Friday, March 2, 2012

Weekly "Game Lunch"

This semester, I've (finally) gotten a social game lunch at Wittenberg in full swing. This is a great way for faculty, staff and students to interact casually, but also exercise our minds!

I've had a couple past semesters that were attended regularly, but now it is finally common to have different groups of people wanting to play different games on any given week.

Some aspects that seem to work well are the following:

* Short games with variable numbers of players. Tsuro, Tetris Link, World War 5, and Hey, that's my Fish! have all been popular.

* Games with less hidden knowledge tend to promote discussion. The less time you spend not on your turn trying to figure out what you're going to do next and more time paying attention to what other people are doing, the more you may interact with them.

* Games with shorter turns keep people interested. Hey, that's my Fish! has a problem where players may try to analyze the game too deeply to try to win this turn. This can drag turns out unnecessarily. This relates to the next point...

* Games with randomness seem to keep turns shorter. Although they're no longer combinatorial, there's still plenty of discussion/consideration in these games to keep them interesting. I bet some will disagree with me here...

I fully recommend adopting a weekly game lunch! :) Our Tuesdays have become very fun! So much fun that I've missed a bunch of Tuesday posts lately! Oops!

Next week is Wittenberg's spring break. Posts will return the following week.

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