of an interesting game at GDC where up to 5 players push pedals to control independent rockets on a space ship, which was actually pretty fun, so I think with some technical improvements this could work.
