This week we had a free week and I chose to bring a few games, one of which my friends and I ended up paying, being, Ticket to Ride. I’ve wanted to play this game for a while so I was really excited to have the opportunity to play, and to have JS there to help our group when we had questions. Ticket to Ride seems like a really complex game at first but it’s not too hard to catch on to. I played with a partner because we had an extra person in our group and I was honestly glad to have the extra help because I would have been confused otherwise. Overall I think I have a good understanding of the game, except for how the tunnel feature works, since I did not use it. My partner Anne and I had the longest train in the game and it was a really fun mission to have and goal to achieve. Other players seemed to catch on pretty well as well, even though it was everyone’s first time playing. If I were to play the game again, I think I could semi-confidently play on my own.
There were a few challenges to playing the game, one of them was trying to figure out which cities the cards are pointing at exactly. Because this is the European version of Ticket to Ride, there are a lot of cities close together and it can be hard to tell which city the cards are telling you to go to because it’s just a dot and there isn’t a lot of clarification. Another challenge of the game was playing upside down. We had to gather around a table and the board was upside down for half of us, and I was one of them. The cities are difficult to read upside down so I needed to get up a few times just to make sure we were on the right track to where we needed to be heading. Lastly, the game could get a bit dull at times. There aren’t really any plot twists or anything, the game is pretty repetitive and I felt like there were moments during turns where players were zoning out a bit. However, at the end of the game everyone seemed to agree that the game was fun and that they would enjoy playing it again. I think because the game is simplistic, it’s a nice game to play with music or a movie on in the background, just kind of a game for a nice chill evening.
Other things I enjoyed about this game is the individuality aspect, I like that everyone has a mission they are trying to accomplish that is secret from the other players. I also enjoy that this game has different elements to it like implementing both strategy and chance. This game is also very approachable for a variety of ages, which is really cool and a hard thing for games to overcome. I could see myself teaching this game to someone half my age, or someone three times my age, and I genuinely believe both age groups would enjoy it. I would like to play this game with my grandpa because I think he would enjoy the theme of the game and would understand how to play it without getting frustrated.I also think this game can relate to leadership because leaders are usually trying to execute a mission or goal, which you are doing in this game. Once you pick a mission, you’re pretty forced to be committed to it if you want to be successful at the game, and leaders must stick to their mission as well. Some missions take a lot of time, effort and determination, which is required in this game as well because this game is lengthy.

My group this week decided to play Mental Blocks. The game is a group puzzle where each player sees the shape from one perspective. We had to construct the shape out of blocks within the time limit while also following other restrictions such as only touching one color. Overall we struggled much more than I expected, possibly because we had five players instead of eight like the last time I played. The first shape was easy enough, but that gave us some false confidence leading to a much too difficult second shape. Going back down in difficulty we found some success, but it was still a challenge.

One challenge we had as a group was only viewing the puzzle from our own perspective. We often had disagreements about the overall shape of the blocks that might have been easier to solve if we figured out which side each of us had first. Another problem I faced which likely wasn’t intended was interpreting the shape of the 3d cards. At one point after we ran out of time I showed the card to everyone at the table and we all agreed that the card showed the shape as being three blocks tall even though the solution clearly only had two. While I understand showing a 3d object on a 2d card is difficult this problem occurred several times and with only five players we didn’t have any other 3d cards.

Having a good leader greatly helps overcoming the challenges of Mental Blocks. Getting the players to work together instead of independently is the best chance for success. This requires someone to think beyond their personal goal on their card and to instead coordinate placement between players. While each player has their own goal their trying to accomplish the point of the game is to find how to combine them all to win. As a leader in this game or in real life you must find how to compromise people’s desires in order to effectively work together.

This week’s games have me very interested. In the game, players are divided into two camps: the blue team and the red team. At the beginning of the game, players will get random character cards, randomly assigned to two different rooms, and then start the game. During the game, players have to talk, reason, and send the hostages to the opponent’s room, so as to achieve the victory goal of the camp. During the game, the characters are basically hidden information, but through the sharing and revealing of cards, players can start looking for partners of the same faction, and they may also know who the enemy is. who is it! During the game, a team leader will be selected from two rooms, and the team leader will select hostages to the other room in each round. Therefore, the team leader must have good judgment and communication skills, as well as field control skills.

I got the non-talking character card two rounds in a row, so the first round was really frustrating for me, and I didn’t know how to share ideas and information in an effective way. But I found that this helps me to better observe everyone’s information and the team leader’s judgment. At the same time I found the role of the leader to be very important. Because the team leader will largely determine whether the game can be won or not when exchanging hostages. If other players are not satisfied with the leader, they can try to replace the leader.

For leadership, this game is about communication skills and how to hide identities. The strong leadership of enterprise managers is manifested in many aspects, and strong communication skills are an important manifestation of leadership. Good managers usually have strong communication skills and a wealth of communication skills. Communication skills not only play a decisive role in foreign business negotiations, but also play an important role in the internal management of enterprises. If business managers want to improve their leadership, they must improve their communication skills. Managers and team members should communicate with each other on the basis of mutual respect, enrich communication skills, improve communication skills, and leadership will improve.

Two Rooms and a Boom is a game that I actually had played prior to class, and it was just as fun in class as it was the first time I played it a few years ago my freshman year of college. I think the first round is challenging and makes people question whether or not they actually can get into this game because it is uncomfortable and people don’t understand how fun and complex it can become. I think it’s a great game to play with large groups of people and helps people get to know each other a little better. Even though you are talking about the game directly and you can’t always trust what people say during the game, you start to recognize people and become familiar with their names because they need to be talked about in order to continue the game forward. Personally, my biggest struggle with this game was just getting started. I felt shy about asking other people to see their cards, and because my first role was the devil card, I was nervous to even talk because I didn’t want to accidentally tell the truth. As someone who is generally pretty honest, this card was very hard for me and I definitely messed up a few times. 

Other roles that I had during the rounds of Two Rooms and a Boom are the shy guy, a normal red team card, and the robot. Of these roles, the devil was my hardest, as explained earlier. I enjoyed the normal red card the most because I was able to show my card to anyone and be completely unconcerned about repercussions because there weren’t any. I liked being able to show my card because then people with other interesting cards were able to expose themselves to me and I was able to figure out the game a lot faster. It is very limiting to not be able to show your card, and even though my role was very basic, I almost felt as if my role had suddenly become very important when I was able to gather important information that others could not obtain or did not know yet. I almost felt like a housekeeper. A seemingly unimportant role, with a lot of secrets to keep. While I enjoyed this role and aspect of the game, I also think my friend Josh would really enjoy this game and would be very good at it. Josh is very intelligent and enjoys strategy games, or games with complicated dynamics that he has to try to figure out, like this one. Josh is very good at reading people, remembering information, and taking initiative in complex situations. For these reasons, I think he would really enjoy playing this game and would be very good at it. 

This game I think can relate a lot to leadership because, in leadership, the leaders are tasked to figure out a lot of team dynamics and manage relationships between people to suit the best interests of everyone collectively. If a leader is not paying close attention to their people, they might miss out on important details happening with their team. In an organization, there are several different types of intricate roles that all loosely or directly relate to each other, and leaders must learn how to navigate these dynamics. There’s a lot of multitasking in this game, as there is in leadership. Lastly, something we have discussed in one of my other classes is that leadership is not specific to someone with a leadership role, but that anyone can step up and be a leader at any time. This is especially true for this game, as smaller roles can end up being very important to the cause and people can somewhat choose to what extent they would like to be involved by asking certain questions or performing certain actions.