Game Day

As a class exercise, we all brought games from home and played some with each other. In my group, we played a game called Cards Against Humanity. If you have ever played the game Apples to Apples, this is more or less the same game, but the more adult version. It's a fantastic game, especially if everyone is drinking.

The rules and game mechanics are:

1. There is a white deck and a black deck. Everyone draws ten cards from the white deck. Each white card contains a phrase, or word.
2. During each player's turn, they draw a black card, which has a subject, question, or a fill-in-the-blank sentence.
3. The player who draws the black card on his/her turn reads the card to everyone playing, and then everyone picks a card from their hand of white cards which they think fits the best.
4. Once all cards are collected, the player who read the black card reads aloud all the white cards given to him/her and proceeds to pick the card which they think either fits the best, or finds the funniest.
5. Whoever holds the most black cards at the end of the game wins.

The combination of black cards and white card answers are what make the game so hilarious. So for example, a black card might ask, "What keeps me up at night?" and answers could range from, "Daddy issues" to "Bitches." A personal favorite combination of mine is "What were Michael Jackson's final dying thoughts?" and "Kids with ass cancer." As you can tell, the combinations can get pretty heinous.

Since the goal is to collect as many black cards as possible, a core mechanic is Collection. Also, because a commonly used strategy of winning this game is predicting the sense of humor of the person who read the black card, it could also be argued that a core mechanic is Prediction.

Cards Against Humanity is a very fun game for those with a darker sense of humor. Many combinations of black and white cards are wholly unexpected, which provides a large portion of the comedy.

Its web site is here:
http://cardsagainsthumanity.com/

I strongly encourage you to give it a try.

Marshmallow Game

I recently experienced the Marshmallow Game for the first time. It is an interesting game in which a few participants must work together to build a structure out of twenty pieces of spaghetti, a piece of string, and tape, on top of which must rest the marshmallow. It was an interesting experience that demonstrated the strengths of good cooperation, and for many others, demonstrates how easily bad cooperation can lead to disaster.


Luckily, my group’s structure stood successfully. We spent much of our time in the planning phase. More than half the time was spent discussing how best to make the structure stable with the marshmallow on top. Around the five-minute mark, I began to worry that we would run out of time without having actually built anything, so I decided to urge everyone to start building something. We hurriedly settled on a triangular shape, which was reinforced by taping three parallel spaghetti sticks together for each leg, and managed to finish the structure and top it with the marshmallow just in time. Surprisingly, we had the tallest structure in the room and won the game.


Through this experience, I learned that good communication is essential to collaborative efforts. I also learned that time management is essential as well, as we had difficulty getting past the design phase.