Untitled - August 18, 2025

00:00:00 Speaker: Welcome to pick Up and Delivery, the podcast, where I pick up my audio recorder as I walk away from the ATM and deliver an episode to you while I stroll home. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoon listeners. It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago. Pretty hot, feeling very warm on halfway through my longer than usual walk. I'm heading back from the ATM, so maybe I shouldn't be telling you that, but you can't come and mug me because this is not in real time. So take that. I'm joking. You listeners wouldn't do that to me, I don't think. Now, if I play you in a particularly vicious game, all bets are off. But anyhow. So I'm walking home and it is early August now. I think it's August seventh, and that means that I am in full blown preparing for this semester mode. What I have here is. a list of the games that I am using in my Tabletop Games and Communities class. This time around, I am actually teaching both of my board game focused classes in the fall, which I'm fine about, but I'm also a little bit sad about it, because it might mean that I'm not teaching any board game classes in the spring, and I really like teaching one at a time, so teaching two will be interesting. These are both courses I've taught several times in the past. The Tabletop Games and Communities course is the subject is actually social objects, the idea being that you are a member of a community and this object is about creating and shaping community. What we're doing in the class is exploring how do board games work. What do they do to create and shape community, and what's the process of creating one? So that's the idea. Let's jump into it. So what I want to do today is talk about the games that I have used in the past in this class, the games that we're using this semester or that I think I'm using this semester. I'm just putting the list together now, so I might change it around a little. Uh, and why I use each of these games. What is my learning goal for having students play these games? The general format of the course is that students come in, we have a little bit of greetings, conversation, and then, uh, we start talking about games, and we do that by playing games and then talking about them generally. I lot two thirds of the class to the greetings and warm up and gameplay and one third of the class to talking about the games. So it's roughly two hours to one hour. The class is, well, the class is two hours and fifty minutes long, so break that up how you want in your brain. So here are the games that we play in class and the conversations about them to start with. On the first day, we use balderdash. Balderdash is a parlor a classic parlor game that you can play without any materials except paper. In the game you are playing, it is, like I said, the classic parlor game. The dictionary game, I think is the general parlor game name for it. In the game, you are trying to make up definitions and trying to get the other players to think your definition is correct. We also have I have when I use this in class, I'm using Beyond Balderdash, which also includes instead of just dictionary definitions. It also includes years, initials, movie titles, and what's the fourth one? Dates, initials, movie titles, definitions? I think there is one more, but I'm not finding it right now in my head. Maybe names like people's names? Well, so the way it works is you get a word or a movie title or whatever, and you're supposed to write down the definition of it, then the person who is the running that round is going to say an answer and they're going to read all the answers, and everybody votes on which answer they think is the correct one. If if people vote for your answer, they get you get a point. If you vote for the correct answer, you get two points. As the person who's running the running that one, you can't score points at all. I use this on the first day for a couple reasons. One, I can teach it in five minutes and students can get playing right away. Two, it doesn't take much prep and it's consistently fun. Three it requires creativity. Unlike something like Cards Against Humanity or Apples to Apples, where you're just picking from the options the game gives you. In this kind of game, you have to come up with something. You have to come up with an example. And I like the the quality of having to do it. And finally, because you're writing things on paper, if I have any students who have speaking anxiety, especially on the first day when they don't know anyone yet, it's nice to get to write out your answer and have someone read it. So balderdash is a great first day game. It also doesn't require any prep. For week two. We play codenames and just one. These are additional party games or games that you play in small groups. They involve words and wordplay. And again, not a lot of prep needed so we can play them without people having to worry too hard about what we're playing. This also sets up the later games because as the game, as the semester goes along, students are going to be assigned to be game leaders in these different games. And the idea is they need to know how the game works when it's their turn. One thing I haven't been great at doing in the past is reminding students that it's their turn. So then I have some students who forget and they show up not ready and that lets everybody down. So one thing I want to do better this time is come up with a system for reminding people of when their games are due. This might involve making assignments that pop up in their canvas. That's probably how I do it. I also may want to work into the in-class announcements. Who is leading things next time? I think that would be useful as well. So code names in just one. Also similar to balderdash in terms of being easy to teach and easy to play without much prep. They're both also games I can run where I have one copy, and I can have big swaths of the class play it with just one. I have a whole bunch of copies of which and wagers. So we can use the Wits and Wagers boards as well as the just one boards, and we can use if we need to. We can use, um, the flip tabs from Telestrations. All of these are examples of ways that we can make the elements happen, of ways that we can make just one work without more than one copy. So that's the first couple of weeks, and then we start to get into more complex games. The next I have a Euro game week where I have the students play Dominion, Carcassonne and Seven Wonders. Now, if you're like me, you're saying, Brendan, how can people play all three of those in a two hour session? and I say to you, they can't. But that's okay because they don't play all three of those. They play one of those. Generally, the way it works is I give students a choice between Dominion, Carcassonne and Seven Wonders. I explain each one and I have them put them in preference order one, two, three. And then I rate. I rank them together so that the students, as many students as possible, who picked Carcassonne will play Carcassonne as many as possible. Who played picked Seven Wonders, we'll play Seven Wonders and Dominion. Dominion. Now, how do I get copies of all these? Well, this is where my years of teaching this class pay off. So because I've taught this class for several years now, and because this class has a budget, and because each time I taught this class, I get a budget for each section of the class. I have been using the budget of this class to buy games to teach this class with. So the first year I taught it, I only had a few games I was able to buy. Then the next year I was able to buy some more games, and the next year some more games. Until at this point I have all the games I need to teach this class without much additional intervention. That works great. So the Euro games that I have, we play Dominion, we play Carcassonne, and we play seven wonders. When we play these three games, we divide up into those groups and have fun playing them. I use these games along with the reading, to talk about the idea of eurogames games that are have a theme, but are generally not thematic. They are games where there is an interesting set of mechanisms that are driven mostly by the phrase Jeffrey Engelstein calls or input randomness. The idea that before you make a choice, there is randomness. In Carcassonne, the randomness is the tile you draw in seven wonders. The randomness is the cards that get dealt and passed around in Dominion. It's the shuffling of your deck. In each of these cases, the randomness happens before you get to act, and then you act and make choices based on the outcome of that randomness. By contrast, outcome randomness would be ones where you make an you do an action and then you see what happens based on randomness. So for example, if you play risk when you go to attack somebody, the process by which you roll dice to see whether you win in risk, that is output randomness. Both are great. Both are strong in different contexts, but both are delightful. So that is Dominion. Carcassonne seven wonders. I have two games that we play that are designed around the role playing game experience. The first of these is Lasers and Feelings. Lasers and feelings is a game where you is a one shot role playing game where you play the crew of the Starship Enterprise or something kind of like it, and you are journeying in space trying to solve something. It's generally meant to be kind of funny, and it's light and it's a one shot role playing game. Each player, it's always played with a single die, and if you have to do a challenge, the GM decides whether it is a lasers or a feelings challenge, and you resolve it based on that. Generally, it's worked pretty well. This is one of the harder things to run in class because I really need like ideally eight volunteers, six to eight volunteers. I guess six works to run sections of this game. The challenge of needing people who can DM is difficult. If you have people who have not DM'd at all, you generally have two or three who have done it before. I'll have two or three who have played role playing games before and are willing to. Then I'll have several students who have played role playing games but don't want to. Sometimes it's sparse pickings for getting gems. This is the thing where I may end up seeing if I can find some other solution to that for this year's class, but Lasers and Feelings is the game there. I use that to teach them a little bit about role playing games, so they can have a sense of what kinds of things people come up with for that. In a related way, we also have the Quiet Year. The quiet year is an interesting game where you are playing as a town. I think I've talked about this on the show before. I use the Quiet Year as a way to have students understand games that are barely games, or games that work in a system that asks them to use their imagination or game in a different way. The games do have wins and losses, so it's important to it's important for me to keep those in mind as students are working on things. But generally that's the idea. One of the challenges I have this year is I have a lot of games I want to play, and we just don't have enough time. Like, really, I need to start giving students time to work on their games. Starting in like at the very latest week ten, but maybe even week nine, which is barely halfway through the semester. So if I tell myself I have eight weeks to play games all day, and starting in week nine, we're using time on game development as well. That's an interesting approach. I could backload some of the lighter games that we can play in a half hour or forty five minutes. Mhm. All right. A couple more games we've played. Uh libertalia. The winds of Gilchrist I really like this one. It's very interactive. It plays six pretty smoothly. It runs relatively fast. Uh, and players can play with more or less antagonism depending how the table feels. This game is also interesting because it does things a little different than a lot of the other games we're playing. It's definitely staying in rotation and I think will be interesting to see in play. Uh, Puerto Rico eighteen ninety seven is the hardest one to, uh. To justify or to the hardest one to get played. I really like this game. I think it's very interesting. It is hard. This is the most complex game I ask the students to play, and some students find they just bounce off it. They don't. But a lot of students really do like it. and the conversation about it is really interesting. I think the nuances of the game being rethought in ways that are meant to be more appropriate for the time that we're playing it in, is really interesting. And as a result, it's a game I really like having students play. But like I said, it's also very difficult and it's long, like it's rough to tell students they're going to learn this game and then not be able to finish it. But we also don't I can't give them a three hour class period. So I'm wondering if Puerto Rico might end up being something I set aside. I don't know. Two more. We have the crew mission deep sea. Uh, this one is an interesting game because it's set. It's trick taking, and most students have not played trick taking games. The idea of a trick taking game is relatively simple, but if you haven't played them before, there's a lot of subtlety to them that, if you don't know how to play them, gets really difficult. I remember at one point one of the groups. I came over and was watching them play a little bit, and I realized they were doing very well at the crew because they were just telling each other what they had, like out loud. I'm like, oh, that's definitely not allowed. You definitely aren't allowed to just say what you have. That's the whole challenge of the game, is figuring out what people have based on how they play. So that was amusing to see that happen. So I do like the crew. I'm not sure it will make the cut to be used again this year. I finally burn the fort. Burn the Fort is an interesting co-op game that is very difficult, not only because it's challenging, but also because the rules are hard to understand. They're just not well written. And I still struggle even though I've played it several times now. I've taught it into two different classes. I still struggle with trying to get it played properly at the table. Um, and I'm going to have to do a little work to make that happen again. I'm also going to need to take the video that we shot last year and re-edit it, because I don't think it works because you can't see the class and you can't really see me. But I may be able to, like, put in a little video, put in a thing with me, talking to interact, make the video more interesting to watch. But I want to keep it in because it's definitely interesting as a game about an idea or about big ideas. I do have two other games I've used a lot in the past, which may or may not make the cut this year. I haven't decided yet. So as part of the of last year's games, I did get a budget to acquire some unlocks. I got five of them which gave me ten unlock scenarios, which was good because generally actually, I guess it gave me fifteen to use. Generally, I like to have like three people in a group to do an unlock. I don't think I think more than that isn't super fun. So I broke them up into groups of three and had them do the unlock games. These were not super well received. I think people thought they were okay, but they weren't super excited about them. And I think those are probably not going to be part of the gameplay this year, although I might maybe I'll do a week where there's like a couple different short options and people can pick which one they want to do, and I divide them up based on what they said they wanted to do. So the examples would be like point salad, the crew, and unlock. The problem is I do want everybody to experience these other games. And so I think I might just I probably just sideline unlock instead. I've also used wits and wagers at various times in this class. I don't think I will, but I could end up doing so at some point. It's a really good large group game you can play with like the whole class if you want. That works fine. And then Kokoro Avenue of the Kodama is a game I've played with the whole class before, because all you need are the player boards and they're easy to replicate, and so everybody can have the player board and we can all play using the same set of cards, so that works well. I have a PowerPoint made for it and everything, so it's really easy to run that one. And then the bulk of the time in class. I have a little lecture each week about different kinds of game mechanisms. I talk about the game industry. I have students work on various aspects of their game design, developing main components and the rulebooks and playtesting and prototyping. And then they do blind playtesting and then develop their final version, which they then turn into me and it ends up being pretty good. I've generally enjoyed that class quite a bit. The hardest thing is I don't have enough time to do everything I want to do, so I'm going to have to very carefully. The problem is, I really need I have all the stuff I want to show them, but I really need to protect the time for them to work on their games. And so that part is the trickiest. So that is that. I'm keen to hear from you, dear listener. What kinds of what do you think I'm missing when you think about? I have half the semester to show students a variety of different kinds of games, to give them some ideas and some space to work on a game. Is there anything you think? Whoa! Brendan, you're really missing out by not showing them this or that, or this kind of game or that kind of game is probably a better note. What kind of thing should I make sure to include in the second half when I'm talking about design? What's the best piece of design advice you've heard or you have yourself? If you are a designer, share those ideas over on Board Game Geek and Guild three two six nine. I'd love to know what you've been thinking about and see the designs you've been working on. Well, that's it for me today. I want to say thank you for joining me on my walk. I hope that your next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye. Brought to you by Rattlebox Games.