Spring semester is in full bloom on Samford’s campus. Warm weather is returning, students are flocking to Ben Brown Plaza in droves, and the brothers of Alpha Tau Omega (ATΩ) can be seen sprinting across campus as if running from their worst enemy.
In a sense, they are. Each year, spring semester marks ATΩ’s annual game of Assassins, where brother turns against brother and every man is for himself.
The game is one big circle of trust. When the game starts, the only knowledge each player has is a riddle (in order to decipher his target’s “killword”) and a random fact about someone else’s target. However, each brother must be smart about who he trusts: betrayal is always just around the corner.
The brothers of ATΩ take their Assassins game seriously. Junior game runner Mitchell Drennen is one of two men in charge of this year’s game.
“There’s an entire Assassins Constitution with all of the various rules in place for the game, and this year, it got up to 18 amendments,” said Drennen.
Far from creating petty competition, the game promotes brotherhood throughout the fraternity. Through the gameplay, the brothers are encouraged to trust men they may not have been familiar with before. Noah Haworth, a senior member of ATΩ who has played the game for four years, said he particularly loved this aspect of the game.
“The thing I love about Assassins is how often brothers reach out to brothers who they normally wouldn’t talk as much with to gain more information,” Haworth said.
Gaining information includes figuring out who one is the target for, finding one’s own target and deciphering the killword to seal the target’s death. The way to get a target disqualified from the game is to say their killword to them.
Drew Middleton, a junior who has played the game for the past three years, said that the chaos of information gathering is his favorite part of the game.
“My personal favorite part of the game is the very beginning when everyone is racing around and frantically texting people, trying to get any information that they can in order to keep them in the game,” said Middleton.
This year’s game began on Feb. 5 with 117 players total. In the past, it has extended through spring break. It ends when there is one man left standing.
The game concluded on Feb. 21, when senior Rob Rait was declared the winner.
“ I truly couldn’t win it alone,” Rait said. “I didn’t win for myself, I won for our class. Senior supremacy, Xi or die.”
Arts & Life Editor
