Day 13 - Class Overview

I'm really bummed that this class is over. I got to play a lot of new games that I really enjoyed and I met some incredibly fun and good spirited fellow players. I feel like now I pay much more attention to the mechanics of the games that I enjoy and maybe understand why I dislike others. I also enjoyed hearing about game design from people in the business who also really love games. I don't have many friends that are willing to sit and learn a new game, let alone one as complicated as something like 7 Wonders so it was nice to geek out about this kind of stuff people that are just as passionate about it. I also learned about a lot of new games that I had never even heard of before but that I would like to play again. We also got to playtest the games that we made with our fellow classmates. Everyone that played my game gave me very positive feedback so I think I'll try to improve it even more and make a more substantial board so I can share it with friends and family. Hopefully I'll get to try some other people's games in the future if we ever have a class game night.

The most valuable thing I took away from this class though was a better understanding of how the way you interact with other players influences the experience of the overall game for everyone involved. Almost all of the designers we talked to said that it's a more positive experience for everyone when you either work together in a co-op game or if you devote your resources to helping the players lagging behind rather than trying to sabotage the one that's winning for competitive games. I think that's an important lesson to keep in mind, especially if you have a tendency to get a little over competitive like me. I really hope this class continues in future years.

Day 12 - Fleet Designer Interview and Werewolf

The interview we had with one of the designers of Fleet was pretty interesting. He gave some of the same insights that we got from our previous interview earlier on the class, such as how there's not a lot of money in game design. It's really something people do because they love games, not because they think they'll make millions. But he did explain that sometimes people hit it big, not because they come up with a particularly good game but because they create the next big game mechanic. Or it happens because someone creates a game that uses an already existing mechanic in a novel way. Then we played a few rounds of Werewolf, which is just another version of Mafia but with a lot more roles than the Sheriff and Nurse. I found that it was incredibly easy to sway people to kill of certain people. It's very much a game where people bandwagon on the just a suggestion but I think part of that its that it's almost all chance so there's no best way to decide who to accuse of being the werewolf. It's definitely a fun game though, even if it takes a long time for large groups. It also is a good game for groups where not everyone knows each other.

Day 11 - Relic Runners

Relic Runners was different from anything I'd played before. I thought its mechanics were more complicated than they needed to be. The whole game centered on building roads to move from space to space more quickly so you could uncover tiles and reveal relics. But the only way to claim a relic was if two of the same kind had been revealed and then you had to move from one relic to the other in exactly one turn to claim it. And on top of all of the that, the amount of points you received for claiming the relic was equal to how many roads you took to bridge between them. I found it frustrating in that there were too many things to keep track of that really didn't mesh well for overall strategy. You want to uncover tiles but you need to move to spaces that let you get more roads, of which there are very limited amounts. Plus you wanted to keep stacking in your supply crate skill trees. It just felt like the mechanics didn't really fit the theme of the game. When we finished we couldn't even figure out what the best strategy for the game was.

Day 10 - Mystery of the Abbey and Amazonas

The first wave of the day I played Mystery of the Abbey which is kind of a cross between Clue and Guess Who? except that it's in an Abbey for...some reason. Everyone is a monk trying to figure out which monk from the Abbey committed a murder. The strategy for this game is pretty simple, you ask other players as many questions as possible to try and narrow down who the killer is and pay attention to the information being exchanged by other players. Overall I enjoyed playing it, even with all its strange mechanics like having to go the mass every four turns. It was also interesting how you could earn points by making correct "revelations" about the murder (such as "the murderer has a beard" or "the murderer is a novice monk") to the point that it was possible to win the game by making correct statements even if you couldn't actually predict the exact person who was the murderer. I think the only thing I didn't like was more of a social aspect in that one of our players kept falling asleep during the rules explanation so they constantly kept getting confused during the game while taking a while to take their turn which was a little frustrating for everyone. I think that just goes to show that even if it's a well designed game, who you play it with can make a huge difference in your experience playing it.

For the second wave I played Amazonas which is a pretty simple game to learn. You have to build connecting research stations in the Amazon jungle in a fashion very similar to Ticket to Ride. But for each station you built you also collected a piece of the wildlife found at that station. Part of how you earned points aside from building along the correct route was to collect at least three or more of a type of wildlife and/or collect one specimen of each available type of wildlife. Part of the strategy of this game, which I didn't realize until late game, is that you should build as many stations with different wildlife as you can early in the game because the first station built in an area only cost two gold but each additional station built there increases in price. This will also result in more wildlife for wildlife points as well as bonuses for some of the income cards, allowing you to later buy the stations you need to complete your route. I don't think I disliked the game but I probably wouldn't play it again. It had almost no interaction with other players so it kind of feels like you're all sitting there and happen to be playing the same game while playing your own individual game. It was also hard to sabotage or block other players because each location had tons our connecting paths to other stations.

Day 9 - Fluxx

Today I taught Fluxx, which was a bit harder to teach than other games because the only real rules that you start with are that every player draws one card and plays one card on their turn. As the game progresses players add new rules cards and goals for winning the game. It's also tough because almost every card in the game has its own unique instructions so it's impossible to prepare players for every card they'll encounter. You basically have to trust that players will read all the instructions on all the cards they pick up because you can't micromanage everyone else's hands, especially when you're playing and trying to manage your own cards. There were a few times that rules were misunderstood or ignored, like when we finished a game and realized that the radioactive potato card was supposed to be passed counter-clockwise every time the goal was changed. But even despite that everyone had a very good time and game ran very smoothly.

Some people that were playing had a little initial trouble adjusting to the fluidity of Fluxx. They were used to other hand management/set collection games where you want to hoard cards. But in Fluxx you can lose your cards in an instant because all new rule cards take effect immediately. It can go from every turn you play 2 cards to every turn you must play all the cards in your hand. Or someone might play an action that requires everyone to swap hands with other players or even have everyone discard all of their current cards. Because the parameters of the game are constantly changing, the players constantly have to change their strategy as well. It really comes down to what order should you play your cards to either help yourself win or prevent other players from winning. 

Day 8 - Co-op Games Day

Today I got to play Betrayal at House on the Hill in which all the players are working together to discover a haunted house and uncover the betrayer among you. Once the betrayer is revealed so is the "haunt" and the players are given two separate instruction books, one for the team and one for the betrayer. It involves some dice rolling, mainly as checks for mental and physical stats. The really cool thing about this game is that the board is built as you uncover new tiles which are shuffled so you'll never play with the same board twice. There's also a ton of scenarios because there are many different ways to bring about the "haunt" and it can be any scenario from the house slowly sinking into Hell to a giant blob monster expanding through the house. Again, another feature that gives the game a lot of replay value in that having the same game twice is very hard. In my game we had to face an evil blob monster that expanded to each adjacent room every turn. It was extremely difficult and we lost, but it was a very close game.

In order to do well in this game you have to be very vocal with your team to create a good strategy, especially since each character has different strengths in certain stats. To defeat our monster we needed to pass a lot of knowledge checks, so we assigned the people with high knowledge stats on containing the monster while the player with high might concentrated on fighting the actual betrayer and the rest of the players continued to explore the house looking for items that might help the group. If even one person doesn't act as a team player it can cause everyone to lose to the betrayer. The only thing I didn't like was the aesthetics of the game. A lot of the tiles looked the same and the player tokens looked like something off an model train set. Other than that though I really enjoyed the game even though it took a long time to play.

Day 7 - Cuarenta Tournament and Gaming Panel

I didn't get to do much during the Cuarenta tournament. I only really played 3 official games and spent a lot of time waiting. My team also realized that we had been playing it completely wrong yesterday. There isn't a lot that I can add about the mechanics or strategy that I haven't already discussed in my previous post. However after my last game I got to play some Pandemic with the rest of my table. It was much easier this time and we beat all four diseases very quickly. So either because half of us had played before we were better able to strategize with each other or we set up the game/played it incorrectly. Either way, I still had a ton of fun and am going to try and purchase it soon.

We then listened to a panel from a Calvin alumni who has had experience designing game pieces and has been to many gaming conventions while owning over 400 games himself. He explained how over the last decade or so there has been an increase in the tier of games that are more complicated and that hold players responsible for their choices. These games are usually aimed at older children and adults. He then went through some of his favorite games, which ranged from typical eurogames to even kids games. I definitely saw a few I'd like to try. I also want to use some of the online gaming sites he mentioned since while I like playing eurogames, my friends have very little patience for learning things that have more than 4 rules.

Teaching Self Assessment

I taught Ticket to Ride: Europe this past week. I think I did a pretty good job. They seemed to pick up the rules right off the bat to the point where everyone becomes more competitive once they know what they're doing. Of course, it's a pretty simple game so it may have more to do with that than with my explanation skills. I also tried my best to advise people without being a backseat driver and for the most part tried to let them figure out strategies that worked best for them. I think the main thing I need to do is to not only pour over the rules but practice actually explaining them out loud. I felt like I rambled or repeated myself a lot when explaining the game. I don't really feel like teaching this game changed my approach to that game or to other games but that's probably because I've played it so much that I didn't discover anything new.

Day 6 - Pandemic/Cuarenta

Today I finally got to play Pandemic. I've been wanting to play Pandemic for at least 2 years now and I was not disappointed. I haven't played many cooperative board games, and I found that I really like that style of gameplay. And Pandemic was so fun in and of itself that even though we lost horribly (and by that I mean we lost the game, decided to keep going to see how much longer it would've taken to beat the game, and lost 2 more times) I had a blast and I instantly wanted to play again. I think part of what makes it a great game is that with each player's role and special abilities the game never feels hopeless, even though there are 4 different ways to lose and only one way to win. It always feels like you're just a few turns from victory and then an epidemic hits and suddenly your workload has tripled. But you don't feel like "oh well, I'll just throw in the towel now." Maybe it was just the people I was playing with, but we were very optimistic throughout the game. I think Pandemic and other cooperative games are also more fun because everyone feels like they are contributing whereas when it's a competitive game sometimes if you have a bad start you'll never catch up to everyone else and then you just feel frustrated for the rest of the game. But it's really hard to fall behind in cooperative games because it usually only happens if the whole team falls behind.

For the second half of class we learned to play Cuarenta, which is a card game from Ecuador. At first I didn't really understand the rules but eventually our group figured it out. It was fun, but I'm not really a huge fan of card games centered on tricks, like Hearts or Rook. But it is a game that makes you think more than most other card games and it takes very little time to play. I found it harder to play with teammates in this game because you don't deal out all the cards so it's hard to try and figure out how many of a certain type of card is left and then try to figure out if your partner has them. I 'm not really sure if you even can strategize or read your partner at all in this game unless they claim that they have 3 of a kind at the beginning of the round.

Day 5 - King of Tokyo/7 Wonders

For the first half of class I played a game called King of Tokyo, a dice game in which each player was a giant monster trying to take control of Tokyo. In order to win the game you needed to either reach 20 victory points or eliminate every other monster. At any given time there was only one monster actually in Tokyo. Any attacks from that monster affected all other monsters but any attacks from other monsters were focuses solely on the one in Tokyo. The main way to achieve victory points is by constantly entering Tokyo or rolling three of specific number (1,2, or 3). The most obvious strategy for this game would be to try as hard as possible not to be the monster in Tokyo as you end up spending your rolls trying to regain life points instead of racking up victory points or energy cubes (in-game currency) unless you have some specific card that is more beneficial if you are in Tokyo. It's also a good idea to try to stay in the middle of the scoreboard until late game or else other players will gang up on you early on. I found the best strategy for me was to spend time getting lots of energy cubes because many of the cards you can buy have abilities that allow you to gain victory points very quickly and there is no limit to how many cards you buy in one turn as long as you can pay for them. Overall I really liked it. I tend to like more complicated games but this one was very simple yet very fun and encourage very competitive playing styles.

For the second half I played 7 Wonders, which is a hand management game with a few twists. I always thought this game was a little too complicated. I'd played it at least twice before and still needed a thorough refresher on all the rules. You have to pay a lot of attention to not only what you are building or need to build your wonder, but you also need to pay attention to the players on either side of you. In each age there are several turns in which you will be handed a deck and you need to choose a card to keep and pass the rest to your neighbor. You want to hold on to things you need, like resources, but you want to try not to give your neighbor something that gives them an advantage. I noticed that Curt was building a hefty military so I tried to either take military cards for myself or sacrifice them face down to build stages of my wonder. Ultimately I realized I should have been keeping the science cards from him. Most militaries aren't much larger than 4 to 6, and the penalties for losing to a neighboring army are small (-1, -3 or -5 depending on the age). But the score for having science cards is determined by the number of science cards squared. It would have made more sense to prevent him from going to 5 science cards (25 points) to 6 science cards (36 points) than to worry about losing 5 points to his army. I'd rather lose 5 points than let him gain 11. I do like playing 7 Wonders and it's a reasonably timed game, it's just difficult to teach to new people.

Day 4 - Rook and Railroads

For the first half of class I was placed in a group to learn the card game Rook. It's very similar to Hearts which can be played with a normal deck of cards; Rook has it's own special deck. It's played with two teams of two with partners sitting at opposite corners of the table. Before you begin playing everyone is dealt their hand and there is a round of bidding. If you have lots of high cards that will let you win hands you want to bid high to let your partner know that. Or you can bid high to try and throw off the other players. The key is to keep the final bid low so the penalty isn't as great if you lose or make the bid high if your far behind in order to make a last ditch effort to catch up. The bid can be as high as 180, which is the maximum number of points attainable in a round. The winner of the bird gets the kitty, which consists of five randomly dealt cards in the middle of the table. It's a big advantage to get this because you have to put five cards back in the pot so it's a chance to either get rid of low cards or try and get rid of an entire suit from your hand so you can play trump cards more often. The person who wins the bid also gets to decide which suit acts as a trump. The rest of the game is very similar to Hearts with the only differences being that 1 is higher than 14, there is a Rook card that is worth 20 points and acts as the lowest trump card, and only 5's, 10's, and 14's are worth points. This game pretty much uses the same strategy of Hearts where you try to hold on to higher cards to win better pots with the addition of a team element where you want to put point cards in the pot if you partner is winning because even if it's lost from your hand it's still going toward your team score.

For the second half of class I taught some people how to play Ticket to Ride: Europe. It's a very basic hand management game where you collect cards with different colored train cars on them to build sections of  railroad of matching color and quantity. The goal is to accumulate the most points through building segments (longer segments are worth more points) and completing tickets by connecting two cities listed on the ticket with your trains. The Europe edition has a few extra rules. Some segments require a certain number of locomotives (wild cards). To build segments designated as tunnels the dealer flips from the draw pile the same number of cards as the player is trying to build with; for each additional locomotive or card of the same color as the player's cards the player must supply an additional card. If they don't have enough cards then they fail to build the tunnel and must try again on their next turn. Finally there are also stations, which players can place on a city in order to borrow another player's segment of train to complete a ticket. However, each train that is unused as the end of the game is worth 4 points.

The best strategy is build as many tickets as you can and try to get tickets that you can overlap so you don't have to build as many segments. You can try to sabotage other players by predicting where they will build and blocking them but this is a risky strategy in that you may end up wasting trains and have unfinished tickets at end game that result in a score penalty. I saw with my group that towards the end of the game the two players in the lead employed different strategies. One decided to just keep building long segments in order to rack up points from building and to win longest route at the end of the game, which is worth 10 points. The other player had an extensive network of trains so he just kept taking more tickets in order to try and get points for routes that he had either already completed or that he could finish in one to two turns. It was a very close game, so both strategies are viable.

Day 3: Game Designer Panel

Today I had the privilege of listening to a panel with game designers Greg Bush and Phil Chase. They gave us a brief background on their experiences growing up with gaming and their transition into designing games. We also got lots of information and pointers on game design. They said the easiest was to start a game is to decide on a theme and then figure out what mechanics would best fit with that theme or create your own mechanics to compliment it. As for picking a theme, they said it's best to stick with what you know and what you enjoy; a well done game can be about pretty much anything. One suggestion they had was forming a game around a historical event or era if you happen to be a history buff. They also said that it's perfectly acceptable to mix and match mechanics from other games that you enjoyed if you can mix them in an original way.

When it came to the actual design process they said that it's perfectly normal to go through several versions as changes are made to the game. However each step of change(s) should be small so that when the gameplay experience changes drastically from one version to another you can pinpoint the source of the change and decide from their how you want to continue. Part of how the speakers specifically liked to keep track of each version of development was through spreadsheets that everyone on the development team has access to. On that note, it's important to keep components of past games even as you develop new versions in case you want to go back and start from a previous point or reincorporate something from a past version. All in all, I really enjoyed the panel far more than I thought I would and they mentioned some games that they thought were particularly well made so now I have some new games to try out.

On an additional note, I also got to try out the game Killer Bunnies which is a hand management/dice rolling game. The person teaching me wouldn't tell me all the rules before we started, he insisted that I learn as I played and made mistakes which is a pretty frustrating way to learn anything. Aside from initial difficulties early on in the game I actually enjoyed it. It's very much a game that centers on sabotaging other players so it I think it definitely makes a difference in how your social experience in the game pans out depending on if you play with people who are very competitive or vindictive.

Day 2 - Settlers of Catan Variations

Today was focused on Settlers of Catan and several variations made by players to the core game. My group played a regular game first just as a refresher for the basics of the game. While playing the basic game it was evident that early actions of the first few turns can set the mood or tone of the rest of the game. If you spend a lot of early game sabotaging other players then it quickly becomes a hostile environment in which players are unwilling to trade resources with each other, routes are built solely for the purpose of cutting off other players' progress, and everyone playing becomes far less accommodating when it comes to bending rules or instituting house rules. It also causes people to be more vindictive when it comes to placing the robber, operating more along feelings than strategy. 

The second game we played we used a variation involving two teams. Each team consisted of two players who were sitting on opposite sides of the table. They weren't allowed to verbally strategize with each other, they had to try and figure out each others tactics so they could either aide each other or try to not impeded each other's progress. You are also unable to trade with anyone other than your teammate and you must do a one for one blind trade and hope you successfully guess what the other player needs. We decided to tweak this variation even further so that you had to trade with your partner every turn. We also eliminated the robber and made it so that every time a seven was rolled everyone got to pick one resource of their choice to balance out the fact that trading was limited. Thus all knight cards allowed players to do was steal one resource card from another player. We actually had a lot of fun with the second game but we didn't have enough time to finish it. I may try to start that up again with some of my friends. 

Overall we discovered that the best strategies for team based variations of the game is to compliment each other on both numbers and resources. Try to settle near resources and numbers that your teammate doesn't have access to so that your team collectively is constantly gaining resources every turn. For single player variations it's a good strategy to try and pair up resources like wood and brick or wheat and ore by settling on two resources with the same number. For example every time a four is rolled you may receive both a wood and a brick so that you can power build roads. Ideally this strategy could work in team scenarios but it depends on the placement of the board and the order in which settlements are placed early game. 

Next class will be a guest panel with Greg Bush and Phil Chase. If I get to ask them a question I'll probably ask where does one start when making a game? Do you start with a theme (e.g. zombie apocalypse, frontier settlers, etc.) or with a template (e.g. deck builder, team/cooperative, party game, puzzle, etc.)?

First Day 1/9/14

This post is technically a day late, but hey, that's the life of a college student for you. Midnight is the new 9 p.m.. I was kinda nervous before I came to class, as you usually are before you start a new class, but it was very casual and a lot of fun. I'm taking this class with some friends but I met some new people today that were pretty cool and I hope I can get to know some of my new classmates better.

The first game I played was called Perudo or Liar's Dice as most people know it from Pirates of the Caribbean. It was a really loud game but I think that helped make it more exciting considering it's already a pretty simple game from the get go. I normally don't enjoy games that rely on calling other people's bluff, especially if you can use statistics to calculate the probability of their lies in your head. It's especially annoying when playing these games with someone who is very good at doing mental calculations. I personally don't like to do a lot of math when playing a game so I tend to shy away from games like B.S./Cheat or Poker. But I really enjoyed this game, and I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that the people I played with were more concerned with having fun than having a 100% accuracy rate in predictions. The only thing I wasn't to clear on was figuring our how many ones (wild card dice) you had to guess depending on the previous guess. I think the pattern goes take whatever number you are guessing a quantity of, divide it in half and either round up or add one depending on if it's even or odd. For example if I guess there were four sixes I would take six, half of six is three, three plus one is four, so the next person would guess four ones.

I had played Apples to Apples before and the much more adult version Cards Against Humanity. I think this game can either be fun or tedious depending on who you play it with. I like to play by picking cards that were either the best fit for the chosen adjective or that were witty. Other people just like to pick whatever is the most random, so there's really no point in having an adjective card to begin with. I had also played Pictures and Propositions which I find takes a while to play and either results in a very funny result or one that is too similar to the original sentence to be entertaining. All in all, I had a fun time and I look forward to the rest of this class.