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.