This week we played Blood on the clock tower. It is a hidden role game in the vein of werewolf.
I think my friend Adrian would enjoy this game. The hardest part was trying to figure out info about others, and verifying if it was true.
A leadership skill I noticed was the same one in werewolves. They follow the leader where once someone makes an accusation then more people are willing to vote for someone. Although in this game it was less likely that players would completely vote randomly just because there is more opportunity to confirm roles.
In the game I got the role of the virgin, which if a towns folk accuses them the accuser is executed instead. I was killed by the demon on night 2. I didn’t really do much for the rest of the game cause my role is more dependent upon me being alive, but I still had fun cause there felt like there was more of a way to deduct things. Evil won the game and my friend who claimed to be the empath was actually the baron.
GOTW: Ladies and Gentleman
Like most games we’ve played in class, this one was a little confusing at the beginning. It was hard to understand what the aim of the game was and what I had to do in my role as a “lady”. The people at my table relied on each other to understand the next steps and how best we could play the game. The hardest part about the game was working with a partner, while not really being able to communicate what I needed to that partner. It was also hard to get to the end without another player getting in the way of what I needed to be the “best dressed at the ball”. It was also hard to connect to my character at the beginning, because I wasn’t sure I was meant to be doing,
As we went further in the game, after playing for a few rounds, it became clearer what I was meant to be working towards. And during our discussion afterwards, it was interesting to see how playing the game related to identity and how our identities influence the actions we take. I think it was difficult to connect to and understand the game because I wasn’t sure what identity my character was based. At the start of the game, we are given a general character description and what we need to do in that role. However, there was no context about who this character was. The discussion at the end of the class really shed some light on the purpose of the game.
I don’t think this game necessarily has to be played with friends, family, or people we’re familiar with. I think it can be played by any group of people, but probably in a quiet setting. Overall, I think the session went well and made more sense towards the end of the game.
Game of the Week Blog Reflection 4: Decorum
Decorum is the game we played this week. You were given a card with objectives on it and had to decorate the home satisfying everyones objectives without knowing the other peoples’. The hardest part of the game was the communication or lack there of. You could only respond using “I like that,” “I don’t like that” or “its fine.” This brought up past memories with my old roommates… but I did enjoy the game a lot! You had to choose to pick up on others moves and keep things or change it up to fit your requirements. I think my sister would like this game because of the passive aggressive communication… jk! I do think she would enjoy it though because of the strategy puzzle elements of the game.
The session went very well once we started picking up on the other players needs. It would get frustrating when one thing would cancel out all the past work, but it also made it very fun!
GOTW Ladies and Gentleman
This week we played a game called Ladies and Gentleman. It is very different from the rest of games we have played in class. It is known as an asymmetrical game where there are 2 different roles and each role plays on their own against the others of that same role and then eventually come together with the other role. One role is the gentleman which is the role that I played, and this roles goal is to make as much money as he can so that he can buy everything that his Lady wants. The Ladies are the other role, and their goal is to dress themselves for the end game where certain items may give more points than others. In the end the winning team/duo will have acquired the most points.
This game was very difficult to understand and learn to play. I think that it helps that you only really need to learn one role because both roles are basically playing 2 different games. Just focusing on one role made the game seem like it was lacking something or that it was just boring in general. For the gentlemen, there was little strategy and the little strategy that was needed never really felt like a game winning strategy. I am not too knowledgeable on the ladies role, but I know they had more strategy to it compared to the gentleman role. I feel like this game also had too many pieces to it and it just added to the confusion.
The limited communication between roles made things much more difficult, especially in terms of leadership. Rather, leadership really came within the roles. I feel like, even though we were going against each other, the other gentlemen were very open about how they were playing and what the best course of action was. They were also helpful at explaining how things worked, which really proved their leadership through this game.
Overall, I feel like this game was interesting, and definitely a new way to think about how games can be played. I think it relies mostly on playing in character, which we didn’t really do since we were all just learning the game, but I can see the enjoyment that some might gain from it. This might go towards the bottom of games that we had played in class just because it was confusing to learn.
Ladies and Gentlemen reflection
This week we played ladies and gentlemen. I feel like my brother and his fiancée would find the game interesting. I would say the hardest part of the game was understanding the rules and that there are basically two games being played. I would summarize the game as splendor but one half is about collecting the currency why the other half is selecting the cards to win.
The leadership skill I would say would be having trust in others. In this game you need to trust that your teammate knows what they are doing in order to win. Having trust in your team is a sign of a good leader.
In my game I played as a lady. I started out with a servant card that would double the amount of points of a brooch, so I grabbed the highest point brooch and my teammate had to forlorn it. I got some other servant cards and my main strategy was to accomplish them in order to get more points. By the late game I kept getting a low amount of items not worth a lot of points but they completed the servants task. I was able to win with 27 points.
The leadership skill I would say would be having trust in others. In this game you need to trust that your teammate knows what they are doing in order to win. Having trust in your team is a sign of a good leader.
In my game I played as a lady. I started out with a servant card that would double the amount of points of a brooch, so I grabbed the highest point brooch and my teammate had to forlorn it. I got some other servant cards and my main strategy was to accomplish them in order to get more points. By the late game I kept getting a low amount of items not worth a lot of points but they completed the servants task. I was able to win with 27 points.
Free Play Reflection
This week was the free play day so Mike, Nicholas, and I played Star Wars Unlimited to try out our new decks we made. I think it’s a very fun game that I’m trying to get more people like my brother to play. The hardest part about the game I would say is the balance between decks. Some decks are really good against other strategies, finding decks that kill units quickly to be the best.
The leadership for this week is kind of different because we weren’t necessarily showing leadership from the game. Mike and I were practicing with our decks in order to get ready for an event that meeples is running. Mike wants me to help people learn to play and act as a “bounty” that people can challenge in order to get more packs. I would say we were showing leadership through taking initiative to prepare for a larger leadership challenge.
The first game we played was my mandalorian deck vs mikes new Fennec Shand deck, which he won because it is very annoying and makes me unable to attack. Then the 2nd game I played a deck around buffing my units by damaging them, against nicholas who was using a starter deck. We were mainly trying to see how new players would do against our custom decks, which Nicholas did win. The last game I played against Mike using my Boba Fett deck I bought vs the same started deck. It was pretty close but I was able to win because I was doing constant ping damage to him.
GOTW FREE PLAY
This week we were given the option of a free play. I played a few games during this class which included Flip 7, Can’t Stop, and The Game. All were very fun and enjoyable, The Game and Flip 7 were both card games, while Can’t Stop was a fun dice rolling game. The Game was a cooperative numbers building puzzle like game where you need to get rid of all the cards together but others can not know what cards you have. Flip 7 is a risk taking, points building game, fast paced and very simple. Can’t Stop is also a risk taking game where you roll the dice to make pairs and try to get the most pairs out of the group. If I were to rank these games I would say that Can’t Stop was my favorite, then The Game, and lastly Flip 7.
I would say that the hardest part of these games were the risks and not knowing when to stop before you lose all the progress you just made. It was also difficult learning the games on the fly, I feel like for some of the games we would start and not understand some rules so we would then stop and read the rules again. In the end, these were simple games to understand after taking some time to read the rules and play through the problems.
With these problems that we faced, came leaders who took lead of informing others of the rules. We also were very helpful to the others even though the games were against eachother, we would give advice as to what move we should make, which made it a casual and friendly game rather than a competitive game. Also the cooperative card game that we played, had leadership built into it, where leaders would be the one to speak up to the group where to stay away from or where they need to go next.
Overall these game were very fun, and the risk taking in all of the games helped implement leadership roles even in games that were solo and not cooperative.
Assignment: Create an online (Buzzfeed or other) Quiz & Assessment
Assignment Description: Develop a Buzzfeed-style quiz about a topic around leadership and games. For 150XP, have at least 10 persons take your quiz. You should submit the quiz, results, and a brief 2 page analysis of the results. Examples could be “What color Meeple is my leadership style,” “What is the best type of game for my leadership style,” or “Which character in the Battlestar Galactica Board Game Am I?” You must use an existing software like PlayBuzz or Buzzfeed (these two are recommended) to create the quiz and include a link to the quiz in your assignment.
Assignment: RPG Character Build
Assignment Description: Create a RPG style character sheet about yourself and your leadership including relevant skills, traits, personality, etc. On the standard RPG scale (1-18, for example) you must have the core stats of a RPG system of your choice For example: Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) has Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. Remember you do not have an unlimited number of traits… use the numbers to best describe you!
For this assignment, I decided to make a character sheet for the Call of Cthulhu RPG. This game puts the players in the role of investigators solving supernatural mysteries. These investigators face eldritch horrors (typically using the Cthulhu Mythos from H. P. Lovecraft) and deal with the effects they have on their sanity. I have not played any games with this system, but chose it because I wanted to learn more about it and thought it was a universe I could create an accurate representation of myself easily. I learned how to create a character through the Call of Cthulhu Wiki and created the pdf through The Dhole’s House, a fan site that has a variety of tools, including a character creator.
There are 8 main stats within Call of Cthulhu:
- Strength (STR)
- A measure of an investigator’s raw physical power
- Constitution (CON)
- A measure of an investigator’s health and hardiness
- Power (POW)
- A measure of the combination of an investigator’s force of will, spirit, and mental stability
- Dexterity (DEX)
- A measure of an investigator’s physical agility and speed
- Appearance (APP)
- A measure of an investigator’s physical appeal
- Size (SIZ)
- A measure of an investigator’s height and weight
- Intelligence (INT)
- A measure of an investigator’s cunning and ability to make leaps of logic and intuition
- Education (EDU)
- A measure of an investigator’s knowledge accumulated through formal education
With a standard array of 40, 50, 50, 50, 60, 60, 70, and 80, I gave each stat a starting value that I felt most accurately described to myself. A value of 50 is considered average. I allocated my highest two stats as intelligence at 80 and education at 70 because I have grown up focusing on school, and most of my hobbies are mental activities over physical ones. Due to my age being above 20, I got to make a roll of a percentile die to see if I increased my education level. The roll was above a 70, so my final Education stat is 80.
Another skill that Call of Cthulhu investigators have is luck. Luck’s starting value is based on rolling 3 six-sided dice and multiplying their sum by five. My result was 40, which is a bit below average. In my actual life, I feel like I am much luckier than that one roll suggests. I have been lucky to have a very supportive family who have helped me get to this point in my life without too much struggle.
Call of Cthulhu games are typically set within the 1920’s, but there is a modern variant I chose to use. The main reason I did this was to include the occupation I most imagine myself having in the future, Computer Programmer.
The most interesting and time-consuming part of character creation was adjusting my specific skill values. Call of Cthulhu has a large range of skills to allocate points to. In addition, there is some space for players to add custom skills or specify skills that fit within a category (Art/Craft, Science, Survival, etc). Here are some of the skills that I added points to that I find most important about me:
- Computer Use
- The skills I have learned through using computers for school and entertainment throughout my life, as well as what I have learned in my degree
- Library Use and Spot Hidden
- I have found that computer science requires a lot of research and skills to find key information in documentation. I think these skills translate to my experience here.
- Baking and Cooking
- The two skills I added to the Art/Craft section, I have had a lot of fun learning these skills through fundraising for my student trips and hosting my friends for weekly game nights.
- Spanish
- I learned Spanish throughout middle and high school but have not practiced it as much since. I have been trying to pick it up again recently to communicate more with the families of some of my friends and my girlfriend.
All of the information I’ve stated above can be found on the first page of the pdf below. On the second page, I go into more details about myself, trying to focus on aspects of leadership that I find important.
GOTW Reflection – Decorum
In this week’s class we played Decorum, a house-decorating logic game that will both make and ruin friendships all over the color of a lamp. In Decorum, players (up to 4 per game) are tasked with decorating the new house that they have moved into. But there’s much more to it than that. Each player is given a terms sheet in which they must follow. If not all terms are met on their sheet, they cannot be satisfied with the furnishing arrangement of their new house, and thus the round cannot end. The terms were a super interesting part of the game, as they encompassed each aspect of the game itself, including rooms, paint colors, furniture styles, and even pets (if playing with 2 players)!
When beginning our first round of Decorum, my group instantly ran into trouble. You see, the game calls for reactions after each move. If a move satisfies one of your personal terms, you love it! If it negates one, you hate it! And if it doesn’t mess with you at all, you are fine with it. This aspect of the game led to many fun and jovial moments in the rounds we played, with the title of “Difficult Roommate” being bestowed upon each of us at least once for not liking the green lamp in the bathroom or vintage curios in the bedroom.
The hardest part of Decorum actually has a very elegant solution. For our group, we kept running into people making the same moves that conflicted with other players’ terms. For example, one person’s terms may have said that they were forbidden from being in a yellow room, while another’s may have said that they had to have an entirely yellow floor of the house (odd design choice, but alright). This would lead to a back and forth battle where yellow was being placed and removed every turn, and no progress was being made. Decorum’s solution to this helped us tremendously, though. In Decorum, every 5 rounds allows for one of two things (depending on which story you’re playing and with how many people) – a house meeting or a heart-to-heart. In both of these scenarios, players are allowed to share one of their terms with another player. This allowed us to communicate the problem moves and make adjustments, eventually leading us to quicker rounds after a strategy was found.
Decorum is a great game to reference when discussing representatioms of leadership, as it encourages fulfillment with added community aspects. Leadership is not found in one’s ability to dictate others’ actions, but rather in one’s ability to work with the skills and needs of other’s to reach a common goal. In Decorum, you are doing exactly that. You must ensure your own needs (terms) are met, but in the process help others (your roommates) meet their goals and needs. On top of this, Decorum also encourages leadership qualities through its forced communication guidelines. With only limited phrases available, it forced players to make large impacts with little communication – something that can be seen in many great leaders across history. That being said, I believe that Decorum is a game that is for everyone, and one that brings people to a greater understanding of how other’s communicate.
Although it’s a game for everyone, the strategy within Decorum instantly reminds me of my friend Henry. I believe that he would love this game, as I know he has played (and loved) similar, non-team-based strategy games such as Ticket to Ride and still brings that game to social gatherings.
All in all, Decorum was an awesome experience, and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a challenging night in. Bonus points if you play it as you’re actually moving in with new roommates.
When beginning our first round of Decorum, my group instantly ran into trouble. You see, the game calls for reactions after each move. If a move satisfies one of your personal terms, you love it! If it negates one, you hate it! And if it doesn’t mess with you at all, you are fine with it. This aspect of the game led to many fun and jovial moments in the rounds we played, with the title of “Difficult Roommate” being bestowed upon each of us at least once for not liking the green lamp in the bathroom or vintage curios in the bedroom.
The hardest part of Decorum actually has a very elegant solution. For our group, we kept running into people making the same moves that conflicted with other players’ terms. For example, one person’s terms may have said that they were forbidden from being in a yellow room, while another’s may have said that they had to have an entirely yellow floor of the house (odd design choice, but alright). This would lead to a back and forth battle where yellow was being placed and removed every turn, and no progress was being made. Decorum’s solution to this helped us tremendously, though. In Decorum, every 5 rounds allows for one of two things (depending on which story you’re playing and with how many people) – a house meeting or a heart-to-heart. In both of these scenarios, players are allowed to share one of their terms with another player. This allowed us to communicate the problem moves and make adjustments, eventually leading us to quicker rounds after a strategy was found.
Decorum is a great game to reference when discussing representatioms of leadership, as it encourages fulfillment with added community aspects. Leadership is not found in one’s ability to dictate others’ actions, but rather in one’s ability to work with the skills and needs of other’s to reach a common goal. In Decorum, you are doing exactly that. You must ensure your own needs (terms) are met, but in the process help others (your roommates) meet their goals and needs. On top of this, Decorum also encourages leadership qualities through its forced communication guidelines. With only limited phrases available, it forced players to make large impacts with little communication – something that can be seen in many great leaders across history. That being said, I believe that Decorum is a game that is for everyone, and one that brings people to a greater understanding of how other’s communicate.
Although it’s a game for everyone, the strategy within Decorum instantly reminds me of my friend Henry. I believe that he would love this game, as I know he has played (and loved) similar, non-team-based strategy games such as Ticket to Ride and still brings that game to social gatherings.
All in all, Decorum was an awesome experience, and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a challenging night in. Bonus points if you play it as you’re actually moving in with new roommates.