HIDE&SHRIEK

The lights in this place gave up a long time ago. What's left is a floorplan you have to learn in the dark — wards, a morgue, surgery, the boiler room, a chapel nobody finished clearing out — strung together by corridors, dead ends and chokepoints.

Hiders get a head start and somewhere to disappear: the space under a bed, the underside of a surgery table, the dark behind a stack of crates. Then the seeker is let in, and the only thing either side really has is information. Where that sound came from. Which door was open a minute ago. Whether the thing sweeping its torch across the corridor has actually seen you or is about to walk past.

Rounds stop being separate. Survive one and you get paid, and the payout is bigger the fewer hiders are left standing at the end — surviving alone pays best of all. That single rule is what turns the other hiders from company into competition.

So you spend the coins on them. A can of oil laid outside somebody's hiding spot: they come out, they slip, they hit the floor loud and stay down while a torch swings round to find out what that was. You were three rooms away. You were nowhere near it.

The shop re-rolls between rounds and stocks exactly one of each item, and players pick in order of coins held, richest first. Everything you buy is something you took off the person behind you — and passing banks your money for first pick next time.

Then the seeker gets their turn. At the end of every round they're dealt a small hand of curses and hand one of them to one hider of their choosing, which in practice means whoever wound them up most. Items last a few rounds, stack three deep, and visibly change your character, so everyone can see exactly what you've been made to wear. Dying strips the lot — which makes getting caught the only way out of a bad one.