Table Top Game Club Week Eight: Betrayal, Zombies, and Courtly Intrigue

As we headed into Halloween, we decided to feature some classic spooky, haunting games.  Tuesday’s session was all about the modern classic, Betrayal at House on the Hill.  As most folks know in the gaming community, Betrayal has some flaws.  The powers and abilities can be a little off balance, the Haunt can appear a little too early, or as we saw last year, the betrayer can be stuck in the basement while the heroes gather every possible item like a Supernatural Easter egg hunt.  That said, it’s also an incredibly entertaining experience, with wonderful tension and atmosphere.  The week’s game brought in Haunt 15: Here There Be Dragons.  This could have been a brutal feast for the dragon, but the betrayer was upstairs while the remaining survivors were isolated in the basement.  By the time the dragon and betrayer finally made it to the basement, the survivors had every necessary item to make quick work of the beast.  Still, the group had fun, and it was a good introduction to the game.

The Friday before Halloween called for Last Night onEarth.  I really enjoy the idea behind this game.  The game mechanics are easy to handle, the components are well made, and I appreciate the different scenarios.  I think the cards are clever, and the art direction gives it a cinematic feel (although the female characters are a bit weak in a cheesy, 80s horror movie kind of way).  We played the basic Die Zombie Die scenario.  Like with many other examples of this type of game, sometimes the balance can be thrown off early.  Both zombie players rolled sixes right at the start, so the maximum number of zombies were spread all over the map.  We hapless humans were unable to get any real traction or gather suitable weapons before we were swarmed and turned into lunch.   A similarly quick game was played last year.  I still think it’s a good game, and we’ll probably revisit Last Night at a later date.

The quick game of Last Night on Earth gave us time to crack open Love Letter.  For such a simple game, there’s some nice strategy involved, and I was happy to see a new gamer pick up the nuances, and score a win.  It’s also a good game to prepare groups of students for Coup, when the time comes.

Next week, we’ll feature Small World, plus stay tuned(?) for my upcoming post about H.P. Lovecraft's influence on table top gaming.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

Table Top Game Club Week Seven: Pirates and Astronauts

This week was the first full week of class in quite some time.  Tuesday's feature game was Libertalia, not only a fantastic and easy to learn card game, but one of the few engaging games that can play six players.  It was a great game, and after the first of three rounds, I was impressed with how quickly the grade 9s picked up on the subtle strategies.  With everyone working with the same decks, everyone knows what the others are holding.  It takes a great deal of patience, guile, and dumb luck to scratch out a win.  If you need any more convincing this is a good game, check out this.

Friday was our first open gaming session we've had in a few weeks, so I ran a playtest of Mission Red Planet.  Playtest is the term I use to refer to a game session where we don't know the exact procedures, so we have to read the rules as we play through it (I'm aware of the actual term 'playtest' in the industry, but the term also has an exciting connotation of mystery my students like, so I adapted the term for my club).  Even with the awkward bits as we read the rules here and there, this is a fun game.  It's tremendously fun to load up a ship with astronauts, sabotage a player's strategy, and send a rival to the moon of Phobos while you harvest ice planet-side.  It's a game that has great visual appeal and is really easy to pick up.  The students really enjoyed it, and this will definitely hit the table a few more times this year.

Next week, in honour of Halloween, we feature Betrayal at House on the Hill.

PC Gaming: I'm Sorry, Your Game is Racist

PC in this case stands for Politically Correct...see it's a pun on PC (Personal Computer) Gaming which is a popular...it's a play on words...see what I did there....right....

So I might end up alienating readers right off the bat, but here goes nothing.  You might not be a fan of political correctness, but I figure with us only a few days from Halloween, I think folks could use a quick refresher on things that are racist towards our Aboriginal population.  Bear with me here as I make a short list of racism in pop culture and its relationship with table top games.  This might get a touch verbose, but here goes:

Washington Redskins- There's no real surprise here.  The recent movements that have been made towards changing the team name, and owner Dan Snyder's refusal to change the logo and mascot, have been well documented.  Aboriginal mascots are dehumanizing caricatures that are designed to reinforce a colonial worldview that insists Native people were noble savages who shared more in common with animals than human beings.  The Washington Redskins aren't the only major professional sports franchise with this issue, but they are currently the poster-children for colonial bigotry in the name of profit, which brings me to...

Halloween Costumes- Yeesh, how is this still a thing?  Buzzfeed did an interesting review of Aboriginal themed Halloween costumes.  It's pretty cringe-worthy.

Peter Pan- As I've explained to my Native Studies students, there's some sad contradictions that appear on the history of Disney films.  The one I address is that Disney, for reasons of cultural sensitivity, has tip-toed like a ballerina in a minefield over the 1946 film "Song of the South" and its depiction of African American Southern culture.  Disney has never released for home video a complete version of the original film, yet continues to re-release Peter Pan, a film featuring a horrible portrayal of Aboriginal people.  Hop on YouTube and check out the song "What Makes the Red Man Red?", and like the characters you'll say "Ugh" and "How?", but for very different reasons.

The Lone Ranger- Sorry Mr.Depp, but a white guy playing a white guy's misinterpretation of a fictitious Crow man to stand in for a fictitious Comanche man, all in the name of being a role model for Aboriginal children, creates such a twisted exercise in cultural appropriation, it makes my stomach hurt.

The X-Men- Going back to the 70s folks.  In 1975, after a five year drought, Marvel released a new X-Men comic, Giant Sized X-Men #1.  In the story, Professor Xavier and his protege Cylcops had to throw together a group of X-Men to search for the original team who were captured by a living island (trippy, I know).  The team had a distinctly international flavour, featuring Wolverine from Canada, Storm from Kenya, Nightcrawler from Germany, the Russian Colossus, Japan's Sunfire,  Banshee from Ireland, and finally...yeah... Native American Thunderbird.  Thunderbird's alias was John Proudstar, an Apache who was seen wrestling a buffalo on his reserve (I'm not kidding).  His outfit had all the markers of an Aboriginal Halloween costume, and he basically looked like Billy from Predator (another noble savage) after doing plenty of P90X.  He would die a couple issues afterwards, but his little brother would début a few decades later as Warpath.  Aboriginal people are one of the few superhero types where their powers and abilities are linked to their ethnicity.  It would be like an Italian superhero with the ability to drive a fast car and shoot pasta from his wrists.

Still with me?  Okay, so where is the relationship with boardgames and other Table Top Games?  What's the connection?

I'm sorry, but Bang! and Bang!:The Dice Game...you're a bit racist.

Now before the right wings and left wings start flapping, please let me explain.  Bang! is a card game that features two interesting mechanics: "take that" direct conflict cards, and "hidden roles" where one player is the Sheriff, and the other players are deputies, outlaws, and renegades.  Each character type has a different win condition based on who gets eliminated via the aforementioned "take that" cards such as the dynamite card, or the titular "bang" card, which simply means "I shot you, because that's what you do in a Western".  Bang! was published back in 2002 in Italy, and the game tries to capture the chaos of the Italian or "spaghetti" Westerns.  The cards are also written in Italian with English translations.  In the original card version of Bang!, the set includes two "take that" style cards called "Indiani!" or "Indians!" which implies "we're being attacked for..well...something.", because the card doesn't go into any detail why the players are attacked. Once played, each player must discard a "bang" card (to simulate fighting back) or lose one life point, because Indians hurt white people who don't have guns...or so the game implies.  The Indians are not true characters; they're presented more like a hazard, like a hailstorm or torrential downpour.  There might be Indians, so bring an umbrella.

It's an awkward idea that evokes images associated with the westerns of John Wayne, where a "good Injun was a dead Injun."  The idea is dehumanizing at best, so it becomes quite a quandary when playing the game with students of various backgrounds.  Our current game club has a couple members who are First Nations, so slapping a card down to reinforce Colonial ideals and Manifest Destiny is not something I want to do as an educator, a gamer, a Canadian, or a decent human being.

Now earlier I declared that Bang! is "a bit racist", and readers might be thinking "how can you be a 'bit' racist?  You are or you are not."  This is true, but the racist overtones in Bang! are easy bullets to dodge.  In the entire deck, there are only two "Indiani" cards.  Last year when we played the game, my colleague who introduced the game to the club had wisely pulled any potentially offensive cards...and no one noticed.  Gamers really enjoyed the game, and all racial overtones were gone, period.  It was an easy fix.

What's not so easy is eliminating an entire side of a die.  Many people in the games industry view Bang!: the Dice Game as a superior version of the card game.  It plays quickly, avoids the Italian translations, and has that wonderful tactile sensation you get when you grab a handful of dice and chuck 'em, hoping for the best.  Symbols on the dice represent the actions from the card game, but like I said, it plays faster and in a more elegant fashion than the card game.  For my club, I want the players to have the best experiences, but sadly the "Indiani" are back.  One side of each die is an arrow to indicate the "Natives are really restless".  When you roll an "Indian Arrow" as it's described in the rules, players grab one of nine arrow tokens.  When the last arrow token has been grabbed, players lose one life point for every arrow token.  As before, there's no rationale for the arrows; it's apparently just par for the course in the world of Bang!.

BtDG has an alternative version based on The Walking Dead comic franchise.  Arrows are replaced by Walker bites and arrow tokens are now zombie heads.  It's a nice idea that doesn't jive for my club.  For starters, we have plenty of zombie games already (Zombie Fluxx, Dead of Winter, Zombie 15, Last Night on Earth), and I like the idea of a western themed game.  Also, the components for the Walking Dead edition of BtDG aren't as good as the original, as the Walking Dead version uses stickers on the dice instead of quality engraving.

I think I have two solutions for my desire to engage my club in a fun, Western themed experience:

Flick 'em Up and Bountytown.

Bountytown is a simple to learn game as each player takes on the role of a bounty hunter.  Cards are placed on the table to represent a town, and bounties are placed on criminals.  The players gather sets of cards to simulate hands of poker, with the stronger the hand, the better the ability to resolve conflicts and claim the bounty.  It's a quick game, but nicely simulates the old west in a culturally appropriate manner.  Flick 'em Up is a dexterity game.  Incredibly popular, but a touch pricey, the game has players taking on the roles of Sheriffs or Outlaws, either protecting the innocent or robbing banks and stealing loot.  The game mechanic here is the flicking of small disks to simulate shooting, entering a building, etc.  It looks incredibly fun, but the price tag and demand for the game is currently making it a little difficult to acquire.  Either way, cultural decency is maintained, and I feel much better about my hobby in general.

I know it was a verbose journey, but if you've stuck around this long, I appreciate your attention.

In the weeks to come, along with my weekly Table Top Game Club report, I want to write about H.P. Lovecraft's profound influence on the world of games.

Thanks for reading,

Dan Buday

It Begins!!!!

Um.... hello.....

So, I was encouraged by a post on www.boardgamegeek.com to start a blog based on weekly reports I was making about a club I started at my school, that we simply refer to as the Table Top Game Club (frighteningly original, I know...). I created a thread on one of the forums that documents the inception of the club, and our weekly sessions over the course of an entire school year.  Other teachers across North America have also contributed to the thread, documenting their own game clubs in their respective schools. For those interested, you can read the thread here.

For my colleagues in education, the thread on Games in the Classroom on that site offers some excellent examples of ways to incorporate games into teaching and learning.

This blog will serve as a way for me to report upon the weekly trials and successes of running a game club at school.  I also want to highlight some particular games that we have found enjoyable, discuss issues and themes in gaming, and maybe have a weekly segment about game components, and some other not so random thoughts of  a geeky educator.

The title "Board at School" is inspired by a meme I saw recently declaring proudly "Bored Online? Board Offline!" as a response to the rise of the popularity of table top games in a digital world.  It's a great sentiment, so I stole the play on words around "board".  That said, if you are an administrator, superintendent, or any other SPSD employee, I want you to know I enjoy my job, and I am not "bored", so just relax.  We're here to have fun and learn.

In closing I want to send a shout out (yeah I just typed that) to fellow teacher Evan Cole and to fellow board game geek Wil Wheaton (only one of whom I actually know), for helping me set up this blog and inspiring me to start a game club respectively.

Thanks for reading!

Dan Buday