New Game of "Astro-Assassins" to Begin This Week

March 29, 2006

AUSTIN, TX -- Get 'yer water pistols ready!  A new installment
of the hit game "Astro-Assassins" is set to begin this Friday
in the UT Astronomy Department.

The game was first suggested in February by Casey Deen, a
first-year graduate student.  A set of rules was quickly
drafted, players were recruited, and the assassinations began.

"We expect that many more members of the department will
participate this time, now that they know how much fun the
first game was," Casey commented.  "Suckers."

"Astro-Assassins" is a game in which players are assigned a
target (another player) whom they will attempt to assassinate.
Each player is simultaneously a target and an assassin, though,
so care must be taken to avoid being assassinated.

Assassinations are carried out within RLM (Robert Lee Moore
Hall, the location of the Astronomy Department) when the
assassin verbally announces his or her intention to the victim,
while outside RLM an assassination occurs by shooting the
victim with a water pistol.  Safe areas, where a kill cannot
occur, are limited to the player's office and bathrooms of RLM.

When a player scores a kill, the assassin assumes the victim's
target and reports the gory details of the kill to be
distributed via anonymous email to all players.  Assassinations
continue until all players have been killed except one.

Ten graduate students, postdocs, and staff members of the
astronomy department took part in the first round.  The winner,
Marci Coleman, eluded her assassin for more than two weeks while
scoring three kills.

During the first game, one assassination occurred during a
raucous happy hour at the Crown & Anchor Pub, when the assassin
followed his target into the men's room and promptly took care
of business while the victim was taking care of his business.

Dispelling the myth that nice folks finish first, another
player was assassinated when she kindly left her office to
respond to cries for help in fixing a copy machine.

Another assassination happened when the driver of a car was
killed by his passenger on the way to a downtown restaurant.
Fortunately, the ungrateful passenger chose to pull the
trigger while they were stopped in traffic, thereby preventing
an unintended murder-suicide.

"You really see the heartlessness of people in a game like
this," reported a player by the alias of Duty-Free.  "It's
kind of disturbing."

Morals were often learned the hard way.  Several assassinations
could have been entirely preventable had the victims simply
counted the number of witnesses present before entering
elevators or had the victims spent more time working in their
offices and less time roaming the halls.

"It's a stupid game for stupid people.  I don't even own a
water gun," remarked a disinterested grad student known as
Cheesecake.

While some players were reveling in their sharp-shooting
abilities, other individuals in the department who were
not playing the game took it upon themselves to torment the
minds of those who were playing.  Such actions led directly
to the assassinations of two players who had let down their
guard, blissfully ignorant of the fact that their true
assassins were not who they suspected them to be.

"This time, there will be no mercy for the sick bastard who
killed me during the first game," revealed one assassin who
wished to be known only as Seedy.  "And I've still got that
bowl of pasta salad on my kitchen counter at home."