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I'm working on a new storygame (it's in the planning stages), and I'm trying to come up with ideas for deadly 'games'. The storygame is a fan fiction for the television series Alice in Borderland, if that helps at all.

Any of the beast game or squid game rounds could easily be turned into death games, although I think there may be a little overlap.
You could also look to most board games converted to a "live action" version are pretty much automatically death games. Something like RoboRally or Survive: Escape from Atlantis could be realistically implemented in Alice in Borderland tech levels.

Yeah, Squid Games was one of my thoughts, but I didn't want to necessarily copy all of those ideas (especially since they're all deadly anyway). Board games being converted is an interesting idea I didn't think about, so thank you for that!

• Tag, but players pass around a live bomb
• Capture the flag, except the 'flag' is a monster of some sort that is also trying to kill you and the losing team is killed
• Treasure hunt where players slowly succumb to radiation poisoning and the first team to find the antidote survives
• Snake and ladders with real venomous snakes and extremely high ladders
• Poker but you gamble with body parts, e.g. fingers, eyes, ears and debt means death 
• Mafia irl where those voted out are killed and the mafia have to brutally murder their victims
• Rock, paper, scissors, where you're choosing whether your opponent dies via avalanche, a room of blades, or...um papercuts? 
• The floor is lava, literally
• Hangman, literally

Oooh, these are very interesting ideas!

Suffocation could perhaps work for the rock, paper, scissors angle.

One player has to kill the other with whatever they won the match with. 

That could work for a more 'messy'/personal kill (no way of denying responsibility that way).

If we're going down the board game path:

Battleship but players are on the grids instead of ships.

Mouse trap - teams have to survive various traps in a maze like scenario

Don't Wake Dad - players have to steal items without waking "Dad"

Definitely some more great ideas, thank you!

The poker idea is my personal favorite lol, it sounds quite good

A gruesome twist on the children’s game of operation where you have to perform surgeries on someone while they're performing a surgery on you.

Basically, you have to remove 10 capsules without killing the patient or resulting in terminal blood loss, and you're doing this while the other person is operating on you.

So you both lie on beds with computer screens attached to robots operating on the other person. It's like an iPad you can see the an x-ray of the other person's body and you can only see one object at a time. There are drugs being pumped into your system that keep you awake and lucid but don't do anything to numb the pain(obviously none of this is realistic, I'm well aware, but I'm just trying to come up with a twisted game format for this horror universe).

Each time you find a capsule, extract it with the surgery robot, and place it on the table, another location of a capsule unlocks on your Ipad, so you can start trying to extract that next one. And you have to maneuver the robot to remove that next capsule. And so on, until you reach and extract all 10.

The capsules are strategically located in non-lethal places, but it’s possible to fail the challenge by dying from blood loss or shock, so you may want to use your robots to stitch up your opponent, because that will also help them perform surgeries on you without severing an artery for example.

You both have bombs in your necks that explode if you kill your patient, and once one of you extracts all 10 capsules, the other dies.

That's a really great idea! Very twisted, but it's a really good idea...especially if there's a time limit element.

(Why, yes, this storygame is shaping up to be an extremely complicated one before I've even started writing it properly).

Yay!

Thanks Cat, I'm so glad you liked it. I'll try and come up with some more, and I can't wait to see your game!

Getting surgery while giving surgery. Seems a bit dangerous. Lol this is dark. I don't anticipate too many surviving this one.

It does sort of fit with a lot of the games in the series. A lot end in many people dead.

In the Borderland, players have to play dangerous games to continue to survive in the world. If their days run out, they're taken out by a laser.

I'm not sure many of the Saw traps would fit...

A three-dimensional maze with a masked killer that will destroy them. They must get to the top floor without being caught by the monster/murderer thing. The catch: the floor begins to slowly rise as the game starts, which will crush them if they don't figure out a level's maze and get to the higher level in time.

That's a pretty cool idea!

I haven't seen the series so I have no idea if it fits. \_(0_o)_/

I'm pretty sure it would fit.

(I also recommend the series. I binge watched it in an entire weekend. Really enjoyed it).

It sounds kind of like Squid Game (I did see the first season of that). But the title suggests some sort of fantasy element.

It's definitely close to Squid Game, but there are a lot of differences. I wouldn't say it's fantasy; it sort of feels more sci fi horror, though not with aliens or other planets or anything like that.

I love this idea. I can't wait to see how Cat will pull this off using the CYOA format, she has to be pretty creative with it, but I think she can make it work.

I think you are giving me a lot more credit than I deserve! But unlike the other storygames, I am putting a lot of work into planning this one. I'm not great at scripting, though, which I think might be necessary for the scope of this storygame.

Full disclosure, I haven't watched it at all, but I've heard the anime Death Parade has some really interesting death games. In particular, the first episode has one where two people play darts. The twist is that the darts are connected to their opponent's nervous systems, with higher value targets causing greater pain and even death. I won't say any more about how the game actually goes down, in case you want to watch it yourself of course.

Also, the opening theme is a banger. :D

I think I will have to check out the anime, as it sounds really entertaining...and the idea sounds interesting, but I definitely need to see how it plays out to be able to visualise it in the storygame.

Thank you!

Everyone is put into a giant pitch black room with guns. Fill it with obstacles, make traps that emit light/sound, and make the guns give off bursts of light when fired. Now, everyone is trying to navigate a room filled with traps, obstacles, and unseen enemies.

Really, anything where players are forced to stay quiet while something is hunting them will make people tense. Admittedly, the storygame aspect somewhat undermines the overall point, but I'm sure there is a way to make it work.

That does sound like a very tense game! Thank you for the idea!