Tag Archives: Event Reflection

Gaming Event Reflection: Strategy Gaming Club

On Tuesday, February 15th, I attended a gaming event here on campus, specifically one of the Strategy Gaming Club’s (SGC) meetings. SGC is a student organization that provides a time and place for students to play all sorts of tabletop games, as well providing a wide selection of these games at each Sunday and Tuesday meeting. Additionally, SGC also has a group of members that have been hosting sessions of the Warhammer series of games, as well as miniatures for players to use with the games on Wednesdays. Recently though, these Wednesday meetings have been taking place alongside the Tuesday meetings, allowing those who usually could not come to the Wednesday meetings to play various Warhammer games during the Tuesday meetings instead.  

SGC Tuesday meetings allow the attendants to play whatever tabletop games they want to, assuming that the organization owns those games and have brought the games with them to this meeting. Due to the fact these games could require any amount of space, the organization itself does not perform any setup of the room themselves beyond bringing the tabletop games, instead allowing the members to break up the large rectangle of tables themselves in order to create the space that they need for their chosen tabletop games. As a result, the only part of the room left in its initial state is often the far end of the tables, which are where the games not being played are located. However, this more hands-on setup is typically not a problem, as all of the attendees will often move the tables back into their initial place once they are done playing games, and the table is no longer in use. 

Of course, you will need to get a group of players together for most of these tabletop games, but the other attendees of these meetings are usually more than willing to arrange groups to play larger games or join you for a game you would like to play. In many cases you might be able to play multiple different tabletop games in one meeting, but at this particular meeting I was only able to fit one game in, though I enjoyed it quite a lot. I was only able to play this game due to the fact that SGC was able to move some of its Warhammer content over to the Tuesday meetings.

Warhammer and it’s various games are something that I’ve been interested in for quite some time now, but I have never been able to experience them myself due to the large cost of building an army of miniatures and lacking any time to attend SGC’s Wednesday meetings. As such, now that Warhammer is being hosted during the Tuesday meetings, I jumped at the chance to finally play these games myself. During this meeting specifically, I played Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress, a Campaign Dungeon-Crawler game set in the Warhammer 40k universe, along with three other players.

In Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress (Blackstone), you play as a group of explorers searching for relics and riches within the depths of an ancient space-faring fortress. These expeditions into the fortress take place in two distinct phases, the exploration phase and the facility phase. In the exploration phase, the players draw a card from the exploration deck, which determines what they will find in this area of the fortress. In our session, we only drew Combat cards from this deck, but other areas of the fortress will feature other challenges. Combat encounters in particular are quite complex, as they require the players to balance not only their own actions, but also their position in initiative, the group pool of Destiny Dice for additional actions and the potential actions that their enemies may take based on the roll of a twenty-sided die. After each exploration phase, the players have the option to exit the Fortress and enter the facility phase, where they can use their character’s ships to perform various actions and purchase items using the loot they have gathered, though each player can only visit one ship. From this point the players can either save their characters by placing their character cards and loot in their special card sleeve and stop for the time being or reenter the Fortress.

    As Blackstone is a Campaign game, my group is still quite far from finishing it, but I had quite a lot of fun with the combat encounters that we were able to play through. However, I do not think that the fun I felt was purely attributed to the game, but to the people I was playing with as well. For one thing, one of the players in this group is actually someone that I have known since my first semester here at Miami, and that I would consider a good friend. And the two other players, even if we only recently met, were still more than willing to discuss the things they enjoy and just generally have a good time while at the meeting. This general feeling of openness and acceptance is not just something that applies to this particular meeting, as it is something that I have found in every meeting of SGC that I have attended. 

I believe that it is because of this open and accepting feeling that I enjoy my time with SGC so much, both this meeting and any other. No matter what group of people I choose to play with, or what game we are playing, I enjoy my time while I am there. The community their organization has built is just so accepting and so committed to having fun that it seems to be hard not to have fun while playing tabletop games with them. Not only that, but if the game you are playing happens to be a game that you are unfamiliar with, and someone else is very familiar with, the more experienced players will typically jump at the opportunity to share something that they love with someone new. This exact scenario is what happened during the above meeting, as while I am still relatively new to the people that play Warhammer at SGC’s meetings, they were very excited to help teach me the games that they enjoy so much.

As I have expressed throughout this reflection, I have always been able to enjoy my time spent at SGC, and the meeting on February 15th was simply an example of just why that is. The community that the Strategy Gaming Club’s officers have been able to build over their time is just simply such a welcoming and open one. As a result the entire organization just has a friendly and accepting atmosphere that makes it clear that having fun and meeting new people should be the number one priority, and that the tabletop games available are simply a way to meet those people and build those friendships. Even after all of this time, there are still new people in the organization to meet, and new games to play, and so the environment that SGC provides will always be appreciated.

A selfie of myself at SGC, with some of the people I was playing Blackstone with in the background.
A picture of a combat encounter in Blackstone. The miniatures had not been painted yet, so unfortunately almost all of them are pure black.
(Unfortunately, I’m not sure how to rotate it in the blog post.)
My character card, showing the two wounds I had suffered at this point and the rewards I had gathered to the side of the card.

Dr. Michio Kaku

Yesterday, on March 9, 2020, I attended the campus leadership lecture led by Dr. Michio Kaku. Dr. Kaku is most famous for being a co-theorist of string theory and has also written several best-selling books about physics and the future. Additionally, he also has been in several TV documentaries about his discoveries and even hosts a podcast. Currently, he teaches theoretical physics at City University of New York and I must say, even though I am not good at physics, I would love to be in one of his classes. Dr. Kaku explained things in his lecture that should have been extremely complicated, but he made complex ideas and concepts sound easy to grasp. Dr. Kaku had a sense of humor that was apparent throughout his talk. I was quite surprised about how much of a great personality he has, considering he is so brilliant. The lecture was one of the quickest hours of my life. 

I have always been fascinated with the future. What will it be like? Will it be possible to make myself immortal? Will flying cars exist? Can I teleport? As I have gotten older, these questions have frequented my mind less and less. However, Dr. Kaku was the opposite and showed what can be developed and conceptualized with those probing questions. Not only that, but Dr. Kaku expanded outside of the realm of physics and applied his findings and theories to outside sectors, such as healthcare, finance, and the humanities. Hearing Dr. Kaku reaffirm that humanities, reading, and writing will always be important to the professor made me happy because I feel that so many scientists are so quick to dismiss things like that. 

Considering history, there have been several identifiable “booms:” the Industrial Revolution, the inventions that came out of the Cold War, the computer boom, the robotics boom, and the ever-looming artificial intelligence (AI) boom. AI and virtual reality (VR) are already prevalent in today’s world, but not in a way that can benefit all of society. For example, most people associate AI and VR with the Oculus Rift or comparable headsets. However, AI and VR can extend into the world of art. Dr. Kaku showed some crude images that had been printed from dreams using modern and seemingly futuristic technology. He extended out simple images by saying that one day, we will be able to record our dreams and watch them in videos the morning after. Continuing off of that, maybe one day, Alzheimer’s patients will be able to have a memory chip in their brains that can help combat the symptoms. There are so many possibilities considering AI, VR, and the future. Hearing someone as well-respected in the field as Dr. Kaku made the child in me excited. 

One thing that is drilled into my head as a finance major is risk. We must analyze all risk, where it came from, and how we can get rid of it. I feel like a lot of other people do not consider this, but I was happy when someone decided to ask about the riskiness of having AI and VR controlling our lives and being implemented into our cars and houses. It is a huge invasion of privacy, but Dr. Kaku addressed the question appropriately and mentioned how Big Brother is always watching us. Additionally, he mentioned that like everything else, there is a degree of risk that may not be certain or completely known. That is something that will be better known when it becomes apparent. That information can help combat future risk, although it cannot be fully eliminated. Another thing that I believe could have also been addressed during this question is ethics regarding AI and VR. As Dr. Kaku is such a famous scientist, it would have been interesting to hear what he thinks about the ethics of the government listening in and the little privacy we do have. I do think it was interesting that he did mention that the Internet was never created to be private, though.

Following the lecture, I attended the reception. As expected, there was a very long line to go meet him and of course, it had been a long day for him so there was not any time to ask a question or speak with him. However, being able to have gotten the opportunity to meet someone so respectable is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Not only that, but so many scientific things that I have heard have some connection to Dr. Kaku. Hearing him speak reignited the flame in the child inside of me and has me considering all the possibilities that come with the future. One of Dr. Kaku’s books is next on my reading list. I am also thrilled that Miami University offers us opportunities like this to engage with leaders in their respective fields through lecture series like these. Prior to this, all the on-campus lectures I had attended had been through Farmer, since those tend to align more closely with my interests. However, I was pleasantly surprised at how applicable another field could be to my life. In the future, I plan to look more into the lecture series on campus to see who else is speaking.

Game Event Review: RECON 2020

I attended the 2020 League of Geeks RECON event February 22nd and 23rd. RECON involved many activities in several different rooms in Armstrong and it was a bit overwhelming, but at the same time, was incredibly fun to go to. On the morning of the 22nd I participated in the Game Awards. This was the first year RECON was holding a Game Awards where students on campus could turn in the games they have created to be played by others at RECON and by a judge. I turned in two games with two different teams. I created a board game based off of the infuriating video game I Am Bread with Jeremy, Juliette, and Steven during our IMS 211 class and we decided to put that into the running. I also turned in a game called Nexia that I created with Bryan, Seth, and Jonathan during our IMS 212 class. We created a game that was based on Risk, Catan, and a dash of DnD roleplay. It was a strategic resource and army management game with a board that is different every time it is played. Players explore new lands and collect resources to build towns and armies. During the Game Awards playing session. I taught the game to two girls who came to the event. It is a very complicated game to explain, but they got a hang of it quickly and had fun doing so and voted for the game as their choice to win. The judge came by to ask questions of the girls while they were playing and took notes and went to go judge the others. The announcement would be tomorrow, but after the girls left, I had to pack up and run to go do volunteering for a different club of mine. I forgot a lot of the rules that my team and I created for the game and I hadn’t played the game since last semester, so it was a bit difficult for me to explain correctly. I also felt like I was keeping the players from other events they wanted to go to because my game was so long. Also, because it was long, the judge never even got a chance to play the game. Next year I will probably create a new game that will hopefully be shorter to play. I also think that the Game Awards should be advertised a lot more and encourage more people to turn in their games. Many IMS students make games for classes anyways, but there weren’t many games that were participating in the awards. There weren’t many people who came by to playtest the game either. I think location was a big issue there. The room was so far away from everything else so no one would walk by to see and be interested in it. I hope Game Awards will be much bigger next year.

Later that night, I came back to RECON to volunteer for Miami Game Design Club. I am vice president and I signed up to run the Murder Mystery for 2 hours and ended up staying there with my friends until closing time. The Murder Mystery was something we started creating last semester and involved a group of around 5 people to come into a room and read a bunch of different documents and piece together the murder of Steve, a journalist from the 1920s. We worked very hard on this event for a while and I was happy to run the event. The players looked to be very excited to play and some people did solve the murder in the end. I believe our event was a success which I was worried it wouldn’t be. All of the information to solve the murder was in documents and I thought players would get tired of reading so many papers that we created. Many of them created charts and timelines on the white boards and they really put their heads together to figure out new information. We could have made it more definitive though because it seemed that even when people got the answer, they weren’t positive they got it right. I did like our decorations and the story we created. It was very entertaining and because it was set in the 1920s, the last group ended up playing music through his phone to set the tone of the room. It was a very chill atmosphere and I would have loved to play our own murder mystery if I didn’t know the answers already.

On Sunday, I planned to come to RECON for the Game Awards and then go back to my dorm because it was an incredibly long weekend. I came to the pavilion where the Game Award announcements would be held and chatted with my friends until the judge came. It was a very small ceremony where the player’s choice and the judge’s decision were announced. My game ended up taking the win and I was very excited. One of my teammates was there and I gave him a little fist bump. It was very helpful to get feedback on the game we created from our class. He gave us a notecard with the notes he took about the game and his ratings on characteristics about it. He gave a high rating on the art which I created, and this gave me a lot of confidence. The entire Game Awards event seemed underwhelming. I know it is the first year it was held, but I wish it held a little more importance. There wasn’t a lot of time given for people to playtest the games and give their feedback. The judge couldn’t even play all the games in that time. The room was so tucked away from everything else, so it felt like an afterthought. During the awards announcement, the judge was late and there wasn’t much of an audience. The audience that was there was either the people who made the games, and people who just so happened to be in the same pavilion playing games on their own. The announcement was made off to the side of the pavilion and I didn’t feel much accomplishment even though my team won. Even my teammate seemed to be falling asleep even though it was noon on a Sunday. I hope next year is much more exciting. I think the Game Awards could really be something special that people look forward to every single year.

As I said, I only planned to come for the Game Awards announcements then I would leave. I didn’t leave. I got sucked into playing some of the play-to-win board games with my friends. This was probably the most fun I had all weekend. We played Planet and Root. Planet was an amazing game and it was simple to learn and understand. Each of us had a magnetic planet that we added terrain tiles to and tried to win animals during the rounds to have them inhabit our planets. All my friends really hoped that one of us would be able to win it so we can continue to play it after this event. After Planet, I was really intrigued by a game named Root. The art style reminded me a lot of the video game Night in the Woods. My friends and I pulled that game out and were suddenly overwhelmed by it. This game is very complicated, and each person is playing their own separate game with different objectives. We had two people come over to us to try to explain how the game worked and eventually we were able to start. We sadly could only play through 2 rounds before we had to pack up and put it back so the prize drawings could start. I really loved the idea of playing a game that will be randomly given to a person who played it. Free games are always fun but playing them first gives them an idea of how it works and an appreciation if they win it. It was also just a fun time to play with my friends.

The last part of my RECON experience was the prize drawings for both the ticket drawings and the play-to-win game drawings. The atmosphere during the drawings was incredible. Everyone was a good sport and hyped up every single person who won something, even if they themselves lost. It was humorous and relaxing. I didn’t win during the ticket drawings, but I did win the game Root which I was really hoping for. I now own Root and the title of Game Awards winner and that felt pretty good leaving Armstrong that day. After such a hard week and busy weekend. RECON created a positive atmosphere for me to forget my worries and just play with friends. I even got to play Bohnanza with my friends after the drawings which has been our collectively favorite game recently. The League of Geeks brings together so many nerdy and geeky people to one area to just forget about life and have fun playing and creating. RECON is such a large event and I was happy to be both a participate and a volunteer. I could appreciate it on both sides. I highly recommend that anyone should go next year. There is bound to be at least one event during the weekend that interests you.

RECON Reflection

On February 21th, 2020, I did something I have never done before and something I thought I would never do: attend a video game conference. Under any normal circumstance, I would not have attended. I did not know anyone there and I have no clue how to play video games. However, there was an exception: Ultimate Werewolf. We played Ultimate Werewolf on the first day of class and it was so much fun that I just had to go to RECON to play it again. 

Since I did not want to go to RECON alone, I decided to bring my boyfriend with me. He plays more video games than I do and actually had some semblance as to what was happening. We arrived shortly before midnight, pumped to play Ultimate Werewolf. It was his first time playing and since I enjoyed it so much, he figured that he would try his hand at the game too.

This version of Werewolf was much different than what we played in class. This was the “legacy” mode, where instead of Werewolves versus Villagers, it was Werewolves versus Villagers versus the British versus the person who had to guess what team would end up dying (I forgot his character name). Upon receiving my card, I realized that I was the Diseased and had Coronavirus (defined by the Moderator). This meant that if I died, the Werewolves could not kill anyone that night either, since they also had Coronavirus. I was amused to be the Diseased since my role protected my fellow villagers for another night. In a way, my role reminded me of the “medic” but in a more broad way, as they saved the entire village for a night. I was looking forward to learning the dynamic of the group and becoming more involved as the game continued, but unfortunately, I was killed on the first night. I ended up being okay with this since my boyfriend was still in the game and I could watch him try to live until the last possible second. Surprisingly, he made it nearly to the end and his team, the Brits, were the victors of the game.

The Legacy version of this game was quite interesting and very bloody. It seemed like as someone died, they were able to also kill another person or two along with them. For example, everytime one of the Brits died, they had to take out someone to either their left or their right in addition to them. There was also the unique role of the Leprechaun who had the power to shift the wolves’ target either one to the left or the right.  As I watched, I saw that the Leprechaun saved a few people on the Villager team a few times. I also saw how my boyfriend was supposed to be killed twice, but because of the Leprechaun, he made it out alive. 

This version of Ultimate Werewolf was less fun than the way we played in class on Week 1. Part of that has to do with the fact that no one knew anyone during Week 1, whereas everyone playing at RECON seemed to know each other and quite well, too. When I entered the Armstrong Pavilion at around midnight, I was immediately stressed and a bit anxious. Usually, whenever I walk into a room at Miami, I am able to recognize a handful of people and approach them for conversation and guidance. This was not the case with RECON. I only knew myself and my boyfriend, and I tend to get extremely introverted in situations when I do not know people. As a result, I mostly people-watched and did not interact with many individuals. I think I would have had more fun at this event if I knew more people or if everyone was a stranger. 

After leaving from Armstrong, my boyfriend made an observation to me. I am a business student and spend most of my time in Farmer, so I know so many people who are involved within the business community. When I walk into a room full of business students, it is not weird, awkward, or stressful because I know a handful of people in each room. However, someone like my biology major boyfriend walks into a room full of business students and is stressed because he does not know anyone or what is going on, so he likes to stand back and people-watch.  Me walking into RECON resembled him walking into a gathering with business students. I was simply at an event where I knew no one, so I kept to myself. 

Although I only saw about two hours worth of RECON, it looked like it was a blast for people who enjoy gaming. There were screens everywhere and video games of all kinds were being played. I had another friend who ended up going to RECON for a different event and he had a phenomenal time. I would not be surprised if I found myself here again next year to people-watch and try my hand at some non-video games. Had it not been for EDL290, I would have never known that RECON existed and I never would have had a chance to see a gaming event on Miami’s campus. It is a goal of mine to try to attend as many things outside of my scope of interests while I am in school, and this ticked off another thing on the list for me. I will say that I did enjoy RECON more than anticipated and look forward to possibly attending other gaming events on campus.