Games in a Pub - Week 4

10/4/2011 - New people, new games and lots of laughter

This was the last of the planned events for which the aim had been to raise the awareness of the fun that can be had with modern analogue games amongst non gamers. Not entirely an altruistic motive as I had also hoped to raise the visibility of Imagination Gaming and the work we do with schools and community groups.

The audit shows that we had limited, but increasing, success and that perhaps as one of my favourite quotes goes “No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit then ripen.” Epictetus

That said last night was by far and away the most successful of the evenings with returnees from the 3rd week bringing new people, who as far as I could tell had never played anything like the games we had available.

Games played during the evening included the very popular Bausack, and Saboteur which the largest of the groups had an absolute riot with. Another group of returnees started with a collaborative game Forbidden Island and then moved on to For Sale, whilst the family that joined us with two young children played Ligretto, Hick Hack and Army of Frogs. This last game has what may appear a childish name but is, as the father soon spotted, like a good Pixar movie not
something only children can enjoy.

Interestingly though my strong desire in games is to find those that do not exclude other players or allow one player to dominate / mess his fellows, the larger of the groups quiet clearly wanted this kind of game. One should never assume that what you want out of a game is what others do! This group quite clearly asked for a game with what gamers would call ‘screwage’ : the ability to mess up other people, hence I offered them Saboteur ( a game where players have concealed roles and objectives) which from the laughter and comments flying between the players definitely met the required objective.

Quiet definitely from our experience this is not what most people want in a game (and not something we major on) and in many families it is games with ‘screwage’ that cause massive problems and lead in many cases to people going ‘I will never player another game, EVER!’ However when like minded people get together / consenting adults a lot of harmless fun can be had with this style of game.

The feedback from everybody was excellent and so we have decided to continue with our events on alternative Sundays starting after the Easter break on the Bank holiday Sunday 1st May, but with a slightly later start time of 7pm.

More photo's of the evening can be seen here