In this week’s class we played Decorum, a house-decorating logic game that will both make and ruin friendships all over the color of a lamp. In Decorum, players (up to 4 per game) are tasked with decorating the new house that they have moved into. But there’s much more to it than that. Each player is given a terms sheet in which they must follow. If not all terms are met on their sheet, they cannot be satisfied with the furnishing arrangement of their new house, and thus the round cannot end. The terms were a super interesting part of the game, as they encompassed each aspect of the game itself, including rooms, paint colors, furniture styles, and even pets (if playing with 2 players)!

When beginning our first round of Decorum, my group instantly ran into trouble. You see, the game calls for reactions after each move. If a move satisfies one of your personal terms, you love it! If it negates one, you hate it! And if it doesn’t mess with you at all, you are fine with it. This aspect of the game led to many fun and jovial moments in the rounds we played, with the title of “Difficult Roommate” being bestowed upon each of us at least once for not liking the green lamp in the bathroom or vintage curios in the bedroom.

The hardest part of Decorum actually has a very elegant solution. For our group, we kept running into people making the same moves that conflicted with other players’ terms. For example, one person’s terms may have said that they were forbidden from being in a yellow room, while another’s may have said that they had to have an entirely yellow floor of the house (odd design choice, but alright). This would lead to a back and forth battle where yellow was being placed and removed every turn, and no progress was being made. Decorum’s solution to this helped us tremendously, though. In Decorum, every 5 rounds allows for one of two things (depending on which story you’re playing and with how many people) – a house meeting or a heart-to-heart. In both of these scenarios, players are allowed to share one of their terms with another player. This allowed us to communicate the problem moves and make adjustments, eventually leading us to quicker rounds after a strategy was found.

Decorum is a great game to reference when discussing representatioms of leadership, as it encourages fulfillment with added community aspects. Leadership is not found in one’s ability to dictate others’ actions, but rather in one’s ability to work with the skills and needs of other’s to reach a common goal. In Decorum, you are doing exactly that. You must ensure your own needs (terms) are met, but in the process help others (your roommates) meet their goals and needs. On top of this, Decorum also encourages leadership qualities through its forced communication guidelines. With only limited phrases available, it forced players to make large impacts with little communication – something that can be seen in many great leaders across history. That being said, I believe that Decorum is a game that is for everyone, and one that brings people to a greater understanding of how other’s communicate.

Although it’s a game for everyone, the strategy within Decorum instantly reminds me of my friend Henry. I believe that he would love this game, as I know he has played (and loved) similar, non-team-based strategy games such as Ticket to Ride and still brings that game to social gatherings.

All in all, Decorum was an awesome experience, and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a challenging night in. Bonus points if you play it as you’re actually moving in with new roommates.

I’ll just start this post off by saying I had a lot of fun with this game. I don’t play bluffing and betting games often, but I always enjoy it when I do. Cursed Court was especially enjoyable for me because it was uniquely casual compared to other games of its kind. Usually, tricking other players is such a major mechanic that you are actively preventing yourself from winning if you don’t try to screw someone else over. I don’t enjoy thinking like that when playing games; I like to know that all the players are having as much, or more, fun as I am having. Cursed Court did not specifically encourage that play style. The scoring system and win-conditions encourage making plays that are beneficial to you, so actively tricking opponents, while possible, is very risky. A valid strategy is to simply observe patterns on the board and make plays with the knowledge you have.

The group I played with was entirely new to the game, except for one person, who had played the game before. This was a wonderful situation because this person was able to help us understand the rules and clued us in to some more nuanced strategies while not being that much better at the game than anyone else at the table. An early strategy that people adopted was putting eleven chips on their desired space off-rip to guarantee they had it. At first, I thought this move should be reserved for more aggressive plays, and it was better to make low bets first, so you had the opportunity to kick someone else off of your card late-game. Although, as we played, having that level of board control proved to be incredibly powerful, and it was rare that you wouldn’t have the knowledge necessary to make that kind of play in the early game anyway. There definitely is an aspect of “If everyone’s putting all of their chips on the board, the 3-chip bet doesn’t have much power anyway,” that influenced that strategy, but we did manage to have fairly engaging late-games where resource management was an important mechanic.

While our first game was fun, the second game we played was when things really got good. We decided to play an alternate ruleset where cards are not shuffled back into the deck every round, and so we needed to keep track of what cards were still possible to be in play. This began as a fairly normal game, but had a very fun late game where people were aggressively trying to claim spots they knew were able to score big and managing the various patterns that were possible. I think a major reason this mode is so appealing is that the size of the deck with the number of rounds means that the final round still has five extra cards that never saw play. This means that, while rare, there is a chance that a given character never appears, and there’s always a risk that the character that you know has a lot of cards still in the deck would not appear.

The idea of leadership in this game is more esoteric than in others. While you can play this game ignoring the actions of others, you do need to respect strategies and chip numbers that others are putting onto the board to win. Understanding what people are doing and why they may be doing it is incredibly important to forming game-sense. Oftentimes, it felt that the person who made their bet first set the tone for the rest of the round. I observed that when people who started with the aforementioned eleven-chip opening the round had notably more aggressive plays, more stealing spaces and higher defensive bids. Whereas people who started with lower bids tended to create a round where people constantly counted their chips, making sure they had enough to steal a space and not have it stolen back, and making more “bluff” plays on spots that didn’t necessarily have much evidence backing them up.

This is a game I hope I get the opportunity to play again. I don’t really know what else there is to say about it other than I genuinely enjoyed it and found it’s relation to the broader meaning of the class very compelling.

Finishing Fiasco was much easier and more fun than starting it. Getting the game started and doing the first act were a little tough for our group because we all had 0 clue how to play the game. However, once we got it started, the game started rolling and becoming more fun. Finishing our game also was really interesting because we got to add someone new into our group, due to him not being there in the previous week.

This made it interesting for our scenes because it allowed for us to add a new aspect into our stories, which resulted in more exciting twists or turns. I would say the hardest part about this game was getting started and ending it, at least for us. Ending our game was pretty difficult because of our slow start so we had to find ways to condense the story, whilst making sure all aspects were met. I also like how my character developed throughout the game. My character was made off an interesting description, but had a bigger role than I expected. Especially with the addition of the new member into the game, it allowed for variety and my character to be unique.

Looking back, I still think the people having to decide on his or her values and hither they’re going to stick to those even with a made up character. I think this can be a valid thing to look for but also because the character is fake, someone could totally just try to enjoy the storyline and character, like one of the members in my group. To conclude, I enjoyed this game/session because of the way our group was able to come together and put together this story and able to talk out what we wanted for the story. Most importantly I enjoyed how the game began to create itself through decisions.