It was my honor for being invited to host a special game gathering for a group of physics students at the Chinese University Hong Kong (CUHK) tonight. The event was special because the participants were not gamers. The gathering was organized by the physics departmental society as a stress-reliever for their member students.
When I received the invitation, I was a bit worried about the difficulty at handling a large crowd of non-gamers. Thankfully, Derek came to help to co-host the event. The whole event was supposed to be run in 2 or 3 hours. Due to the limitation of size and arrangement of small study-tables there, I avoided any heavy and large boardgames. Instead, I introduced various casual but fun enough games.
There were twenty something participants. At the time of my arrival, some of them were playing Chess, and some with Jenga. A small group came to the front to meet my games to ease their curiosity. I picked Fliegen Klatschen (the Fly-Swatter) game as a warm-up. Some students spoke their desire for a more brain-burning game. Okay, the request was accepted in response with a Ricochet Robot, which was a problem solving game about moving a robot to its destination efficiently. Some of the students were puzzled. Later, they found more fun as they started to learn more knacks in figuring the solutions. More and more new comers came and surrounded the small table to compete for solving the problems. There were almost 20 students around. I have never seen such massive Ricochet Robot match.
Being a broad boardgamer, I was rather committed to expose them with a wider spectrum of very distinct games. While the large crowd was dealing with the robotic problems, Derek and I built a Pitchcar racing track on the floor. Its intuitive design together with the high quality components caught the attention of those late comers to the event. After giving a brief explanation of the rules, they signed up the racing and started to bump-and-run. They were so engaged. Needless to say, there were laughters and hurrays. After the last car crossing the finish line, they even mimicked the award presentation to the champions (See picture).
Following the temperature-rising car racing game, they were presented with Flix Mix. They were never more focused than playing this color matching game. It looked utterly simple, but not easy to learn good enough techniques to win over me. In order to help them better managing pattern recognition games, I further showed them Blink. They started with suspicion but soon turned into excitment about this ridiculously simple head-to-head speed game. Several duels were contested among them. Someone kept rematching until he finally got a victory.
To push the speed limit with extra tension, we then played Pass the Bomb (Travel edition), which was a very exciting word game. People could enjoy it without the necessity of extremely good English vocabulary. When the bomb was ticking in your hand, you might feel emptiness in your head. I was fortunate that I was not really pressed and I didn't lose a score yet in the two games.
After played the heart-pounding word game twice, we switched to play Squint. Knowing that they were science students, they performed reasonbly well in this riddle-solving game with picture tiles. It would be even better if they could manage vertical thinking and information compensation. It was noteworthy to mention that there was the worst Squint riddle I had ever seen (See picture). No matter how hard he tried to build the picture, it was no hope to answer it. Don't tell me that it's a "Dog House". Oops, didn't I disclose the answer?!
Apart from the above games I hosted, Derek also gave the students very great moments with Bug Bluff and No Thanks!. The three hours were fully packed with excitement and hilarious laughters. The responses from the students showed me that they enjoyed the games and this event really much. I would say from my sincerity that I enjoyed this event very much too. The students were apt and fun enough. Actually they were far better than many so-called gamers in handling the games with wide variety. Derek agreed on it too. It was a bit pity that not enough time for us to try out the fun-making party acting game Charoodle. Hope that there would be another similar event with this group.
