Game Flow Analysis of Count the Rice

Spoilers. Obviously.

**An analysis of Count the Rice’s room flow**

This episode was amazing. As a game designer, my guess is that it was a lot more fun to watch than it was to play. I couldn’t help but put myself in the shoes of the players who got stuck by the game system of this game. Now I want to be clear, I don’t think this impacts the quality of the CONTENT, but this is one of those gamechangers that you couldn’t just make into a home game and have it work.

**Room 1** is an outflow. Over time, you move to room 2. This is a good trickle to keep the game in cycle.

**Room 2** is one of the game’s biggest chokepoints, because it requires 3 people to fire Fiddle Me This. The winner moves back to Room 1, while the losers move to Room 3. Ultimately, the Room 1 person and one of the Room 3 people will cycle back to here (by losing Room 1 and 3), putting us back to 2 people. In the early stages of the game, this was fine because Room 1 was flowing down to Room 2, providing a constant stream of a third player. However, later in the game, when Sam is doing the Wenis in Room 1, you get a gridlock in Room 2, where 2 players are stuck in that room, waiting for a player to come back UP the spout. Somehow this gridlock seemed to be Jiavani, Zach, and Hannah, which is a little confusing to me since it should really be 2 players rather than 3. I think this is a reflection of the players being unclear on the goals (which is always a fun part about gamechanger, so no criticism on that) and Jiavani constantly cycling back up to Count the Rice.  It also might be a sort of passive giving up on trying to win the game if the players have intuited the flow. By the time someone comes back up the spout, you are so far behind in Room 2 that losing downwards is hardly going to move you towards conclusion. Instead you have chaos choices (which leads to, for me, the funniest fail in the episode where Hannah goes up to room 1 with Demi, and then Demi completely botches his chance to win. Side note: did Demi look at Hannah’s board and then dyslexically write 412 instead of 421? I thought for sure I saw him peek.)

**Room 3** is a filter, winner goes up to 2, loser down to 4. No big problems here, and this led to one of the funniest running gags in the show since Catherine was stuck in a picture describing purgatory. The only weirdness of this room is that it became hard to intentionally lose when everyone was trying to flow down to 4, and I think this head to head challenge would have benefited from a race to the bottom structure, even if Jacquis’ hosting this was unreasonably funny.

**Room 4** (darkness dressing) was a great solo challenge in that it was difficult enough that people needed to repeat it, and again led to absolute Schadenfreude in Catherine’s fall from grace.

**Room 5** (Grants) was easy, but also the funniest bit. Honestly, having one of the single rooms be so incredibly fast is a great concept for this game, as I’m sure there were multiple times when players needed to wait in the hallway as their fellow contestants finished a room. (I suspect Demi and Ify bumped into each other a lot going between room 6 and 7). The muffled audio of “Hi friend!” in the hallway made me cackle.

**Room 6 and 7** were brilliant as the best contained puzzle in the game. Room 6 (Differences) was really tough, because you had to pay attention to what was going on across rooms to spot the differences. Room 7 was really easy, because you could accidentally land on the correct answer. In fact, you can see Demi and Ify puzzling through this as they are perplexed why Room 7 works differently than Room 6 - it didn't, it just had a ton more valid guesses. There’s also a really key flow here. Failing at Room 6 spits you back to 7, requiring you to figure out what is going on and cycle through again.  This problem doesn’t matter on the way *down* the room spout because it’s much easier to intentionally fail something by saying garbled nonsense or disengaging with the premise. The fact that room 6 makes no sense when you get the first direction is fine - you’re designed to fail! This contained loop is a clever single player challenge, but it does lead to my second biggest concern with this game’s flow which is…

**Room 8.** Limbo. “I’ve been in there for an hour” Anna has no way to realistically get folks to accidentally trickle into this room from Room 7 (because it’s so easy), so this becomes a sort of ancient tragedy, where the only way to escape is to step on someone’s head on your way out, leaving them behind. The “which box has the carrot” game is, of course, brilliant for a head to head structure.  Now a question might be “well what if we reversed Room 6 and 7, and you get spit downward for failing back to Room 8?” This doesn’t work because you need to be able to move between room 6 and 7 in order to spot the differences.  Therefore, the only way to get out of Room 8 is for someone else to come down the system flow, and then win the coin toss-ish challenge to get out of the room.

So all the pieces considered, once everyone is out of room 1, you expect 2 players to be stuck in room 2, 5 players moving between rooms 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. If we weren’t playing with comedians who understand they are making a show, this likely means you have 4 people coming up the spout, with 2 trapped in room 2, 1 trapped in room 8, and those 4 people rushing back up 7>6>5>4>3.

Room 3 becomes an awesome choke point at this stage, where the players are likely competing to get it right (lol, Catherine) and then the two players in Room 2 might serve as spoilers to increase the challenge for the first player to get there (lol, Demi).

But the players who got stuck in room 2 are so far removed from the game that they have no stakes left. The player trapped in room 8 is just twiddling their thumbs. For comedians making a show, this isn’t a problem - they can hang around and riff or flirt with the bouncers, but from a GAME perspective, this is a brutal outcome for a number of folks in the cycle.

I started writing this with the thought of trying to disentangle what felt weird about the structure to me even if it was comedically brilliant (hail to the editors). And I had originally planned on saying what I’d do to “fix” this structure, but honestly, I don’t think it wants to be fixed. Players being trapped leads to funny moments and points of tension along the pipeline that you might not have expected while going down the flow, reversing the dynamics as players travelled up the flow.

**If I made one small change**, I’d have considered moving room 4 (the dark room) to room 7, and then bumping grant up to room 4 and the twin rooms to 5 & 6. The reasoning here is that room 7 was challenging - so maybe you escape room 8, only to flail in the darkness and then go head to head again in room 8. This would have led to more moments in room 8, which I think would have generated some fun moments on repeated plays (particularly if room 8 allowed for swapping the boxes in between plays). This would address the stagnancy of room 8 a little bit.

On the other hand, I don’t think I can fix the stagnancy of room 2 as easily without making the flow upstream too easy. You sort of need these losing players as an end boss for the players coming up the pipe, so while I’d like to be able to get them into the game - it might not be possible. Folks mentioned having the bouncer play the game, and this inspired a possible solution. If Rashawn drops in as an NPC spoiler in Fiddle Me This to make the upstream challenge super hard, it creates an extra body in Room 2 that pushes more of the active players down the flow. To be clear, the proposed rule here essentially becomes if there are ever 2 people in room 2 with no players in room 1 or room 3, Rashawn steps into room 2 and STAYS THERE regardless of winning or losing. This squeezes another player into the lower pipeline (rooms 3 and lower), we still have 1 player who is basically screwed, but that’s a little better than 2, AND we have a superstar musical performer who creates a much harder challenge for folks coming back up the pipeline. Of course, this proposal also extends the game length, and this shoot already felt like it was a very long day, if I read between the lines correctly, so I’m less sold on this solution compared to the swap rooms 4 and 7 idea.

Thanks for reading! What do you think?