Tag: <span>People skills</span>

Castaways – Improve your teamworking skills

2015-11-07 by David Sanchez Leave a Comment

Teamworking in the frame of the prisonner's dilemma. The game categorizes itself as a "semi cooperative adventure", and that's exactly what it is (and good at it). Castaways is a 1-4 player game that plays in about 3 hours, but mind you, it's not just a game, it's an adventure. When you finish playing you'll be surely driven to reminisce a bunch of anedotes and discus with the other players on how you could/should have done this or that differently. This post will be slighter longer than the previous, but I think the game deserves it. So what was that about teamworking, the prisoner's dilemma and semi cooperation? I'm going to be more generic than in other posts describing the main aspects of the game since this one is more complex. Here we go: All the players are stranded on an island after a shipwreck and must get rescued. To be rescued, they must meet a certain criteria when they have finished exploring the whole island, which comprises things such as having built a [Read full post...]

Sheriff of Nottingham – Improve your negotiation skills

2015-08-24 by David Sanchez Leave a Comment

Negotiate, negotiate and negotiate. Sheriff of Nottingham allows you to do one thing, but it does it really well! This is a light, social and really fun game for 3-5 players. The main game mechanic for Sheriff of Nottingham could be described as follows: Each turn, one of the players will play the role of the Sheriff, and the others the role of merchants that are trying to get goods past customs, of which the Sheriff is in charge. The game has 2 types of goods (represented as cards): legal and ilegal. In each turn, the merchants will put all the cards they wish (legal and/or ilegal) from their hand into a bag and give it to the Sheriff, who will decide if he lets the goods into the city without inspections or if he decides to open it. If he inspects the bag, he will receive gold for all the undeclared goods, but if the merchant had truthfully declared his goods, the Sheriff will have to pay him for them and the merchant may keep them. Merchants are allowed to negotiate [Read full post...]

Citadels – Get better at doing your thing (and avoid being denied)

2015-07-20 by David Sanchez Leave a Comment

Backstab and watch your back while you do your thing. And by doing your thing, I mean building your citadel; hence the title of the game, "Citadels". This is a great game to play with 4-8 players; it's fun, easy and gives the impression of being fast paced due to players usually interacting socially during the downtimes. The main game mechanics could be summarized like this: Each player will have cards representing districts of a citadel in his hand, which he will be able to buy during his turn with the money he also has. During a player's turn, they will be able to get more district cards or more money, and build a district using the money. A few special districts will give some special ability that will benefit you or hurt other players. But the spice of the game is that every turn, each players has the chance of exclusively using a character from a shared pool. They are chosen secretly in turn, and each character has some special ability such as: stealing other [Read full post...]

The Resistance: Avalon – Improve your people reading skills

2015-05-18 by David Sanchez Leave a Comment

Detecting lies, reading people's ulterior motives, negotiating, deducing, bonding a team and deceiving: that's what The Resistance: Avalon (from now on, just "Avalon") is all about. This is a great 5-10 player game for practicing you people skills. Summarized, the game goes like this: Each player is dealt a random character (card), which will belong either to the Good or Bad team; each player will keep his character secret throughout the game. The Good team members will not know to which team the other players belong to, but the Bad (which are a minority) do from the begining of the game. For several rounds (depending on the number of players), all players will vote which subgroup of players will go on a mission; then, that subgroup will vote if they make that mission a success or a failure. The Good players will want to make the mission a success, and the Bad players a failure; but if even just one of the players votes the mission a failure, it will fail. So the idea of [Read full post...]