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!)