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 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!)