Ok, I started the murderous roulette theme at the end of my first roulette, and took the bloodshed to levels not seen since in my second roulette. My third one I made the mistake of making people stick to one band. But I learn. A few years ago I got into strategic board games and Euro-styled board games, and I'm going to try to take some themes I picked up from them and apply them to a roulette. Maybe some of my innovations will stick.
While I'm looking for new music, I want to have a little more fun with this because I have about 3 metric assloads (yes, that is now an official SI unit of measurement) of CD's. So the first thing I'm going to do is not eliminate anyone. If you are in, you are in to the end.
While I'm not going to have divisions, I want to take four people who I know well and know their musical tastes align very strongly with mine (Team Fogey, even if they are younger than me), and four people whose tastes I am less familiar with, or I think will provide me with music that Team Fogey won't send but I will still like (Team Wild Card). I assign teams, because the teams aren't really playing against each other. Before signing up, take a look at my last.fm here
https://www.last.fm/user/mrouser and see if you have 9 rounds worth of material. If you do, keep reading.
So, how am I going to incorporate Euro-style games into a roulette? First, there will be FIVE scoring aspects, of which two will be public, scoring from the other three will be completely hidden to other players. The public scoring will be the traditional "how much did I like the song", scored from 1 to 8 based on ranking, with a bonus point going to the player whose song fits the round theme best in my opinion. The first private scoring method is that along with your song, you are going to send me a secret parameter, and whichever song OTHER THAN THE ONE YOU SENT matches that parameter, that person gets bonus points, and the more parameters a song wins, the more bonus points it gets. But you can't score on your own parameter, so if you say "shortest song", and end up sending the shortest song, the person with the second shortest song would get you point. More on this later. The second private method is to pick a song from a band on a secret list of 15 bands which I think cover a wide range of styles. The last private method, and maybe the hardest to get, is what I call reversal points. If you send me a song from an album that I either own or used to own and gave up on, AND I end up liking it, that's worth some cheddar. To a lesser extent, if it is a band or from an album I listened to a before and you send me a song that makes me reconsider, that's worth at least some imitation cheddar. The partially hidden score I am taking from games like "Lords of Waterdeep" and "Nightfall".
So, why should you keep your true score hidden? Because there is going to be a system in place that allows the people in last and next last place to place a handicap on the player they feel they need to catch up to, which will most likely be the players in first and second place on the public score. I already have picked handicaps the players can choose from, and each round I will introduce nastier ones the game progresses. It should make things more fun. The handicapping mechanism is taken from several games, but "Power Grid" is the first one that came to mind.
If you have any questions, post them in here and I'll answer them.