Thursday, January 9: Day 1

Day 1: 

We started off this Interim class with some new and some familiar games: Perudo, Apples to Apples, and Pictures and Propositions.  All these games were meant to break the ice and let us learn more about each other, so that we can get a feel for when people are bluffing, or when they're tense; in short, how they tick.

Perudo is like Poker in that you have to have a straight face and learn to recognize the signs of people lying about how many sixes or fives they have under their cup.  With the point of the game being to have the last dice standing, the game gets harder when people lose more and more dice.  Ones, which were once wild, are played as their own number when a person starts out with only one die left.  An effective way to raise the bid for the next person is to halve the number of whatever pips they called, add 1, and call ones.  For instance, if your neighbor to the right called 8 fours, then you can call 5 ones, which gets people nervous because you're calling wilds and you're effectively raising the bid by 2 non-wild pips if they want to change it back.  This typically leads to an opponent making an overzealous bid, due to their forgetting that ones are just as likely to be rolled as any other number. 

Apples to Apples is old hat to some; the trick is learning what kind of humor the people you're playing with appreciate, and what kind they don't.  If you know the judge fairly well, then you'll be better equipped to play a red noun card that best fits the green adjective card.  My personal experience is that most people go for whatever is funniest, so the guy next to me on Thursday threw a real monkey wrench in the mix by taking things literally; I wasted a lot of good nouns before I figured it out.

Pictures and Propositions is... different.  I didn't really find a strategy in this game, not for a lack of trying, but more for the fact that it seems to be more for laughs than for winning.  In fact, I don't even know how to win.  If the games Telephone and Pictionary had a kid, it would be Pictures and Propositions.  One starts by writing a sentence, or song lyrics, or phrase, and then passes the paper to the left.  When you receive the sentence, you have to draw a picture that represents that phrase, and vice versa, folding the paper over so the next person can't see the previous phrase/picture.  It was included in the set of icebreaker games, I think, to act as a social lubricant and bonding agent; it wasn't competitive at all.

All in all, I was ready for Day 2, which was promised to be a day full of different versions of modified Settlers of Catan that Prof Blankespoor had put together.