For this week in EDL 290T, our class had a free play week. I joined up with three others to play the game Honey Heist. Honey Heist is a short role-playing game where all the characters are bears going to the big honey convention trying to steal the motherlode. There’s two problems with this: there’s a complicated plan relying on precise timing, and you’re a bear. All players have two stats: Bear vs. Criminal, with points between the two shifting depending on player actions. Players that go full criminal or full bear lose the game, so players have to balance their stats while working to pull off the heist.

In this play session, we had a variety of roles: a polar bear, a grizzly bear, a panda, and a honey badger. Over the course of the play session, we broke into the manor for the convention, snuck into the ballroom, nearly got caught by security, did some dancing, committed identity fraud, played guitar, went full-on grand theft auto, distracted a rival bear gang, and ultimately yanked the honey fountain out of the manor with a chain. Though it was a roller coaster, it was ultimately a success with only one of the group getting caught. It was chaotic but a lot of fun and relied heavily on improvisation, which is an element of games I tend to enjoy. The most difficult part of the game was setting up which characters were doing what and tracking where everyone was after the group got split up. Overall, it was a really fun way to spend a class and I’d like to play it again.

The game ties in with leadership because leadership can have a lot of improvisation – even the best laid plans can fly out the window and descend into chaos, so knowing how to navigate chaos and keep a level head is important. I would like to get some of my friends who did improv with me in high school to try this, because I think this is exactly the sort of chaos they’d enjoy.