So a couple weeks ago we all brought in various board and card games so we could learn about design, learning about the rules and goals of different games. I had brought in the awesome game Munchkin, but never got around to playing it. Allow me to elaborate.
So my group consisted of me and four others: Amy, Frank, Cong, and Kerry (sorry Kerry if I spelled your name wrong.) We started off with a game of Uno.
Simple enough, we could get a round out of the way and get to playing Munchkin. I remembered playing the game all the time as a kid and helped explain the rules; players would take turns playing cards that matched the previous card's number or color, and once you were down to one card you had to call Uno before anyone else did, or else you would have to draw four cards, and the first to play all their cards wins. Actually I ended up learning a few new rules myself (I never knew the draw two card skipped the player's turn). Anyway Frank played his second to last card and called Uno successfully, so we all had to figure out what Frank's card was and make sure we didn't play a card he could play off of. Of course no one had any idea, no one was counting cards, so we just kept playing red cards hoping he didn't have one or that Kerry could play a wild draw 4 card on Frank. In the end though Frank placed his last card, which was red, and won the game.
While we were playing, the teacher, Mr. James Morgan (whom I will call James from now on and in future posts as that is what he prefers) gave us another game, and he wanted us to play that next. I told him we were going to play munchkin, but he wouldn't have it. I think there were three other groups playing that anyway. He gave us a small wooden box with the name Fluxx printed on it, and looking at it I feared opening it would release a wormhole to another dimension. Surely enough, it did, sucking up the rest of the class period.
Simply put, Fluxx is a game that changes as you play it. The rules to start with are simply draw one card and play one card, with no goal in sight. The point of the game is to play cards that define the goal and define the rules, such as how many cards you draw in a turn and how many you have in your hand.
We were a bit confused at first because there were blank cards in the deck that allowed you to make up your own rules, goals, and keepers (keepers are the cards you actually play with, various tokens that you need to win, depending on what the goal is), but once we removed those from play, we could actually be confused by the game. At one point we had to draw 5 cards at the start of our turn and discard all but two by the end of our turn, and at another the first card we played each turn had to be randomly chosen by the player to our left.
After an hour, I won, not because of what I did, but because Kerry played a goal whose conditions I already met and he didn't realize it (I didn't see it at first either, I thought the goal was to have the keepers brain and no t.v., but it was actually brain and t.v. couldn't be in play at all), so it was a bit of a hollow victory.
Class was over, and I didn't get to play Munchkin. Frank didn't get to play his game either, and he had just bought a new copy of connect four for this class. We stuck around after class though so Frank could break in his game.
He won that too.
So what have I learned from those games? Well I learned That Uno was about anticipating your opponent's moves, knowing what he would play next and calling Uno before he did, and also using the various wild cards effectively. In Fluxx, I learned to be aware of your surroundings. Maybe if Kerry read the card carefully enough and noticed I already met the conditions of that goal, he wouldn't have played it and gave me the victory. More importantly, Fluxx taught me to adapt to changing conditions; specifically the conditions that prevented me from playing Munchkin.
And even though I didn't play Connect Four myself, I learned there is always time for Connect Four.
-Zach
Special Thanks to Cong for the photos, and everyone who played these games with me.
