Dear all,

I am about to hit 1,000 followers on Steem.

I estimate that it might happen within days from now, if not hours, but I can barely believe it. It took me a loooong time to get where I am: I joined Steemit ten months ago. One of the things that really helped me to boost the number of followers was the weekly SBD giveaway series that I call ‘Feed Your Minnows’.

It is very easy to participate in and it pays 100% of the post’s SBD earnings to all its participants in equal shares, so there are no losers and everyone is a winner! Since its launch it has become quite popular and fun way to engage my followers and to interact with them on a regular basis.

Thus, to celebrate this amazing milestone of reaching 1,000 followers, I decided to introduce a completely new SBD giveaway contest with a new game mechanics and different rules. I am very excited to give you

THE MINNOWS FEEDING FRENZY!!

This new contest will be just as easy to participate in as the good old ‘Feed Your Minnows’: one just needs to register in the beginning of each game “season”. The rest will happen automatically, in daily episodes (aka rounds), without any action required on the players’ part. And this time there will be winners and losers, more on that in the rules below.

THE RULES

At the start of each game season all players will have 48 hours to register for participation. All you have to do is to leave a comment with ‘ENTER SX’, where X is the season’s number. This post will serve as the Season 1 registration venue, so feel free to register for the game by replying with ENTER S1 in the comments below (you are welcome to write some nice things in your comment too ;)). The registration is open to all of my followers, so please make sure that you are one, before you go ahead and register.

The Goal

The goal of the game is to survive as long as possible, by eating up other minnows and gaining weight in the process. The last surviving minnow (the one with the largest weight) will be the contest’s ultimate winner.

All minnows start with the same weight of 50 g (that’s about 0.11 pounds for those of you in the US) at the start of each season.

The first round of every game season will go live two days after the registration post. So, for example, the first round of Season 1 will be posted this Thursday. All registered players will be pitted against each other in randomly created pairs, with a designated Player 1 and Player 2 in each pair. If there’s an odd one out, that player will automatically proceed to the next round, but without gaining any weight. The pairs will be revealed by me in the comments to the Round’s main post. Once again: the players in each pair will be picked randomly, so it’s all about luck.

Feeding, Survival, Elimination

If the two players have unequal weights, the larger minnow will eat up the smaller minnow. The victim’s weight will be added to the winner’s weight and the winner will then proceed to the next round. For example:

Player 1, who is a 50 g minnow,
VS
Player 2, who is a 100 g minnow.

Player 2 eliminates Player 1 and their weight is now 150 g. Simple enough, right? Once again, all minnows have the same weight of 50 g at the start of a season.

If both players in a pair have the same weight, then I’ll roll the dice. Numbers 1 and 3 on the dice will mean that the Player 1 survives, eliminates Player 2, gains their weight, and proceeds to the next round. Numbers 2 and 4 will indicate the reverse outcome for Player 2 and Player 1. Numbers 5 and 6 will mean that both players survive the encounter and proceed to the next round without gaining any extra weight.

Likewise, if there’s one unmatched player left without a fellow minnow to confront in any given round, that player will automatically proceed to the next round without gaining any extra weight.

Once the outcome has been decided in each pair, the episode’s post will be updated with lists of the perished minnows, the surviving minnows, and the latter’s new weights. It will be easy to have an overview of the episode’s results without having to browse through all the individual comments.

Next round will see all pairs formed anew – again, randomly – from the surviving minnows of the past episode. New rounds will be published once a day, until there’s only one minnow left in the game.

Winners and Prizes

Since I’ll have to do quite a bit of administration for this game, I’ll be keeping 50% of the SBD payouts as my ‘game master’s salary’. I hope it sounds fair to you (please leave a comment, if it doesn’t). The remaining 50% will go into the prize pool. The good news here is that half of all the SBD payouts, from the registration post and all the daily episodes will go towards the prize pool. Neat, eh? ;) Thus the minnows remaining in the game will have a strong incentive to upvote each episode, in order to increase their potential prizes.

50% of the prize pool will go towards the one last swimming minnow with the largest weight. 30% of the prize pool will go to the minnow eliminated by the season’s winner in the final round. The remaining 20% of the prize pool will be divided between the minnows with the third largest weight in the game.

The prizes will be paid out once all the posts have received their author rewards, meaning 7 days after the final round has been posted. The results will be announced in a separate post, which will double as a registration for the next season (therefore its reward will count towards the next season’s prize pool).

Questions? Suggestions? Objections?

Please raise your criticism, pose your questions, and make suggestions for improving the game in the comments below. I will be happy to clarify the game mechanics, if needed. And, if you are happy with the rules as they are, go ahead and register by including ENTER S1 in your comment.

I hope it will be a really fun and rewarding experience for all the players!!

Sort of like “lite version” of @papa-pepper’s STEEM-POCALYPSE SURVIVAL GAME CONTEST – only without commitment to act and choose one of the options on a daily basis.

But wait, what’s gonna happen to the beloved ‘Feed Your Minnows’ series??

It will continue as usual, with its regular weekly episodes (with an occasional bonus episode thrown in now and then), its 100% SBD payouts (and occasionally a little extra as a bonus payout), and all its rules remaining unchanged. So nothing to worry to about: ‘Feed Your Minnows’ and its beloved cashtag #MinnowsFeed are here to stay in the foreseeable future! And, of course, you can participate in both giveaway contests. One automatically grants you a share of the post’s payout (as long as you are a follower), while the other will depend on your luck and might reward you with – potentially – much greater payouts, if you are one of the lucky winner-minnows (we’ll call them winnows, for short).