Stalinist Russia
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Stalinist Russia is a spoken word game in which players take turns adding place-date pairs to an expanding historical frame, while trying not to be the one to complete an ahistorical or anachronistic timeline. The one that does loses that round of the game. Each historical frame must describe an actual historic world event, or "historic arc," and each successive place-date pair added to the frame must differ in time by no more than the time between the two preceding pairs. Usually some minimum length between pairs is set, such as twenty-five or fifty years, and constraints are placed on the kind of events allowed (socio-political, scientific, military, entertainment, et cetera).
[edit] Game play
The player whose turn it is may challenge the previous player to prove that the current historical frame is actually descriptive of a real historical event by saying "I challenge you", or simply "Stalinist Russia." The challenger must then make an additional statement expressing specific skepticism of the claim; for example: "Lenin did not hold to the slogan of ‘the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry' for more than fifty years." If the challenged player can describe the current historical frame in a way that annuls the challenge and is neither ahistorical nor anachronistic, the challenger loses the round; otherwise the challenged player loses.
The player whose turn it is may also challenge the previous player if the date of the previous player's last place-date pair (the ultimate pair) was separated in time from the penultimate pair by more than the time between the penultimate and antepenultimate pairs.
Like the game of Ghost (from which the structure of this game is derived), bluffing is not uncommon, though it's rare for it to work as intended. It is best to bluff when you are nearing the end of a commonly-recognized historical period (for example, towards the end of the French Revolution in 1810, or near the end of the silent film era in 1915) and you pretend to append a trivial-sounding place-time event pair that actually doesn't exist or go with that period. Many players will go with the bluff and continue the possibly irreparable timeline.
Game-play generally passes to the left (clockwise) starting initially with the youngest player. In subsequent rounds, the player to the immediate left of the previous round's loser selects the starting place-date pair for that round.
If any score is kept at all, the traditional method uses the letters of the word "Stalinist Russia," in the same fashion as the basketball game Horse. The loser of the first round gets an S, the loser of two rounds gets an ST, and so on. The first person to lose fifteen rounds gets STALINIST RUSSIA, and has thereby lost the game.
Stalinist Russia can be played by two or more players of any age, although the game is less enjoyable if the players don't have a comparable understanding of the historic domain in play. No equipment is required, not even pencil and paper. Use of history texts or online sources is considered cheating.
[edit] Strategy
Since the game tree of Stalinist Russia is huge, mostly internalized, and ambiguous, there is no single best algorithm for play. The game is not easily "solved" by combinatorial analysis of place-date pairs, neither by a geographic mapping of places nor a linear extrapolation of dates. Because the event frames exhibit a hierarchical structure in space-time (for example, France --> Paris --> Montmartre, and 1960 --> August --> 18th), avoiding ahistoric or anachronistic timelines is often more a matter of creativity than recitation (or repudiation) of fact. Generally, the player who does not have the first opportunity to lose has a winning strategy, though the exact metric of success will depend on the group of participants.
As an example, if in a three player game the current historic frame consists of "China, 1200," "Bern, 1564," "The East Coast of the United States, 1776," and "Florida, 1967," the second player may propose a timeline that propagates along a trajectory that includes gunpowder, the first European public demonstration of fireworks, the origin of the Fourth of July holiday, and the Apollo Moon launch. If the second player offers: "Los Angeles, California, June 6, 1986" (The opening of the first Johnny Rockets restaurant), it is unlikely he will be challenged.
[edit] Variants
A variant of Stalinist Russia called Stalinist Russias uses not only real-world history, but also imaginary histories, such as those created by J. R. R. Tolkien, or the Star Trek Universe, et cetera.
Another variant spells out the name "COSTIKYAN" instead of "STALINIST RUSSIA." This is probably because the game was first played among a small group of Brown University students, including Greg Costikyan, an American game designer, in the early 1980s.
