Games in Community

This class has been a wonderful opportunity to try new games and get to know some more of the gamers on campus. I wish Calvin could host a board game night every few weeks like this somehow, maybe by adding on to the collections of games in each dorm and combining them for an event. I hope to have more opportunities to play games in the future at Calvin. Even if I don't I expect to spend time at Game Night at Out of the Box once I have graduated.

I have always been a big gamer, but even I was starting to get gamed out after upwards of 35 different gaming sessions over the course of these past two and a half weeks. I have gained an appreciation for others who get tired after fewer games, because at this point I think I need a little bit of a break from gaming for a while. I have also gotten to experience playing these games with a wide variety of people. I really appreciate how well our class has gotten to know one another through playing games, even when the table talk was kept to a minimum in some instances. I feel like you can learn a lot about someone by playing games with them, and I am glad to have had the chance to get to know so many students I would have never interacted with otherwise.

I also have a greater appreciation for game designers and how difficult it is to come up with something novel enough to be interesting, but not too complicated to play. It is a fine line between adding rules to make the game work and having so many that no one ever wants to learn. This is part of the reason that this class was so enjoyable, I think I cracked open the rules on maybe one tenth of the games I played, otherwise I was just listening to a classmate describe the game to me and playing without the tedious entire book of directions to listen through first.

I am so glad I was able to take this class this interim. It is my last interim, so I was happy to have it be so enjoyable.

Teaching Games

The first game I taught was Power Grid, I was planning on teaching this game since Christmas Break, so I made sure to brush up on the rules by playing a few times before class started. I also practiced teaching two new players before teaching the class, so I knew what explanations I could do quickly and which ones were more important to emphasize.

Teaching the group in class was fairly straightforward, especially because I was not playing, so I felt like I could offer strategy more freely. I already knew from practicing that I would need to make sure the end game conditions were clear before we got to that point, because it can happen quickly, but we did not even make it into Step 2 out of the 3 in the game that normally occur before the game reaches the end. Unfortunately we had two games scheduled for that day, so we had to wrap up only a few rounds in, when everyone was just starting to get the hang of the game. It seemed like everyone was having fun with the game, I noticed a bunch of them at the Power Grid table playing again this week.

The only feedback I got on what I might improve was to make sure I explain the different areas of the board in an order that makes sense as I go along, since there were a few places where I skipped around and eventually explained everything, but got them overwhelmed and confused at first. I also realized about 30 seconds too late to fix anything that I had forgotten to reorder the player order for the very first round, so the player who had gone first in the luck of the draw was actually at a disadvantage he shouldn't have been, but since I knew we were not going to be able to finish the game, I just let it go and didn't confuse them any more.

I also got to teach Shadows over Camelot, which I had only played three times previously. This game I probably did a worse job of teaching, as I tend to forget some of the little rules as I play, and I discovered that some of the first times I played, I "cheated" by mistake. This time the only thing we did wrong was failing to pick up white cards as rewards for playing black cards face down on the Black Knight, Lancelot and the Dragon, so we only hurt ourselves and still managed to win.

Next I will be teaching Kingdom Builder, which I have now played one time in total, and lost terribly, so hopefully it goes well. At least now I know some strategies that don't work.

Day Nine

Pandemic

Pandemic is a cooperative game that a lot of people had been playing and teaching already, but so far I had not gotten the chance to play it. It was nice having the opportunity to self-select what game we wanted to play, so I finally had the resources to play it. The idea is to use each player's special abilities to research cures and control infection across the globe without letting too many outbreaks occur.

The first game we played we lost, but the second time we were very lucky and pulled the cards we needed for a cure in the setup for the game. We attribute that as why we were successful the second time around. We also discovered half way through the second game that we were technically not following certain, specific rules: we were not pulling a replacement city card when the "Epidemic" card is revealed and we were allowing one of the special abilities to work in two directions when it should only work in one. If we had been following those directions, we might have had a different outcome in the second game, maybe even in the first, hard to say.

After playing two rounds of Pandemic the rest of the class had already finished up with their games, so we split up to work on our team projects, which was fun. My game is definitely coming along nicely, although testing it with 3 players makes me wonder if the deck I have built is going to work for that many players. It still needs quite a bit of tweaking before being presented next week.

Day Eight

The cooperative game that I played was Shadows over Camelot. I had already played several times before, so I was the one teaching it, but it was nice getting the chance to play along with the game I was teaching this time. We started out trying to capture the Holy Grail, but pretty soon there were other quests that needed attention and no Grail cards coming up for us to play, so our forces got spread out pretty far. With only four people playing out of the seven possible, we were struggling for a while, with an eventual 4/6 swords in favor of Evil, until enough knights pulled cards that we could capture the Grail at last, giving us the 3 swords needed to win, and suddenly the game was over. I still like this game, even after playing it more than any other game so far, and I am glad to have noticed two of the people who played with me sign up to teach it later on in the week.

Day Seven

We played a Cuarenta tournament for most of the time, followed by free time to play things for everyone who had not made it into the final round. My team was knocked out in the quarterfinals after some very high tension preliminary games. One was at 38 points for both teams for a very long time, and another was won very quickly because our opponents had gotten a Bye, so we got a 10 point headstart.

By the time we finally lost, we were sick of Cuarenta, so we started playing 7 Wonders with a few people who had not yet learned it. It was interesting trying to teach the new players when half of the group had played before and was trying to give advice and the other half kept popping in and out of the game. We got most of the way through before a guest speaker began his presentation.

I was surprised at how many of the games on his list of favorites I had heard of, as well as how many I never knew existed. I am glad we had someone come in and make having a large collection of games sound like something to aspire to. It was also nice to hear about the community that exists here in West Michigan to play board games. I expect I may need to get involved with that once college is over and I need to find willing gamers again.

Day Six

Stone Age

This game involves placing cavemen in different locations on the board and rolling the dice to see how many resources those cavemen gather and what they build with them. The gameplay seems a lot like Agricola to me in that it involves worker placement for benefit redemption. We only got to play about half of the game, and were finally getting to the point where we could build huts by the time we needed to stop, but we all agreed that it was a really complex and interesting game. I would have rejoined my group to play this again at the party, but decided against it so that I could learn a different new game. I hope to get the opportunity to play it through to completion sometime in the future though.

Cuarenta

This is a card game from Ecuador that the entire class learned. We started with the basics of how to play the cards to capture matches and how to score and slowly added more and more instructions after each game until we had the full version of the game. It was very confusing at first and I wished that some table had been made the example for us to watch a round of, because that would have alleviated all the questions that arose at the beginning of the game. Once we got the hang of each rule change and had all the details on scoring it became a much more entertaining game than we originally had the impression of it being. When we were supposed to be finishing up my group had just dealt another hand and we were getting good enough at it to be quick enough to finish the round in a few short minutes. This is the game that we are playing Friday as a class, so I hope we got enough practice in to be good at it!

Day Five

Shadows over Camelot

Before class I found enough people to play Shadows over Camelot after all. This game is interesting in that it pits players against the game as well as against a single traitor in their midst. (Although we played the Three Brave Knights variant where none of us were traitors as an introduction to the game, which works best with a larger number of players.) We were able to play cooperatively (but may have cooperated a little too well by telling each other what cards we had, which is against the rules) and barely defeated the forces of evil to win. The game hung in the balance for a few rounds with 5 black swords, but we eventually beat the Saxons back enough times to fill the Round Table and win.

Yut

This game is a traditional Korean game where wooden dowels are tossed like dice to determine how many spaces a player's "horses" move. Each of the dowels has a rounded side and a flat side, and one of them has "X" marks on the flat side. The number of dowels that land flat side up signifies the number of spaces to move with two exceptions: if all of the flat sides are down the roll is a "5" and if the "X" side is the only flat side up it means "Go Back 1." The idea is to get all of the horses around the track and back past the start position. If your pieces land on your own pieces, you can move them together from the point on, if you land on someone else's piece it is removed from the board and you get to throw the sticks again (rolls of 4s or 5s also give another roll and those rolls can be performed before deciding which rolls to use in which order, they also stack so you can roll unlimited times in a row if the board is set up correctly).

This game was finished very quickly compared to the other games people were playing today and so we tried to play with more pieces and more teams to see if that would make the game last any longer. It was very interesting to see how different strategies work out, since part of the game is deciding what moves to make with each roll and part of it was just the luck of what roll came up. It seemed a lot like Sorry, and makes me wonder if that game was designed with this one in mind, or if it just happened to be successful because such an idea works so well.

1812: The Invasion of Canada

This game is a strategic, conquering game, like Risk. It took more than half of the time we had to learn all the rules of the game and feel comfortable starting. Even once we started, it felt like we had little chance of making it through even a single round of everyone getting a chance to play (although we made it halfway through a second round). The American side was another girl and I, both of whom have had no experience with conquest games before, against two guys playing the British side, who quickly captured one of our spawn points, at which time we called the game and declared them the winners. I am not sure whether I would play this game again, I feel like would need to become more comfortable with a conquest style game, or partner with someone who knew what they were doing to be able to understand good and bad strategies better before I would enjoy this style of game very much, but it was entertaining to see how quickly we "lost."

Shadows over Camelot

After the brief and rushed introduction to the game in the morning, I thought it would be a good idea to try the game out again with more people. I was hoping that I would be getting a lot more people together, but it ended up being only four of us playing. We shuffled in the Traitor card this time, but in the end we revealed that we were all Loyal. We did end up beating the game again, but if there had even a Traitor among us there was no way we would have ended up even close to winning. I still think it has something to do with how many players there were in the game, but we will see on Monday when I teach the game to the class as part of Cooperative Games Day.

Day Four

Power Grid

Today I taught Power Grid to a group of five others (and could have played the six player game, but it worked much better just facilitate instead). I was happy to see that the group was picking up the game rather quickly. They were just starting to get into the swing of things (having played two complete rounds) when we were give a 10-15 minute warning. They managed to play another two rounds before we had to call it a game and switch groups around. They all said they wished they could have finished and wanted to be able to play a whole game again, so I plan on bringing the game to Game Night on Thursday for anyone who wants to join in for a complete game. I did get some more suggestions on how to teach the game more effectively from them, but overall I felt like my practice teaching on Sunday was useful, so I am glad I did it.

Betrayal at House on the Hill

The next session of games I had played most of the ones that were being taught in that session. Thankfully (unthankfully?) there was plenty of room at House on the Hill. I should have taken that as an "Omen"... This game begins cooperatively, until certain conditions are met, at which time, one player becomes the Betrayer who attempts to stop the rest of the group from completing their task. The players explore a house one room at a time, using characters with different Mental (Sanity and Knowledge) and Physical (Speed and Might) stats, and as the tiles in the house are turned over, Event, Item, and Omen cards are revealed and affect the players. There are a huge number of scenarios and the setup of the house is always different. The scenario is selected based on the Omen that triggers the betrayal and where it was collected, making it very difficult to get the same scenario twice in a row (or maybe ever!) This game we decided was finished at the point we stopped at because the Betrayer was being beaten up by multiple other players and those players were about to win anyway. It was a very interesting game and I am glad there was space for me to join it. By the last few turns we had gathered a crowd of others who had already finished their own games, partially because the game looked interesting and partially because we were getting very loud at points.

Today was a pretty fun day full of games. I would have played another, but I picked one that needed more people than I could convince to play, so I will have to play it some other time.

Day Three

Today we were visited by two individuals who have worked together to publish games through Mayfair in the past. The talked to us about how the process of game development goes, telling us there is no "one way" that works. Their stories of how some games take years to develop made me nervous for actually completing the assignment to design a game during this interim. However, they also triggered an idea for me in the middle of their talk by telling us we should work with something that we know. I have a pretty well roughed out idea that I am working on now, but I have some doubts that it will actually be very coherent any time soon.

Digger's Garden Match

After they shared their stories with us they also shared some games. I ended up at the table playing a children's color/shape matching game. It used hexes with one color per side and a particular quantity of a particular shape. The idea was to match colors and/or shapes on one or more sides of a hex in order to score the number of points total enclosed in matching sections. The game seems simple on its surface but we quickly discovered that there are ways to be clever about placement in order to set up future plays. Being much older than the game's target audience, we aimed for the highest scoring placements as we possibly could, to the point of contemplating moves for minutes at a time.

I was usually one of the highest scorers each time around the table and so when I ran out of tiles with a placement worth 11 points and was far ahead of the pack I was correct to be confident in winning. Although I should not take much pride in winning such a simple game, but it was entertaining to fill a few minutes in the middle of class.

Puerto Rico

The next game that we played was Puerto Rico. I have played this game before with my family and was expecting to have to teach it, but I did not end up having to do it alone. It was interesting to hear some of the little differences in house rules as we tag-teamed the explanations. We ran out of time to finish the game, which was disappointing, but fine with me since I had plans to go home and play one of the new games from the pile rented from Out of the Box.

Relic Runners

Neither of us playing this game had played it before, so I read the rules in their entirety (or so I thought, apparently I neglected the final scoring section that explains the 5 victory points per type of relic as opposed to per relic, period, so the victory really doesn't count). This game was interesting in the fact that players had to move around, exploring the ruins and temples scattered throughout the jungle. I enjoyed "capturing" relics by making extremely long sets of explored trails to get the most victory points I could when capturing a new type of relic. The pieces are really fun to play with because they are really detailed and colorful. I liked this game and would like to play again, but I want to play the rest of the pile, so I'll have to see about borrowing it from someone else later.

Weekend

Legendary

After class on Friday a friend picked up a copy of Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game from Barnes and Noble and proceeded to convince me to learn it on Saturday. We sorted through the cards, separating out the heroes and S.H.I.E.L.D agents from the villains and henchmen and then set up for the tutorial scenario. The game consists of a set of cards and a board on which to play them (making it easier to set up). The box has a lot of extra space in it, so there is room for all of the expansions that add more heroes, villains and scenarios to the game. Every turn you pick up an entirely new hand of cards, which can spent to either attack or to buy additional face up cards for your deck. The competition is between the players as well as against the Mastermind villain and the rest of the villains and henchmen in play, meaning a balance of attacks is necessary. Because each player is building a deck during the course of the game, you compete with them for certain purchasable cards as well as attempt to earn the most victory points from fighting villains. This was a game I had not played before, but I ended up with more points than the person who was teaching (although that could be because he was giving out free advice for people who had really good hands about what order to play things in). I plan to play it again in the future, since I only got to see the powers of five of the heroes.

Power Grid

This game I taught over the weekend as a preparation for teaching it during the week. I have played a few times, the most recently being over Christmas break. Power Grid is a game in which players compete to build a network of cities powered by the power stations they purchase and supply with raw materials. While there seems to be a lot going on at once, the phases in each round keep things organized. Players purchase new power plants through an auction at the beginning of each round. Power plants have the ability to power different amounts of cities and require different amounts of raw materials. Raw materials go up in cost as the demand goes up, but the player in last position is given the advantage in this purchasing phase. The cities in a player's network are important because they earn money when powered using raw materials, but they also cost money to build. At the end of the game, whoever has the ability to power the most cities is the winner, regardless of how much money they have amassed. This makes it important to pay attention to the impending end game, because it can happen very quickly, as was the case when we played (and I won suddenly). While not exactly fast-paced or exciting, this game is a fun way to simulate the production of electricity through the use of coal, oil, garbage, uranium, wind, and fusion.

I learned some techniques I can use for explaining the combination of turns, phases, rounds, and steps to beginners in the future, and I learned that I really need to explain the end game better, so that other players can see it coming. After surprising the people I was playing with and winning at the end I am glad that in class I will be supervising the play instead of participating, because I am afraid I would be a bit too ruthless.

Day Two

Settlers of Catan

This game is one that most of the students in class have played before, (including my 15 years worth of playing) but one that is different every time it is played. The dice are only one element of randomization in the game, the position of the tiles in relation to one another and the distribution of the numbered pips that determine the payout on each die roll, and the fact that players get to choose their own starting position. Having a different board every time the game is played is what makes it possible to play over and over again. However, even the most dedicated Settlers enthusiast can become jaded after a "Settlers Overdose" and require a little variation to become interested in playing again.

The point of today's game session was to get the entire class comfortable playing games together by playing something familiar to most people and easy to teach and pick up for the students who had never played it before. For those of us who have been playing for years, we were introduced to some variations that force us to change our strategies to cope with the new board set-up or rules. Whether it was predetermined "fair" boards that left less up to chance and strategic placement and had to do more with choices made spending the cards earned, or adding different rules for the robber, or even playing with a partner without communicating resource needs directly, there were plenty of ways to mix it up.

The group playing at my table got to play one and a half games of a team based variant. Partners sat opposite each other, so that in our group of four we could alternate turns between teams. The winning condition was for the team to collect at least 17 points between the two of them (with both players having at least 7 points), which could be accomplished with victory point cards, longest road, or largest army. An added rule to allow the teammates to work together but restrict them from making ridiculously profitable trades, was to require a blind trade of one resource card between partners after each one of them rolls the dice. This made it important to pay attention to what resources were being collected. It was also important to foster good trading relationships with the other players, since any other trade between partners was forbidden.

It was difficult at times to refrain from communicating to my partner what type of card I was in need of, since my typical "table talk" is usually to complain loudly about what cards I need. I felt like I really couldn't talk much at all because I did not want to cheat by revealing information to my partner that would give him a hint of what I needed to trade. It also felt a little bit restricted only having two people to trade with, especially because they weren't people I was familiar enough with to talk into ridiculously ludicrous trades (no fair taking advantage of people you've just met, save that for family, right?) Having a partner who knows my strategies and mannerisms probably helped a lot in the first game we played, which we won quickly compared to the second game (but it also had a lot to do with the other team's very poor initial placements).

For our second game we were more comfortable playing together and had brushed off our Settlers strategies, so the game was very even throughout. We tried playing with four players in two teams on the six player expansion because the instructions for that variant claimed it would be faster, but the first game progressed much more quickly than the second. This is interesting, because it could have to do with a variety of factors, or perhaps just my perception of time. I would have to play a few more games with each size board to figure out if our speedy first game was just a fluke or not. However, since we now have a pile of new games to borrow over the course of the next few weeks, I do not plan on playing more Settlers until February, so that I get a chance to play as many new games as possible!

Day One

Today we played a few ice breaker games. While they seem to have succeeded in getting us all laughing together, I'm not sure how much stock I put in the games themselves, since I am thinking of them in terms of getting to know the other students in my group.

Apples to Apples

I have been playing this game for over a decade (in fact my family owns the floor demos for Apples to Apples Junior and Junior 9+ from GenCon) so I am very familiar with the rules and have played it with a variety of groups. While it is always interesting to see what the judge picks each round, and you can learn about the winner of each round by what they have put in as well, when the group gets this big, all the rest of the cards each round just disappear without being argued over or claimed by anyone in particular. Because we were mostly small groups of friends in the large group playing this game it was hard to "know your audience" enough to put in "good" cards. I feel like it is a good getting-to-know-you-better game, rather than one used for introductory purposes. Perhaps the reason I feel this way has to do with the fact that my group played this game first, but we were not particularly talkative, especially because of the noise coming from other groups. The logistics of it meant it would have been easier to have two smaller games to get to know one another and laugh over the card choices together.

Pictures and Propositions

While the results at the end of this game were hilarious and confusingly bizarre sentences, it felt like the game part was a lot of stop and go and very isolated. When waiting for a new message we all sat around staring at each other, because if we started to talk or laugh about the jokes we had seen it would ruin the rest of the game. I feel like maybe this game was good at getting us to laugh together and feel like a group, but not very good at getting us familiar with one another in any other ways. It was still very entertaining to see the strange sequences of drawings and hear the progression of the messages as they morphed.

Perudo

This game makes sense if you can remember all the bidding rules at one time, but it felt like there were more options of bids that were not allowed than those that were and that might have been a better way to explain how to bid to new players. I liked that our group took one "practice round" before we started taking dice away, because it felt like the game was much more friendly that way. I know I am competitive, and I know most of the other guys in my group are as well, but we maintained a fairly laid back game in spite of that. I speculate that has to do with the way that we each express ourselves while bluffing, because compared to other groups, we were much more calm and quiet about this particular game.

Tomorrow is Settlers, and I am excited, since this was my introductory "grown up" board game when I was 6 years old. I know it is an old standard among students here, so I expect to see even more fierce competition, as our true natures are revealed! (I am of the opinion that you can learn a lot about a person from playing a game of Settlers with them, so this should be good!)

Games & Community

This January I will be 1 of 40 students participating in a class focused on gaming, both board games and card games (and some other types of games, like dice games thrown in there for good measure).

I am looking forward to the class for several reasons: I will get to play a lot of my favorite games (and even teach one of them), I will get to learn new games that I haven't played before, and I will get to design a brand new game as part of a team (no big, brilliant ideas yet, unfortunately). I am excited for the chance to get college credit for doing something I wish I had more time to do in college anyway: play games!

The people in class come from a wide variety of gaming backgrounds, and backgrounds in general. While I know several of the other students, and have met even more in passing, the point of the class is to grow a community of gamers with the skills to gracefully host others in friendly competition. Gaming is an activity the appeals to many people and makes it easy to get a group enjoying something together. I hope to invite some of my friends who did not make it into the class over to enjoy some of the new games I learn over interim.

This is going to be good!