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.