Monthly Archives: November 2020

Game of the Week Blog Reflection Week 10: D&D Week 3

This week we continue our journey to the D&D. We have played D&D for three weeks and this week is the final week that we play the D&D. Although I am eager to start a new game, I really want to explore more about D&D world with my team.Finally, we arrive the other side of the bridge. We won a huge Goblin last week. The process is not easy and everyone was injured to varying degrees. Because the battle with the huge Goblin was intense, the wall of the cave got damaged by the spells. After crossing the bridge, we realized the water was pushed into the cave and water swept us out of the cave. Everyone got the damage, and we were separated by water and need to regroup. I need to decide whether to find the rest of the team first or go alone. I believe the most important thing now is to find my team, so i roll the dice and use my spell to find my team.

Although this is a dice game, D&D encourages us to combine the strategy with individuals’ power to make decisions. If without my team, i can not win the Goblin and can not reach the deepest part of the cave. The hardest part of this game is that I need to come out with different ways to solve the problems my team encounters. Although sometimes we need some luck to win the battle, most of the time we need a strategy. A good strategy can help me win the game easily and therefore we don’t need to depend on luck.

The session went well and i think everyone’s idea is excellent. The most impressive thing during the play session was that Grayson successfully find a key that can help us find the final treasury. Although i am bad at rolling dice, i often use strategy to win the battle. For example, i ask team to separate into two parts, one part is responsible for attacking, the other is responsible for healing. i am happy that my team listen my idea and execute my idea during the battle with the huge Goblin. I really like playing with my team because everyone is friendly and helpful when other teammates got trouble.

To sum up, D&D is a team game and people can not only learn what is teamwork from this game, but also can enhance his/her relationship with others.I hope i can introduce this game to my Chienese friends and play with them.

Game of the Week Blog Reflection Week 9: D&D Week 2

This week we are continuing our play of D&D. This game is quite interesting now as we dig into the story. After training of the first week,I think I am now familiar with the game setting and I am ready to move further. Continuing where we stopped from last week, we roll the dice and snake into a black cave. There are some lights on the wall so we can see what is in the cave. When we reach the part where there are no lights, we use dark vision. We encounter a huge Goblin at the end of the cave. He seems not friendly to us and prepares to attack us through his hammer. After a short discussion, all my groupmates want to fight with him. Grayson uses intimidation to reduce Goblin’s armor, Xinpen throws a fireball, and I, as a Warlock, make medicines to heal the team. After a short fight, we decide to use deception to force the Goblin from a Union with us. However, we underestimate the Goblin’s determination. He does not want to join us and instead, he attacks us again. The game of this week ends as we kill this Goblin and across a bridge to the other side.

I like the battle parts of this game becasue I think the battle parts are exciting. We not only need to calculate the damages based on our attributions, but also need to consider strategies. For example, two people cast spells, one person make healing medicine and one person uses intimation or other spells to reduce the enemy’s armor. However, there is one part that I don’t like, that is the process rate. i think we spent too much time discussing, so the process is very slow compared to the other teams. Therefore, i help my teammates make decisions sometimes when they are hesitating. I think every time when i help team make decision, i show my leadership to them.

The game session went well. Everyone tried his/her best to contribute something to the team. We discuss the strategy with happiness. I really want to know what will happen as we move deep into the cave.

Week 3 – D&D

This week we had a chance to continue played D&D from what we left last week. The overall process still running very well, since for two weeks practices I am very familiar with the rules and my spells. And I have a better experience with D&D since I have a better understanding of my strength and weakness. For example, I am a noble elf, my weakness is my strength and charisma. And my strength is intelligence and wisdom, so I can contribute my strength to my team, and my team members can cover my weakness. Since I am good at long range attack with the spells thunderclaps and fireball, and my team members are good at close attack with sword. So we can work very well as a team, use our strengths and hide our weakness. It gives us a chance to explore a new town, which we did not have a chance to do it last times. 

       But it also brings the hardest part toward the game I think since it is a new place, and we needs to make a lots of decision. Since it is a new experience for us in the town, but in the town, it had a lots places. For example, tavern, inn, smithy, apothecary, market, office, bank. And we needs to make a lots of decisions based on the situation we had and it is difficult to me. Because when I am in a team, I am not good at making decision, I tend to listen to the decision of others and obey or give my own opinions. But I am really not good at making decision, making a decision needs great responsibility. As a team leader, it needs great responsibility to take care the team but also make decision.      

  I would like to play D&D with my roommates because I think it is really have a lot of fun and she will enjoy it. In this time, I will be the leader to take care of her and told her the rules and spells she needs. The overall process will by enjoyable and we will have a lots of fun.      

Ladies and Gentlemen – Reflection 6

This week we played Ladies and Gentlemen. Honestly, it did not go as smoothly as I would have pictured. Tabletop Simulator made it difficult with all the moving pieces and we had a member drop out in the beginning, who was my partner. I decided to take the role of a gentlemen, simply because I am a business major and enjoy the stock market, so thought this role would suit me better than the lady role.

I think the hardest part of this game was moving all the pieces simultaneously. I think this part of the game would have been easier in person, but is very difficult over the web. I also think it would have been more enjoyable in person, reaching over each other to grab the resources, creating an exciting environment. What I liked most about this game the simplicity of the male character and how easy it was to learn his part. I believe the lady role was a tad bit more difficult, but I would like to try that role if I had the chance to play again. I think this game ties to leadership because you are taking on a character who is responsible for another person. Essentially you are leading a team of 2 to help each other succeed by being successful at the ball.

If I were to play this game again I would want my mom to play with me. She is a multitasker and enjoys a busy environment, so I think she would enjoy the environment this game creates. She also won’t take the time to learn an overly complex game and I believe I could teach her this game in a reasonable amount of time.

Week 4 (Can’t Stop)

In the fourth week of class we were scheduled to play the games Can’t Stop and Incan Gold. Unfortunately during the class period my group was unable to play Incan Gold. Fortunately Can’t Stop was really fun to play and had lots of interesting mechanics for a game that broadly looks pretty simple.

In Can’t Stop the goal is to get to the top of three columns by rolling dice 4 dice and determining pairs that help to advance up the columns. What makes this game interesting is that a player can only advance in 3 columns in a turn and can roll the 4 dice as many times as they want or until they can’t advance in any columns anymore. Furthermore, if the player fails to advance in any columns upon rolling the dice they lose all advancements they had made that turn. This mechanic is what makes the game so interesting as well as a great demonstration of an important part of leadership, risk taking.

Risk taking is displayed in this game as players must make a choice to either continue rolling and progress even further at the risk of losing all past progress, or stop rolling and keep what progress they have already made. This decision happens multiple times in a turn for a player with the risk growing greater every time they roll. This is very similar to real life where leaders must assess the risk taken when committing to some action. Leaders do tend to have more control over the outcomes than a person rolling dice as seen in can’t stop though.

Overall I really enjoyed playing this game and had several strategies that I devised while playing. The main strategy that I attempted to use was to commit to as few columns early on in a turn as possible. I did this because it would give me a safety net per say where I could continue to take progress in the other columns without the risk. This strategy doesn’t work for long however as the likelihood that anyone would roll into a specific column multiple times in a row is rather low. In the case where I would get stuck committed to three columns I tried to always have one column I was committed to be in the range of 6-8 as these numbers are the most common to come up when rolling 2 dice, and I was even more likely to get this total on at least one pair when rolling 8 dice.

If I had to recommend this game to people I would say it fits into a category of easy to play and learn while being moderately harder to master. This game has a lot of points where a player can play optimally. However, this game also gives players a chance to win when they aren’t as well aware of these “better” playstyles. I would recommend it to my grandmother personally because she enjoys games that can be played quickly and I believe she would enjoy this kind of game a lot. Overall I think Can’t Stop was a lot of fun to play and would recommend it as a fun game for anyone looking for a quick game to play.

Week 2 and 3 (Fiasco)

In the second and third weeks of playing games in class we played a game called Fiasco. This game is all about story telling and interacting with other people. In Fiasco players tell a story through scenes where they interact with other players. The players interactions are based upon the setting in which they inhabit which is determined by dice and the players as they choose the relationships they share with each other. The outcomes of the scenes determine a characters outcome at the end of the story as characters collect dice for a scene either ending good for their character or poorly for their character. True to its name though this game typically ends up as a fiasco for some people and my group was no different.

In this game of Fiasco me and the other players played a group of a gambling baseball player who betted on their own games, a bookie who assisted in the baseball player’s gambling and was in his own legal troubles, and a lawyer who was the baseball player’s cousin and helping the bookie with his legal problems. In this game the baseball player wanted to make a huge gamble in the playoffs game his team was supposed to win against a much lesser team in terms of skill by throwing the game and collecting a large amount of cash. In the meantime the bookie was trying to save up money to get out of the gang he was in. All of these are the identities of the characters and an important part of being a leader, knowing yourself.

In this game leadership is displayed in two ways. The first of which is knowing your character in the game corresponding to knowing yourself in real life. This is demonstrated through how your character is “made” in the game. As you find what relations your character shares with others that is all you learn. Your character does not yet have a name, possibly profession, a favorite color, or many other traits that all people are expected to have. So you the player have to figure out what makes your character who they are, much as a leader has to understand who they themselves are. The other part of leadership that is relevant to this game is the ability to react to the unsuspected.

About halfway through Fiasco a game mechanic called the tilt happens. The tilt throws some unexpected curveball at the players that the players and their characters must react to. This demonstrates leadership simply in the fact that a good leader must be able to react to varying situations that may arise.

When I played the game I enjoyed it a lot. There were a lot of fun mechanics that made the game interesting in a way the same game would not be repeated again even if I tried really hard. I think my favorite part of the game was creating my character and their relations to other characters. This aspect of the game is really fun from a storytelling perspective as well as learning what other people want to do with their character. On the other hand I did not enjoy the end of the game.

At the end of the game all of the conflicts and story that happen in the game are resolved. In my game I the lawyer got off scot free from all potential problems pocketing some money from helping my cousin gamble. On the other hand the other members of my group the bookie and the baseball players had less desirable outcomes. The bookie ended up being harassed by his former gang for the rest of his life, in jail and out, after failing to out the gang boss in court. The baseball player was beaten up by his former teammates after getting caught betting against the team and throwing the game. While the ending of our story was interesting and exciting the mechanic that got us there worked relatively strangely.

The dice that are given from scenes throughout the game are used to determine the final outcome. The dice are rolled and you subtract the total of the dice from each other and the further away from zero the better the characters outcome. In the situation of having a lot of good dice this makes sense. However when rolling high on the bad dice this outcome seems very strange to me as in my head rolling even should be an impartial outcome whereas a high roll either other way should be some extreme, either fortune or misfortune. Overall this was my least favorite mechanic of the game.

In the end this game was a lot of fun to play and I enjoyed the time I spent playing it. I would recommend it to anybody who likes roleplaying games or just roleplaying. If I were to recommend this game to anybody I would definitely recommend it to my mom who enjoys roleplaying games like dungeons and dragons for the roleplaying aspect as well as many of my friends whom I play dungeons and dragons with.