This week we finished our game of Fiasco! Once again the hardest part was getting the act started, but once we began the scenes flew by. Our scene pace was much faster in the second act, as we began to resolve the conflicts. This act was far more action packed and full of twists and turns. In the second act there are two twists selected ahead of gameplay. Our twists involved plans going wrong and someone going on an uncontrollable rampage. I think that we struggled a bit more with communication and pacing this week. Part of this was simply due to having less setup needed before getting into the game. As far as communication, I am not sure why we seemed less in sync this week but I’m sure it was just a natural variation in how we interacted.
As the story approached its conclusion, it seemed there were less options for how to manipulate the plot, however there were several surprise events. I loved the improvisation aspect of this game because it encouraged creativity and discouraged obvious endings. For example, there were many surprise double-agents in the second act of the game. It was fun to see how each teammate would respond to each other and the plot developments. In our specific case, it seemed everyone but my character was secretly involved in the illegal fur trade mystery that defined our narrative.
As we discussed at the conclusion of class, it can be difficult to navigate situations in which each person has a different opinion on how to proceed. This was not a huge issue for us, but there were some moments where our miscommunication was leading to a bit of frustration when we probably should have taken a step back to get back on the same page. We did manage to keep the game going, but in hindsight it may have been better to simply fully pause the game to have a conversation instead of trying to push through gameplay while explaining ideas.
Overall, I enjoyed this game experience and how every player had the opportunity to lead scenes. It allowed for every individual player to experience being an actor, director, script writer, producer, etc. This game encourages you to go out of your comfort zone and try new things. Teamwork is necessary and yet everyone gets to have a stake in the plot and major decisions being made. Fiasco highlights the importance of leading as well as being active listeners and followers. This game would be good as an acting exercise or a way to teach communication and the different roles in a team. While cooperation may not have meant agreeing on the same plot, it was important to be able to interact with one another to progress the story. I had a great time playing this game and getting to know my classmates!
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Sushi Go! Game of the Week
We played Sushi Go!, a card drafting game in which you collect various sushi dishes in order to gain points. Each person starts with a hand of cards from which they strategically select a meal in hopes of accruing points. These cards sometimes have set point values but many have value only when combined with other cards or when certain stipulations are fulfilled. After selecting your card you pass your deck face-down to the person on your left. When cards run out, the points are counted and the round is over. The winner is determined after three rounds.
The most difficult part of this playthrough actually had little to do with the game itself. We had to restart multiple times for various reasons which meant it was hard to get through a full game. Once we got the hang of it, the game was very fun and fast-paced. I would probably recommend having a practice round in which you can see the cards and directions to get used to each of the card’s meanings. My group got into it and ended up having some close scores. There was not necessarily a leader in this game, but we did work together to get used to the game. It was more about creating a space where we could all ask questions and have fun.
This game would be fun for a party or group of friends. I liked that there was an element of strategy and sabotage while still being a lighthearted game. For example, if you knew someone to your left had a wasabi card, you could hoard the nigiri cards so that they could not gain extra points. It was fun to be able to figure out the game as a group and see what strategies each member gravitated towards. For example, some tried to have the most puddings or maki rolls while others tried to stack dumpling cards. There are so many options to choose from when crafting your ideal hand. So if you’re wanting a fun party game, Sushi Go! is a great choice!
Fiasco Week 1 Review
We played the role playing game: Fiasco. My group chose to play the Ice edition, however there are different “playsets” or settings to choose from. This game relies heavily on character building and player decision making. As is the case with many role playing games, the hardest part was actually getting started. When reading through the directions and setting up the game, it seems a bit overwhelming. Many decisions are made before gameplay occurs and these initial choices will impact the plot, characters, and relationships of the entire game. All this to say that game setup was a daunting task and I felt a bit unsure how to initiate the improvisation scenes.
Once we actually dove into the gameplay the experience was much less intimidating and seemed to flow naturally. I enjoyed the player interaction and the way that we bounced ideas off of each other to create a scene. It reminded me of the improv game “yes and” in which players do not reject each other’s ideas but rather add to and twist their interpretations. Some of my classmates expressed their preferences for games in which there is more randomness and less player decision. Personally, I felt like this game had randomness because you never knew how your teammates would react or interpret a scene.
Fiasco requires communication and cooperation between characters, while leaving room for individuals to create unexpected plot twists. One thing that makes this game unique, is the need for different players to take a leadership role depending on the scenario. This ensured that all players were able to take charge of certain parts of the overarching storyline. I believe that our gameplay went pretty well as we were able to trust each other and have fun with our situations. I believe this game would help with confidence in acting classes while making sure that all players got to design, participate, and lead certain scenes.
Once we actually dove into the gameplay the experience was much less intimidating and seemed to flow naturally. I enjoyed the player interaction and the way that we bounced ideas off of each other to create a scene. It reminded me of the improv game “yes and” in which players do not reject each other’s ideas but rather add to and twist their interpretations. Some of my classmates expressed their preferences for games in which there is more randomness and less player decision. Personally, I felt like this game had randomness because you never knew how your teammates would react or interpret a scene.
Fiasco requires communication and cooperation between characters, while leaving room for individuals to create unexpected plot twists. One thing that makes this game unique, is the need for different players to take a leadership role depending on the scenario. This ensured that all players were able to take charge of certain parts of the overarching storyline. I believe that our gameplay went pretty well as we were able to trust each other and have fun with our situations. I believe this game would help with confidence in acting classes while making sure that all players got to design, participate, and lead certain scenes.
T.I.M.E. Stories Week 2 Reflection
This past week we finished playing T.I.M.E Stories in class. For me, this week was not nearly as exciting or enjoyable. Towards the end of the playthrough, it felt annoying that my group simply missed the one or two items that we needed to get to complete the puzzle on our 2nd and 3rd loops. I’m sure this factor was only made worse by way of us having a limited amount of playtime. But on the other hand, I’m fairly certain that the aimless feeling that I had would have still been present with a longer playtime.
I think taking notes on literally everything would’ve helped, but to me that would not have made the game more enjoyable. It probably would’ve helped us figure out the puzzle sooner, since we would’ve known implicitly what locations/items we were missing. That being said, I do think this is a well designed game, but it’s just not for me. I like low barriers to entry on games that I play, and longer games are less enjoyable for me.
Once again, this game provides a great avenue for leadership by way of directly influencing the flow of the game as the Time Captain. Someone could just be the person to put the location cards in the right place, but there are opportunities to take the reins and help guide your group to a successful playthrough with minimum loops.
I think taking notes on literally everything would’ve helped, but to me that would not have made the game more enjoyable. It probably would’ve helped us figure out the puzzle sooner, since we would’ve known implicitly what locations/items we were missing. That being said, I do think this is a well designed game, but it’s just not for me. I like low barriers to entry on games that I play, and longer games are less enjoyable for me.
Once again, this game provides a great avenue for leadership by way of directly influencing the flow of the game as the Time Captain. Someone could just be the person to put the location cards in the right place, but there are opportunities to take the reins and help guide your group to a successful playthrough with minimum loops.
T.I.M.E. Stories Week 1 Reflection
This past week we played T.I.M.E Stories in class. It was quite a fun game. The story is very intriguing, but I’m unsure of how it will eventually resolve, as I don’t think we’ve gotten very far before the end of class. The gameplay aspect I liked the most was resetting the time. It reminds me of some of my favorite roguelike video games, Risk of Rain 2 and Hades, in that while you lose some of your progress, the most valuable thing carrying over is your learned knowledge of the game. I can’t wait to run it back next week.
The most difficult aspect of playing the game was certainly learning the basics of how to play. There’s many moving parts and when playing it for the first time, it’s very overwhelming. Now having gotten through a full cycle of the game, I’m quite sure that I understand how to play the game properly. An aspect of the game I’m still learning is combat. In that first cycle, I never had to enter into combat, but even at opportunities where I could, from my understanding, I would’ve lost very badly and been killed/knocked out. One aspect I do not like is the skill checks. Every so often a location would have a challenge to beat, but out of the 4 or so challenges that I’ve encountered, my character has not had any skill points in that area being checked. That led to my group and I having to spend even more time at a location that might not even have been worth it.
It’s very easy to see and understand how this game ties into leadership. To start, the game requires someone to be the “Time Captain”, an in-game leader that helps facilitate the game to run smoothly. Next, someone has to keep track of all of the information that’s discovered to make sure that no little detail is left unremembered. A potential outlet for leadership for this game could be role-playing. It’s not required by any means and would have little effect on the overall flow of the game, but someone could lead a group into that.
The most difficult aspect of playing the game was certainly learning the basics of how to play. There’s many moving parts and when playing it for the first time, it’s very overwhelming. Now having gotten through a full cycle of the game, I’m quite sure that I understand how to play the game properly. An aspect of the game I’m still learning is combat. In that first cycle, I never had to enter into combat, but even at opportunities where I could, from my understanding, I would’ve lost very badly and been killed/knocked out. One aspect I do not like is the skill checks. Every so often a location would have a challenge to beat, but out of the 4 or so challenges that I’ve encountered, my character has not had any skill points in that area being checked. That led to my group and I having to spend even more time at a location that might not even have been worth it.
It’s very easy to see and understand how this game ties into leadership. To start, the game requires someone to be the “Time Captain”, an in-game leader that helps facilitate the game to run smoothly. Next, someone has to keep track of all of the information that’s discovered to make sure that no little detail is left unremembered. A potential outlet for leadership for this game could be role-playing. It’s not required by any means and would have little effect on the overall flow of the game, but someone could lead a group into that.
T.I.M.E. Stories Week 1
This week we played T.I.M.E stories, a fun cooperative game where we are traveling through time to complete a specific goal. It honestly gives me escape room vibes. This was a very fun start to the game. In my group, there were only two players so I got the chance to play as two characters throughout the game: Madeleine who gets anxiety attacks and Fredrick who has shock paralysis. My teammate played as a bitter woman and someone else who I’ve forgotten
The challenging part about the game was that there was not much instruction on how to play the game. The tutorials were trying very hard not to spoil the narrative, so a lot of the info we received didn’t fully encapsulate the game. I also found it hard to navigate certain information. For instance, one of the characters I played, Fredrick, had a certain problem fighting when there are 1-2 shield in play. I didn’t realize this until playing the game a few times, so I ended up playing my character wrong (oh well).
This game uses a lot of leadership since it is a cooperative game. Luckily for my team, there were only two of us (and my teammate took the leader role). We didn’t have any quarrels or trouble, and I like that my teammate took the lead since I was a little lost with the play through. But if there were more team members, I think this game would’ve really tested our cooperative and communication skills. We have to convince each other which characters go where and battle obstacles together. All in all, it’s a very fun game. It’s one that I am recommending to my family and will absolutely convince them to play.
Compare/Contrast: Werewolf and Blood on the clocktower
- Similarities
- Night and day phases
- Central person who operates the whole game and knows everything
- Secret things happen at night when everyone has their eyes closed
- Evil people find out who their partners are in the night (with the exception of the Imp in BOTC)
- Seer players that can look at other player’s cards or otherwise find out other player’s roles
- Roles that copy other roles- Doppelgänger in werewolf copies another card they look at, and the Drunk in BOTC believes that they are a different role than they are.
- The drunk role!!
- Differences
- Voting mechanism (pointing vs center person turning and raised hands)
- BOTC has many more roles, and is more complicated in general.
- BOTC can, and is supposed to take much longer than Werewolf
- In werewolf, when you are killed, your card is revealed. In BOTC your role stays hidden even after death
- When you are dead in werewolf you are essentially no longer in the game. When you are dead in BOTC you are still very much an active player (including dead votes)
I really like both of these games! I like that BOTC has much more fun mechanics, exciting new roles, cool art, and has a lot more different ways it can play out because of all the different roles. Werewolf, on the other hand, is much simpler and easy to manage. I like that it’s a lot more accessible than BOTC, I was very very confused the first time I played BOTC. I have fond memories of playing Werewolf when I was little, and I remember (and still do) thinking that the pointing mechanic is super fun, because in real life people aren’t so fond of the pointing.
I have to say, I think BOTC is my favorite, even if I am still learning the ins and outs of it. I think its much more playable for experienced players, and I think it would get even more fun every time you play. It has so many outcomes without the expansion packs needed for Werewolf! And I think the whole concept of the clocktower and all the clocktower mechanics are much cooler and more mature than Werewolf.
Compare and Contrast: Werewolf & Blood on the Clocktower
As an avid fan of social deduction games, Werewolf and Blood on the Clocktower were two of my favorite games that we played this semester. They’re both similar in some respects, but although some might consider Blood on the Clocktower to be a better version of Werewolf, I think that they both have their strengths and weaknesses. To start off with, they’re both hidden role social deduction games, that both have a day/night cycle, that both have different roles assigned to each player, and that both have a “good” and “evil” team. However, the main differences come from how Blood on the Clocktower’s Storyteller has an active role in keeping things “interesting”, how Blood on the Clocktower has everyone have a role that does something (as opposed to Werewolf’s villagers that don’t have abilities) and there isn’t a hard elimination; dead players in Blood on the Clocktower can still participate and influence the outcome of the game.
While these elements for Blood on the Clocktower do make it more fun and engaging for the average player, since unlike in Werewolf there aren’t periods where you don’t have an ability and can’t do anything or are just dead and can’t do anything but spectate, I think the additional roles and the role of the Storyteller take away from the pure social deduction aspect. Both games focus a lot on deception and trying to find out people’s real roles, but Werewolf is very pure about this – people are who they claim they are, and there aren’t any neutral or muddy roles to confuse things. Blood on the Clocktower, however, has roles like the Poisoner or the Drunk where they might not even be aware that they’re not who they think they are, and while this element of obfuscation does make games more interesting, it does also put a hard cap on how much social role deduction one can do.
I also think that while the roles being able to interact past death and vote is really fun, it does also make it harder for certain victory conditions to be met because you can’t just eliminate someone who you suspect has problematic information. It causes the game to have less of a hard player elimination than Werewolf, which all comes down to the main difference between the two games: complexity. Werewolf (and Mafia and its derivatives) are really easy to play, and really just require some basic understanding and a bunch of people. Blood on the Clocktower has much more advanced and in-depth mechanics, and thus is more difficult to work through, and also does lean on the Storyteller being good at their jobs. I think they both cater to different audiences in the same niche, and while I think Blood on the Clocktower is the better game because you can do more with its more advanced roles and deeper mechanics, sometimes you do just want to play a quick fun game without having to set a bunch of things up for it.
Reflection on a campus leadership event
Rosalind Wiseman: Respect Is Earned, and Dignity Is a Given
Rosalind Wiseman works with youth for a living, and is deemed an expert on the subject. Youth all over the world inspired her lecture I attended, about mean girl culture, its roots, its effects on our society and all of us individually, and how this all applies to our lives. Rosalind also advises us that youth and children need our own advocation and empathy, especially those in crisis but definitely also every single other kid- every one of us deserves to have a social emotional life, and struggles, and to talk to trusted adults about them!
Something Wiseman said that really stuck out to me was “People learn early that maintaining a relationship is more important than how you are treated in a relationship”. I was definitely sitting in the auditorium thinking about how I’ve lived my whole life thinking this way, to a certain degree. And hey, this might be my conditioning, but I do think maintaining relationships is important in most situations, but I also recognize and absolutely believe that if you are not receiving respect or being treated well in a relationship, you have every right to leave that relationship and maybe you should!!
Another key point in Wiseman’s lecture, talked about as well in the Q&A portion, was conflict resolution. Most of the time, when you’re attempting to maintain a relationship, or you are required to, you need to have conflict resolution skills. You need to be able to “acknowledge that conflicts are difficult, but normal, and can be worked through”. You can’t just walk around hurting your friends, coworkers, family members, any of their feelings, you need to make them feel valued and dignify them even in times of conflict. “Identify key moments to support them” even if you’re not on the same side of the issue yet, or even if you part ways on the opposing side.
As this was a lecture titled “Mean girls”, a lot of Rosalind Wiseman’s advice mainly applied to how to work with women and girls, and how to deal with issues as a woman or a girl. Something she leveled with us about is that a lot of women act the way they do because they’re scared of what other people will think of them. Specifically other women and girls, their peers. This is a huge problem because “women showing anger and frustration are worried people will label them as mean”, so we are taught to be docile, and bottle all of our frustrations up. This goes hand in hand with the maintaining relationships aspect of Wiseman’s talk. Both of these issues teach people to avoid conflict at all costs, and not how to handle it properly.
The most important thing Wiseman talked about, and mentioned over and over again, was that every person deserves dignity. Young girls, old women, everyone, even the person you might have conflict with. She said “Respect is earned, dignity is a given. Dignity is non-negotiable”. As long as we live according to that principle, we are off to a good start in keeping long, healthy relationships in all aspects of our lives.
GOTW: T.I.M.E. Stories
This week, we played a narrative mystery game called T.I.M.E. Stories. In the game you play the part of a team of time travelers sent by an organization to stop a temporal fault from occurring. Our team consisted of four players, each of which took over a receptacle (a host body) in order to explore a specific moment in time and space to stop the fault from forming. The hosts you can play as all have different strengths and weaknesses as well as abilities that can come in handy throughout a run. As a team you explore several locations across a map, fighting off enemies and solving puzzles. However, time is limited, as the organization that sent you there can only hold the link for so long before you are forced back into reality. Many roles have special abilities that can be used throughout the game to gain the upper hand for a player’s given team. The goal of the game is to successfully complete the mission in as few runs as possible, by solving the many puzzles found throughout the map.
Our story started right before we were to be connected to our hosts, and we were briefed on what we needed to do. Our team is sent back to a mental health asylum in 1921. My character was Marie Bertholet. The other characters we had were Felix Bonnunfant, Edith Jolibois, and Mademoiselle Doume. So, we set out to explore the asylum, finding keys, breaking into lockers, and trying (failing) to steal the key off a doctor in the kitchen. Playing as Marie gave me some advantages, especially when it came to the speech skill. I was able to turn any speech roll I made into a minor success. Using her to speak proved very useful in many situations throughout the asylum. However, there was one scenario with a particular orderly that was not so successful. Overall, our team seemed to move quite well, cooperating with each other, and noting down anything we found important as we went. None of us lost any health during the first part of the game, more so having issues with time as we often rolled high on the time lost dice. Our team actually worked quite well together, collectively coming to decisions, and helping each other out as much as possible. We found the secret passageway after murdering Dr. Hyacinth. By the end of the session, we had gathered two pages of a book. Unfortunately, we are near the end of our time loop, and likely will lose everything next week. However, with the knowledge we gained this week, our team should be able to proceed quite easily. I am excited to see what happens.
The hardest part of the game was deciding which options were important with the time we had remaining. While our group was very good at gathering and using information and items, we often ran into issues that cost us precious time points. Our team actually did really well with working together and sharing authority. Our abilities were actually spread pretty evenly, allowing us to prioritize where each of us should go ahead of time so that we worked as efficiently in a new location as we could. I actually believe that that is a way each of us showed leadership. While each of us took on the Time Captain role at least once, we each collaborated and based our decisions on where our strengths lie. The only time other than that that I saw leadership come into effect was deciding where to travel next. Typically, one person would propose moving locations, and then we would all agree on a location.
I loved this game so far. I love games that dig deep into lore, and this one definitely dug deep. I also thought that the mechanics really complimented it well. I loved the exploration aspect as well as the collaborative play. We all had the same goal, which I have not seen much in games I have played recently. I liked the risks we all took, as we all were curious to discover every little secret in the game. This both lead us to learn a lot in our first run, while also being something that cost us a lot of time (I am looking at you moon step man). This being said, this game definitely feels like a game you can only play once. I know there are other decks out there as well, so that makes me a bit tempted to purchase it for myself and play it with my friends. I think my friends Xavier, Katie, Korben, and Roai would love this type of game. They love narrative based games just as much as I do.