This week in class we played two relatively quick games, Incan Gold and Can’t Stop. Incan Gold is a multiplayer card game that is perfect for those that love to take risks and push their luck. To play you shuffle the deck and someone deals by flipping over a card revealing either a trap or treasure. Each player then splits the treasure they gain and then on the count of three everyone decides whether or not they want to push their luck and continue deeper into the temple for more treasure and artifacts or bail out with whatever they had. Can’t Stop is a mixture between a dice and a board game because you roll the dice to move your pawns on the board and the goal is to take over three columns. However, it is also a kind of risky game because if you don’t roll the numbers you need you cannot complete your turn and it is a race between other players.

The hardest part of Incan Gold was trying to maintain a realistic and logical mindset because similar to poker the game becomes addictive really fast and you begin not to carefully weigh out the risk to benefit ratio when playing. One of the players in my group constantly played it safe while the rest of us kept risking our loot in the hopes of gaining more, because of this the safe player ended up winning both of the rounds we played. So I definitely need to work on my strategy for that game! The hardest part of Can’t Stop was trying to be present while playing because I did not like this game at all. It’s basically just a math and chance game with no story or plotline and because it was boring I didn’t care whether I won or lost which is not something you want when playing. I would recommend Incan Gold to everyone and Can’t Stop to maybe my grandparents if I had to.

I think the two biggest leadership aspects in this week’s games would be decisiveness and integrity. For example, In Incan Gold, all the players need to decide at the same time if they are bailing or continuing deeper into the temple. If you cannot demonstrate the ability to make decisions under extreme pressure you cannot be a great leader and you are also not helping maintain the easy playing flow of the game. A clear example of integrity can be found once again in Incan Gold, everyone wants to win and I witnessed players make their decisions based upon what they thought another player was going to do. One player in my group made the decision to bail out because he knew the player who always played it safe was going to do that as well and in doing this he would ensure that no one got the treasures. Some would argue that it was simply strategy but I would argue that it calls your character into question when you would knowingly choose to lose just to stop someone from winning or gaining more from an opportunity than you.