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 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.

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!