January 28

Today was the day that we had to present our final games.  It was interesting and exciting to see what people have made and come up with.  The game that I ended up playing was a spin off of Settlers, and it was fun.  It was a race to see who could get to the middle first to start "colonizing" the ore in the middle.

The class as a whole though, was really fun.  I never knew of so many games  before.  I was always stuck playing Settlers or Monopoly or big long games like them.  But coming into the class I was excited to play new games and just talk to poeple and see how others react when playing games.  It was fun and exciting to learn such new games.  I would highly recommend this class to anyone.  I never really felt like I was going to class during Interim.  People would always laugh when I told them what I was taking, and I just looked at them and asked what they were taking and laughed at them for actually having to do work and study and read books.  I would take this class all over again and use my knowledge of games to try and branch out, and try new games even more.

January 24

Today in class we played the game warewolf.  It is a game similiar to Mafia.  I have never played either version before, so it was really fun and interesting to learn it.  The first game was fun to learn because we did a smaller scale version of it instead of the whole class.  It was interesting to see how the game changed once we included the whole class together.  The rules were easy to understand once you learned the game and remembered how to play.  I would definitely play the game again, because it was fun.  Next time though we would need a better narrator to make sure the game feels fresh and exciting of how people died.

January 23

Today in class I learned Stone Age.  The game was really fun, and at the end of it, I did options that I wouldn't have done, but I wanted to prolong the game.  In the game you had workers who got you resources that you could spend on either more workers, tools to help gather resources, or buy victory points in various ways.  At the end of each persons turn you had to pay food for your workers to survive.  If you didn't have enough food, you would then have to pay 10 victory points and next round you would need to get more food.  The game was a blast, and Seth did a great job explaining it to us.  We all seemed to pick it up quite fast and it made the game more enjoyable.

We then worked on our group game, and we put more details and actually made better cards regarding our game.  We need to test our game again, but we are planning on doing that tomorrow or sometime this weekend before next week.

Late blog post.  Unfortunately I missed the memo about completing the self-assessment form, so hopefully I am able to do that now.  I think that during the first teaching, I tried hard to explain what was happening, and try to get all the different scenarios out, so they could see what was happening.  I tried to show different options of what they could do when it was their turn, and I think that is why I was kind of happy I didn't play even though it did get boring just watching.  Next time, I will explain just as much, but when we play, I can also show different options while we play.  Show different things of what I was doing in a way to help them learn the game.  I don't think my approach to gaming has changed because I like learning a game, and after awhile of playing it and getting to know it better going to teach it to someone else so they can repeat the cycle.  I think that after the first game, the other students playing understood what they were doing.  I believe they enjoyed it.  Everyone was engaged and I cannot remember them playing on their phones or looking around.  They mostly tried to help everyone play the piece that they had drawn.  Some rules I neglected because they didn't come into play until the end.  Maybe I should have stated those rules sooner and maybe they would have changed how they played.  I tried to share as much strategy as I could to try and help them learn the game better.

January 22

Today in class, I taught my game.  I taught Alhambra.  The game went smoothly once my group had an idea of what they were doing.  The only problem we had, is you are only allowed to rearrange your board/city on your turn, and we had one player who decided to try different combinations of his city.  He actually put his city back everytime, but we sometimes had to help him put it back to the original city. 

The second half of the class, I learned the game Shadows over Camelot.  The game went kinda smooth after we figured out what we were doing, but the person teaching it struggled very hard teaching it.  It almost seemed like he had a hard time figuring out what to do.  It was bad, that I was actually trying to lose the game, so we could leave or more particular so I could leave.  That was probably bad sportmaship on my part, but I could not stand sitting there.  The game though once we knew what we were doing went smoother.  We still had troubles, but it wasn't as bad as when he was first trying to teach us.

January 21

Today in class, I was part of a group that learned the game San Juan.  San Juan is a card game to where you build buildings which gives victory points to win.  The game was fun once you learned what cards were good and not good or how some cards have special abilities that allow you pick up more cards or allow you to use less cards to build the new buildings.  Those were a little confusing to pick up and understand, but once you got the hang of it, San Juan was a fun game to play.  The group I played with, was a great group to play with.  We all picked up the game super fast and we all had a good laugh while we were playing.

After we finished our game, we had time to continue designing our final game.  Our group's game is coming along and we played it for the first time yesterday.  We have some things we have to work out, but our game is coming along.

January 20

Today in class we played cooperative games.  The game that I played for the entire time was legendary.  Legendary is a game that I previously played before and had great amounts of fun playing.  It is a card game to where you build a deck of cards over time to defeat hentchmen and the mastermind.  There are ways to lose, and obviously ways to win.  We ended up winning both times we played today.  We had to work with each other in order to win, but then it is a competetion to see who ends up with the most victory points at the end of the game.  It is a great game and I will definitely play it again.