Two Rooms and a Boom was a very fun party game! I really enjoyed how many different roles there were and how much the game changed for each player based on their role. For example, when I was the bomber, I took much more of a backseat on the strategizing as I was an important role, and I let my team make all the decisions for me.
I don’t always enjoy being in a leadership role, though I have been in multiple facets of my life and I will step in if I need to, but I enjoy the teamwork element much more. In this game, as we discussed in class, even though there is a literal ‘leader’ role, we decided that the leader doesn’t actually have all of the power, and it’s very much a team game, making team decisions and coming to team consensus. It was more about making sure that your team was in power, not a specific leader as a dictator. I think the hardest part of the game, for me, was remembering who was which team/role between the rounds. After 2 or 3 everything started to blur together, and trying to remember who’s on my team this round, even if they weren’t last round. The worst part was when they were on your team last round but this round they are an enemy.
I thought it was weird how there is almost no incentive NOT to share your color/card with the gray roles. Unless you have a personal vendetta against that person, of course. I was then informed that there are some gray roles that we weren’t playing with, where you definitely DON’T want to share your role with them, because they could kill you or otherwise screw with your team. I found that the ambassador roles played a huge role in communication between rooms within a team, specifically to share between rooms which team is in power in each room, which absolutely influences your team decisions. Also, they are very helpful in connecting the Doctor-President and Engineer-Bomber. I can see how they would be helpful with all of the other role cards we didn’t play with as well.
I enjoyed playing with 12 or 13 people as we did in class, I feel like if you added much more the game would change and involve less teamwork. Which could be fun to play an almost entirely different game, but I think I would prefer to keep the numbers around what we had. I definitely enjoyed connecting with and learning more about some of my classmates that I hadn’t interacted with before!