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.