It’s 11 o’clock on a Friday night, and Branner is about to fall—again. Lagunita Court is launching an offensive for the frosh stronghold, currently controlled by the Row. This is Stanford Turf, an online strategy game poised to become a winter-quarter tradition, and for the 205 students playing, it’s judgment day.
Turf owes its basic premise to Risk. In 2007, a student at Yale created an online version of the classic board game, swapping the world map for one of New Haven, Conn., and organizing teams around dorms. The game was a hit, and when a version launched on the Farm in February 2008, hundreds of students schemed their way through a contest eventually won by a Branner/Toyon alliance.
To play, students move avatars around a web-based campus map during twice-daily scheduled turns. If avatars from competing teams collide, the game’s algorithms calculate the result of a duel between them. Players who want a competitive advantage can spend points in the game’s marketplace on virtual boosts. They might increase their avatar’s speed with “scooters,” or up their stamina with “energy drinks.” Losers temporarily disappear from the map after each round of duels. When the virtual smoke clears, squads are awarded points for every zone their players control.
After 12 days of play, and with Dead Week looming, Turf Central announced a ceasefire. The Row rallied its troops and called in reserves to triumph over second-place Lag, 455 points to 353. There was no prize for the winners, but a temporary distraction from the winter-quarter doldrums was reward enough.
JOHN MAAS is Class of ’08.
