Memorial Day Gaming | Main | World Poker Tour in LA
May 28, 2003
Games: Barbarossa
This is a game which in theory I quite like but there often seem to be problems in playing it. The basic idea of the game is that players make little clay sculptures which the other players then try to guess what they are which is a very neat idea. Unfortunately, I think the scoring system is quite problematic and encourages various behaviors which are not helpful to the game. I therefore take the principal that I will do my best but I will ignore the scoring system as far as trying to 'game the system'. Others, however, are not bound by this and do things like misorienting a figure during the early stages when guesses of it would cost them points and then reorienting it correctly when guesses start to result in positive points which to me is just plain not cool. Also, people seem to have a lot of trouble answering the simplest questions, either to be intentionally misleading or to be incredibly pedantic. Last night, a person made a 'dolphin' sculpture and was asked 'Does this animal [we already knew it was an animal] mostly live in the water?' He answered 'No' because it always lives in the water and was not trying to screw around, but just being ridiculously pedantic. The last time I played, someone made a 'pencil' and was asked 'Is this object used for writing?' and answered 'it can be' to intentionally confuse people when 'Yes' was assuredly the only reasonable answer (all unspecified questions are assumed in this game to have a 'predominantly' modifier on them).
There was also a funny and sad thing in that one person had made a shape that looked much like a 'bullet' but two of us guessed that and it was wrong. We later learned it was made mostly of metal, was found in a home but not a kitchen, and was around 1-2 inches long. In addition, three of us had 3 letters for it: I knew it was B*RY and two others knew it was BAT* and yet it remained unguessed. I finally figured out it was a battery but by then (5 minutes late) was out of guessing cubes and couldn't guess that and win. I don't know why we all had so much trouble with it.
Posted by aarondf at May 28, 2003 05:46 PM
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