Sheep is a message board/forum based game. Simply put, it’s a game where you want to answer how everyone else will – stay with the herd.
The game is hosted by a Shepherd, who can either just run random games whenever with no ongoing scoring to be accumulated or run a Season, in which the weekly results are used to determine your overall score.
The scoring for Sheep is very simple, if 10 people answer with the same response, each person gets 10 points. It is up to the Shepherd on how many questions there are in a week – I typically use 12 questions but if you have lower participation more questions might be necessary so the overall scores are higher and hopefully there is a greater variance in total scores.
A Shepherd will post the questions a few days in advance along with a deadline to submit your responses. Each participant with PM their responses to the Shepherd. Once the deadline has passed the results are display in the forum with a gap in between grouping results for discussion/arguments to be had by the participants. In my typical game of 12 questions, I group the responses in twos and with the 2 responses also display the current scores up until that point.
The Shepherd does not usually participate in the game but in some instances can by sending a copy of their responses to the first person who submits. If that happens, if the Shepherd allows people to change answers up until the deadline, then that doesn’t allow that person to change since they would see someones responses.
While the game is simple in idea, the most important rule that must always be followed is absolutely no discussion about the questions until after the deadline. If a player has any questions they can always ask the Shepherd via PM.
That is the game in a nutshell. Very simple to play, and always fun on Fridays!