Tag Archives: GOTW

Mysterium: A Class Reflection

This week in Tabletop Games and Leadership, we played Mysterium. I had never played Mysterium before. However, I found it to remind me of Clue and Dixit. Both of which are games I have played before. I really enjoyed this game and think I will be buying it as a Christmas gift for at least one if not both of my brothers.

I sat down at the start of class at the first spot left of the ghost. At first, I was not doing so well. I was the last to guess my room and make it to the weapons step of the “7 hours” stage. However, we collaborated well and all made it to the end area before the last round. The cards I had were the mechanic person, the blue attic with the dress in the corner, and the hammer.

We discussed living and leading as if it is “Day 1” every day. This was interesting to me because as a Student Orientation Undergraduate Leader (SOUL) this past summer, we worked as if every day was a day one because for the incoming students it was. I also have seen this in my outlook on life. I had written in a gratitude journal every day for about three years, give or take some time. This helped me see the positive in things as I lived my life. I still think I am a positive person and look at more negative events as opportunities to learn and grow.

This came into the game as we had to assist each other in reaching the end before we ran out of “hours” on the clock. For example, it took me three turns to guess the room that I needed to, instead of shutting down and thinking the worst, I learned. I knew which rooms were not mine and I recognized that I would still have enough turns to figure out the weapon as well. This helped me remain calm. 

We discussed how you will not have a good day everyday, but living in this “Day 1” mentality does not mean you will. It is more about how you approach the situation as a whole. This applies to leadership because how you approach the work you do sets a tone for the team and can impact the team for better or worse. Having this specific mentality allows you to maintain a more positive outlook and perspective on whatever you are doing. This can help keep yourself and others motivated even on the hardest days, which is very important.

The hardest part of the in class game was knowing how to interpret the clues given by the ghost. I am sure it was hard from the ghost’s side as well. Because we are all still acquaintances and do not completely understand each other’s personalities or the way we think, it was difficult to always know what we should look at in terms of card details. Once we started getting the hang of how the game worked it went pretty smoothly.

Our group did well communicating and helping each other decipher clues. This helped us overcome the initial struggles with finding the hidden messages within the ghost’s clues. Overall, I would play this game and I would also recommend it to others. I look forward to playing this with my family eventually: I guess I will get a turn as the ghost.

Game of the Week Reflection: Ultimate Werewolf

Ultimate Werewolf was the perfect way to start Tabletop Games and Leadership. The hardest part of this game was trust. Everyone had their own role and they were all trying to figure out and accuse those who were their enemies. This in turn caused the students to become overly skeptical and defensive, which is how the game now functions. It’s almost every man for himself situation because you can’t trust anyone else except for yourself. Because of this, trust is the main issue when it comes to an individual win.

This game ties into leadership because the followers blindly trust the leader. What I mean by this is once someone deviates from the main group and votes, others will subconsciously vote for that same person because they now start to follow the majority. This may not be a fair psychological way of going about things, but it is the way how people get voted out. My personal opinion on this is that it can turn the tables if there is one confident leader with devoted followers blindly agreeing with confidence at its core. There are also other leadership factors such as the person who got naturally selected to have a certain card. This can dictate the power the person automatically obtains in the game.

Overall, the session went well but was also a little chippy. There are a lot of moving parts with synergies to different characters and situations that it was difficult to grasp the concept on my first go around. There was a lot of risk in not consciously knowing who you picked and whether or not that person was a positive or negative target in the end. It’s hard to escape this however because this game is all about that risk. There is no definite answer to a multitude of things until it’s nearly too late. This, however, is similar to taking leadership. There is no finite answer to if your leadership will take off and you play that risk knowing that, which makes a good leader if you have the confidence and the consciousness to take on that feat. Logical and critically thinking people such as my uncle for example would like this game not only because of its medieval theme but also because of the thought-provoking actions that occur as well. Overall, I personally enjoyed this game and would definitely take part again.

Pandemic: A Class Reflection

In class today, we had the choice to play Pandemic or Forbidden Island. I have played Pandemic before and am the cousin to Forbidden Island, Forbidden Desert. When I arrived, the Pandemic was the game that stood out to me. This is a cooperative game where the team wins together or loses together. Key word: together. At the end of the class, we discussed different areas of leadership like seeing the bigger picture, leading by example, initiating conflict, thinking of all the possible outcomes, encouraging the team, sharing a common goal, and more.


These leadership concepts were very important to the game as they all contribute to how a group, organization, or team functions, hopefully in an effective way. When I play with my family I feel like I have a completely different function on the team than when I played in class. Because of this, I considered how my own experience and leadership impacted the game. I tried to lead by example but I also provided input which hopefully did not seem like I was too controlling. I probably could have improved in encouraging the team as we went but I do think they all did a good job contributing to our efforts.

We were able to play through the game twice and start the third game of Pandemic as well. I had a good feeling about the last game because we were all more comfortable and confident with the game. I felt like this led to more contribution and shared leadership overall. We also all had a better understanding of the process. Unfortunately, we lost the first two games. We lost when we ran out of black disease cubes during the first game. During the second game, we lost when we were no longer able to draw playing cards. This helped us learn the game as well as each other personalities and styles when it came to the cooperative format.

I disliked being the most comfortable with the game to start because I felt like I was overbearing at times, but this can also be helpful for others when they are just learning for the first time (I have been in that situation before). I did like how our teamwork improved every game we played. I also think we each paid attention to ways we could improve our gaming strategy as a whole.

I felt like this connected to the ideas we discussed in the class of how an organization may have either an executive team or a leadership team. The way this difference was described from our instructor’s perspective was intriguing to me. I felt as though our first round was built with more of an executive team or top individuals who took on the most work or ran things with more control. However, I feel like we transitioned to a leadership team as we all got more confident and were able to bounce ideas off of each other.

I like cooperative leadership teams better. In teams with executive boards, a small group of people controlling everything and seemingly doing the most, I either feel like I am not contributing enough or that I am overpowering the opinions of others in the group. By our third game, we had figured out how our personalities worked together to improve our success in the board game Pandemic.

Game of the Week Blog Reflection (For Class on 4/21/2022): T.I.M.E Stories Part 2

During our last meeting, my group from the prior week got together to finish our game of T.I.M.E. Stories. T.I.M.E. Stories is a cooperative card-based game that requires the players to travel throughout time to uncover and prevent faults in time itself. Your team works together by possessing the bodies of people present at the time and location in question and using their abilities to investigate the area and find the source of the fault. To do this, your team will have to spend Temporal Units, a resource that determines how long your team can remain in that time. Once it runs out, you will be forced to start over, only keeping certain cards and the knowledge you gained during your first “loop”. For this session, our team started on our second of these loops, and used the knowledge we gained from our previous loop to try and locate the source of the fault.

Over the course of this second session, I would say that the most difficult thing that we ran into would be the final puzzle we had to solve before we could enter the last area of the game. Without spoiling the puzzle itself, the main difficulty of this puzzle came from the multiple layers that were involved in it. Our group had to gain knowledge from several, seemingly unrelated clues spread throughout the entirety of the scenario, before finally reaching a specific location. Once at that location, our group had to use all of these clues to finally piece together the solution to the puzzle so that we could advance and complete the story. While this puzzle was certainly difficult, it was very satisfying to piece it all together, and was only possible because our group was working together and combining our knowledge of everything we had seen up until that point. 

However, what could this particular puzzle teach us about leadership? For one thing, our group was only able to finally reach the solution to the puzzle by combining all of our viewpoints and our ideas of what the various pieces of the puzzle could be referring to. Not one of us knew the entire solution, even with all of the clues, and we needed to combine our knowledge and logic to reach the solution. Similarly, a leader could not possibly succeed on their own, they need to work together with their team in order to reach  their goal. Every member’s viewpoint and skills are just as important to the team as any others, a fact that a good leader must always remember if they want to lead their team to success.

Overall, I definitely enjoyed my time with T.I.M.E. Stories. I was a bit uncertain of just how much I would enjoy it after running into issues with the rules during the prior week, but now that our team was more certain of what we were doing, it was a lot of fun! Piecing together that last puzzle was certainly the greatest highlight of our time with the game, and the journey to finally reach that solution featured a lot of interesting scenarios and discoveries that kept us glued to the game. I would definitely be interested in trying out the second story in the T.I.M.E. Stories series just to see if it has any puzzles similar to this one, along with whatever scenarios it might involve.

Game of the Week Blog Reflection (For Class on 4/14/2022): T.I.M.E Stories

In our most recent meeting, our class met to start playing T.I.M.E. Stories, a cooperative, card-based game that sees a team of player’s traveling to a specific point in time to uncover and prevent a fault in time itself. You and your teammates will be placed into the bodies of people present at that time and location, each of which will have their own specialties and limitations that affect how the team performs. Bear in mind though that every action you take to investigate the area, interacting with cards, traveling to new locations, completing tests and participating in combat, will require you to spend Temporal Units, a shared resource that determines how long you can remain in this time. The base cards at the start of the game will inform you just how many cards Temporal Units your team begins with, and reaching zero Temporal Units will force you to flip over a failure card before resetting the game and starting over. However not all items will be reset if this happens, and your own knowledge of the events can be kept. 

However, the most difficult part of playing this game for our team was not any of these mechanics specifically, but rather the rules of the game itself. T.I.M.E. Stories is a very complex board game, with a lot of various moving parts that make it quite intimidating for first-time players such as ourselves, and the rule itself does not do a good job of explaining things. There were multiple times while we were playing where we were uncertain of how something functioned, or of how a particular mechanic worked. The rule was unfortunately not very helpful on this mark, it feels poorly organized, and some things that you would expect to be explained in the rulebook are actually only explained on cards, meaning that you won’t actually be able to fully understand how the game plays until you start playing it yourself.

With this in mind though, what does T.I.M.E. Stories have to do with leadership? Personally, I believe that one of T.I.M.E Stories best contributions to leadership is its emphasis on teamwork. Given that Temporal Units are in such short supply, the players are heavily encouraged to strategize before deciding anything, determining which team members should interact with which cards. Sharing information is also critical if the players hope to advance through the game, as clues acquired at one location are possibly required to complete tasks later on. Similarly, if a leader hopes to accomplish any of their team’s goals, they need to ensure that their team members are working together and cooperating effectively. If a team does not work well together, progress on whatever project or goal they may be working towards will slow to halt, so a leader must ensure that their team members compliment each other.

Overall, I do think I had fun with T.I.M.E. Stories, though the issues that we ran into with the rules certainly did make it more stressful than I expected it to be at times. Now that our team has a better understanding of the rules and how they fit together, I would like to see if we could make more progress next week, as we saved our game at the end of our first “run”. I would also be interested in trying out some of the other Stories that have been created for the game, as one group in particular was actually playing the second Story, and it appeared to function very differently from the Story that our group was playing.

Game of the Week Blog Reflection (For Class on 4/7/2022): Ladies and Gentlemen

During this past Thursday, our class got together to play Ladies and Gentlemen, a cooperative board game where players are split into teams of two, a Lady and a Gentleman, who each have very different roles in the game. The Ladies are playing a card drafting game as they attempt to set up boutiques and create the best outfit for the upcoming ball. Meanwhile, the Gentlemen are playing a dexterity game as they race each other to try and acquire stocks in goods to sell or fulfill contracts. Once both the Ladies and Gentlemen have completed their tasks, the Ladies then pass over the garments and accessories that they picked out to buy during the day for the Gentle to either pay for, pay a much smaller amount to put them on hold until they can acquire more money, or discard them.

I personally played as a Gentleman during our session, though I could tell just from observing the other side of the table that the Ladies had a much more complex side of the game. During the entire time they were drafting their boutiques, shopping for their outfits and choosing which ones they wanted to ask their Gentleman to pay for, they had to consider how many elegance points these pieces had, whether they had a piece of that kind already, and whether they had too many designers or not. With all of those things that have to be considered at any given time, I would certainly say that drafting and choosing what cards to place in their boutique is the hardest part of this game, both due to the sheer amount of things that have to be considered for it to be accomplished successfully, and for the fact that all of that effort may end up being wasted if their Gentleman just simply wasn’t able to make enough money to pay for it. This difficulty in planning and drafting is only exasperated by the blind nature of the game, as Gentlemen are not allowed to share just how much money they have with their Lady, and Ladies are not allowed to share what clothes they are planning on trying to buy with their Gentleman until they are ready to pass them over.

However, while this planning may be the most difficult aspect of the game, it may also be an excellent window into what Ladies and Gentlemen can teach us about leadership. For one thing, Ladies and Gentlemen requires the Lady players to be able to plan out their turns without knowing exactly what resources they will have available to them, and to possibly make contingency plans by grabbing extra articles of clothing and accessories. Similarly, unexpected issues or shortages of resources may occur when working on a project, and a good leader will need to be able to plan for these possibilities. This could include contingency plans to work around those issues and shortages, or gathering more resources ahead of time to work around any shortages that may come up. Either way, a leader and their team creating plans like these ahead of time will help mitigate any issues that come up during whatever project they may be dealing with.

Overall, I very much enjoyed playing Ladies and Gentlemen as a Gentleman. The game can be quite tense if you struggle to find resources you need for contracts or if another Gentleman manages to fulfill a contract first and take your bonus. From everything I saw, the Ladies half of the game may be even more tense, and if given the opportunity I would be very interested in playing Ladies and Gentlemen again just so I can see what that  half of the game feels like to play in comparison to the Gentleman’s half. However, even if I wasn’t able to attempt the game’s other set of rules, I would still most certainly be willing to play the game again to experience the chaos of a fake stock market.

Game of the Week Blog Reflection (For Class on 3/10/2022): Two Rooms and a Boom

Very recently, our class got together to play Two Rooms and a Boom and discuss just what it has to do with Leadership. Two Rooms and a Boom is a hidden role game where the players are split into two teams, the red team and the blue team, based upon the role card they were dealt. The players are then divided between two rooms, and must try their best to achieve their goals by trading “hostages” after each timed round. The blue team, along with whatever other role cards are dealt, has the President card, and the red team has the Bomber card. The blue team must try to ensure that the President is not in the same room as the Bomber by the end of the game, while the red team must ensure that the Bomber and President are in the same room. Alongside these basic roles are several advanced roles, that either change how you interact with the other players, grant new abilities, or even place the player on the grey team with their own, unique win condition. By sharing either your full role or just the color of your card with other players, you can begin to gather information and help your team manipulate the rooms to their advantage.

However, it was many of these new abilities and restrictions that I believe were the most difficult part of the game to deal with. For instance, several of the restrictive roles either made it very difficult to interact with other players and gather information. For instance, the Mime rendered you completely unable to speak, and the Blind requires you to keep your eyes closed so long as the card is in your possession. The Mime makes the game far more difficult as carrying on a conversation and gathering information now requires an effective means of communication without words, which not everyone may be able to perform well or understand. The Blind is likely the most restrictive, as they can no longer view other player’s cards at all and must simply make a judgment on whether they trust what they are told or not. While these certainly don’t make it impossible to gather the required information, they definitely make it far more difficult, and the Blind especially requires the other players be willing to work alongside this player and aid them as they travel between the rooms and gather their own information. 

While these roles create a very large source of difficulty, I feel that they may also be the most important glimpse into an aspect of leadership. These roles, by greatly restricting the abilities of the player or forcing them to be something akin to shy, could represent different disabilities or walks of life, with the Blind likely being the most clear representation of this idea. As such, it is important to remember that while these people might have different needs and abilities, they are still very much people, and can still be the deciding factor in whether a team wins or loses. Similarly, Leaders need to remember that disadvantaged people are still people, and can provide just as much if not more to a team they are placed on as any other person. While they may need some aid in some aspects, there is no reason that they should ever be treated as lessor, and it is the job of a leader to ensure that this is the case. 

Beyond all of this though, I certainly did have a lot of fun with Two Rooms and a Boom. The game can be quite chaotic, and that chaos can be quite enjoyable if its own thanks to your own social skills or even luck that allowed it to happen. Even when the game isn’t chaotic though, being able to use your social skills to both work with your team and manipulate the other team to ensure that events play out as you want them to can be quite entertaining, especially when everything falls into place. With this in mind, I would very much like to play this game again at some point, perhaps in hopes of getting different than I did during this session or just simply to have fun creating chaos with friends.

Game of the Week Blog Reflection (For Class on 3/3/2022): Mental Blocks

During this past week, our class got together to play two games, Mental Blocks and Survive! Escape from Atlantis. Each of us were allowed to choose which game we wanted to play, with the option to even play both of them if we had enough time. Personally, I chose to play Mental Blocks, a cooperative puzzle game where the players attempt to build a specific shape using a series of foam blocks and each player’s clue card within the allotted time. However, each player is only allowed to look at their own individual clue, and each clue sees the target object from a different perspective without stating what that perspective is. It is this particular aspect of the game that I believe makes it so difficult, as if everyone is attempting to create their own individual piece of the puzzle, then they will rarely match the solution unless the players discuss what their perspective depicts and determine specifically which perspective each player holds. However, this was often easier said than done, as the time limit causes most people to immediately begin trying to build their particular perspective, rather than taking a moment to discuss. 

As for the gameplay session itself, our group played Mental Blocks several times, but only managed to actually succeed once or twice. During our first game, we actually played without the time limit and used restrictions that limited what blocks players could move or how they could communicate, and as a result were able to successfully complete our first puzzle. For all of the following puzzles though, we chose to use the time limit, and from there winning became far harder as we simply could not establish whose perspective was which and began to argue over what our cards depicted, building and rebuilding the same incorrect shapes rather than finding the correct one.

Despite these losses, I still feel that we can learn something about Leadership from Mental Blocks. For instance, most of our losses in the game could be attributed to our tendency to build our own perspective first before consulting anyone else. Similarly, in a leadership or group situation, if multiple people in the group have their own, conflicting goals, then the group as a whole may struggle to make any progress at all. In situations like this, the group will only be able to recover if the leader is able to step up and force a compromise of some sort, where both parties gain some, but not all, of what they wanted. This also applied in our games of Mental Blocks, as at least one player was required to set aside their own clue and attempt to parse what everyone else’s clues depicted instead. 

Overall, I had a lot of fun playing Mental Blocks, even if we were only able to succeed once or twice over the many puzzles we attempted. Attempting to parse together various clues while struggling with whatever restriction you receive is quite enjoyable, and as a side goal while playing you can also try to determine what everyone else’s restrictions are. I would very much be interested in playing the game again at some point, perhaps trying to determine what everyone’s perspective is depicting rather than building my own to see if that helps us succeed at all.

Game of the Week Blog Reflection (For Class on 2/24/2022): Fiasco Week 2

Recently, our class got together to finish our existing sessions of the Fiasco Role Playing Game that we had started the week prior. The Fiasco RPG System is designed with the intent of creating chaos for the players to react to and incorporate into their stories. In this session, rather than creating characters once again, we began by performing our “Tilt” The Tilt involves using the dice that have yet to handed out to other players in order to select new Elements to add to the story, using the similar method of defining a category before establishing the more specific meaning behind that Element. Once these twists have been added, we then moved on to Act Two, where we continued to tell our characters’ stories by acting out scenes while including the twists that had been determined in the Tilt. Once we had given out all of our dice, we then moved onto the Aftermath, where we each used our dice to determine how well our character’s story ended and told these stories one die at a time. 

For this second half of our Fiasco session, I personally think the most difficult aspect was trying to incorporate the Elements that we discovered in our Tilt into our existing story. Our Tilt involved two Elements, a stranger arriving to settle a score and someone developing a conscience. Before we could even begin to act out our scenes, we tried to think about ways that we could include those elements moving forward, such as by having our stranger be connected to more than one of our players, and by allowing one of existing characters to gain a conscience and using that to prompt a character arc. While I believe we were able to resolve our tilts very well, it was still likely the most difficult part of this session, and attempting to involve those elements without planning ahead like we had likely would have resulted in the whole story falling apart. 

As for the session itself, it was decided that our rival lemonade salesmen would be presented with a new issue: an employee from the company that made their lemonade stands arriving to reclaim a stand that was not paid for (A stranger arriving to settle a score), which introduced a new issue for both the innocent party and the guilty party. However, while this was being settled the “wizard” from the previous session gained a conscience and attempted to reform themselves into a businessman. Once all of the other plot points had progressed however, the estranged relatives finally settled their scores as one of them attempted to murder the other, and the sound of sirens gathered the remaining characters. The Aftermath then set the background for these characters futures, with the attempted murder landing one relative in jail while the other made a full recovery, one of the lemonade salesman running away with a EMT adn the other losing the spark that made them enjoy the business, and the “wizard” turned businessman reverting back to their “wizardly” ways. 

However, what more is there to learn from Fiasco that we haven’t learned already. Personally, I think the potential difficulty of incorporating the Tilt might contain an insight into leadership as a whole, as was how we were able to mitigate the difficulty of it. A leader needs to be able to account for unexpected setbacks as they attempt to lead their team to their goal, and to plan for a way to get around those setbacks and account for them. Similarly, our group needed to be able to plan how to include our Tilt Elements in our story, even though we didn’t know what they would be until our Tilt happened. As such, I personally think that our planning session not only allowed us to mitigate the harm the Tilt could cause to our story, but was also an example of how you might be able to use planning to be a more effective leader when faced with the unexpected.

My Brief Mind-Boggling Memoir ‘Bout Mental Blocks

This week, I returned to the cooperative genre of board games with the game Mental Blocks. A group of 2 to 9 players (we played with 6) each has a card that only they can see showing either a sideview of colored blocks or a black-and-white view of a corner of a structure, then they must use foam blocks to build a structure that satisfies all the images that the players have. The rounds are limited by time, which was 9 minutes for 6 players, but after a couple failed rounds, our group simply tried to succeed AT ALL. Once we figured out a good strategy, we managed to start solving puzzles in under a minute. Luckily, the game includes ways to change the difficulty of the puzzles. In addition to a set of “Challenging” puzzles, there are restriction and glitch cards that give players additional rules, such as being unable to speak or touch foam blocks of a certain size, shape, or color. By the time class concluded, we had found a difficulty that worked well for us (around a 50% win rate).

The hardest part, by far, was trying to build what was on your card while not ruining what somebody else had built or needed to build. In one instance, another player and I both had blue blocks on our cards but another had zero blue, so we were trying to build this structure in a way that showed blue but also hid it from a single side. Another time, I swore a shape looked one way on my card but everybody else knew it couldn’t physically be shaped like I said. In our efforts to complete our objective right, we had to slow down and build the shape together or we would build something that couldn’t be correct and refuse to let others touch it.

Thinking about that in terms of leadership, one could say the exact same thing about projects where everybody has different interpretations of the same goal. 5 different people could be united under the same cause, but because they are 5 minds who each have their own vision of how that goal will be achieved, they are also 5 people competing to realize their individual dream. A great leader is somebody who includes everybody’s perspectives, crafting a plan that unites everybody’s ideas rather then letting them be until they inevitably butt heads.

I believe my brother would very much like playing Mental Blocks. He and I have fantastic communication and love playing games together that challenge that. Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Overcooked, and so on. Since the game does work with a minimum of 2 players, I’d like to see how he and I fair against the game’s challenges and glitches. Mental Blocks is a very simply premise, but it turns out to be a really cognitively challenging game that I highly recommend.