This week, we enjoyed one of my new favorites in Decorum. Decorum is a cooperative, puzzle game, where the communication of each player’s goals is very limited. Basically, everyone has certain conditions that they must meet while decorating the house with the help or in some cases without the help of, their roommates or other players. The game is designed so that each condition can work together so that it is possible for everyone to finish with all of their conditions met.
This game is not really that difficult, I think that it can be picked up by most fairly quickly, and if all else fails you can just focus on your conditions and you might end up succeeding. But if I were to pick one thing that was the hardest through this game, I would say it is the lack of communication that you have with other players. I think that this game covers that problem well with the idea of being able to say if you like it or not each time someone takes a turn. I know that my group played with the easier conditions, so the conditions were not too difficult to follow, but we looked at the harder conditions for harder scenarios and we realized that the game could become much more difficult by just changing the difficulty of a condition. Either way, you can easily enjoy playing the easier version one after another.
With the lack of communication, leadership is not really obvious through this game. I think that everyone really just follows their own path and maybe picks one other person to try to understand, but the lack of communication makes things harder for someone to really take lead. I think during the phase of telling the player that we like or dislike the move that they made, using a certain tone can really differentiate and lead the other players to start to think of what works and what doesn’t work. This game really just shows how multiple people test out their trial and error skills and how they can work with others while doing it.
Overall, I think that this is a great game and that really anyone could play it. This is definitely one that I will be adding to my collection of board games at home.