The Graduate Student Corner: Some (Inter)personal Reflections
My Board gaming Hobby
As I approach my final year of graduate school, it is remarkable to think back on the past five years and reflect on my personal and professional growth. Graduate school has been hard; by far the most difficult experience I’ve consensually agreed to. One of the most difficult lessons I had to learn was how to have a social life amidst the demands of school. During the first several years of graduate school I found myself having little time or energy for socializing. When I did socialize, it was often with other graduate students and the time was largely spent commiserating—an experience that did very little for me in terms of self-care. However, things started to change for me when I revived my old hobby in board games.
I started collecting board games in middle school, when my father began purchasing me “euro-games” like The Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne, and Puerto Rico. While these games, particularly Settlers of Catan, have become relatively mainstream in the United States these days, 15 years ago they were novel to my family and friends. Unlike games like Monopoly, Risk, or the Game of Life, these games were refreshingly deeply strategic, often presenting multiple avenues for victory. They included mechanics that were more complicated than the child-focused American games. They were made by adults, for adults. The ceiling for mastery was massive, and with each play came novel experiences and interactions with other players.
While my board gaming interests diminished some in my late-teens-early-twenties, I experienced a revival in my third year of graduate school I was invited to begin a Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) campaign with some students. Playing DnD was unlike any other grad student hangout I had been apart of at Michigan State University. Rather than complaining about workload or the most recent student grievance, we were more focused on saving a town from a goblin mob. When we finished playing we had done something, if only in our imaginations, and from that point forward we had something to discuss in the psych building other than school. Slowly, overtime, I began to invite my DnD friend to play board games, and DnD nights started turning into game nights. As more students became interested in joining, I found myself playing games with more and more people, including many non-graduate students that I would likely have never met without board games.
While the coronavirus certainly introduced barriers for playing board games with others, I was lucky to live with several other students during the past year. In our household, board games became a weekly, and sometimes nightly, occurrence; a favorite distraction from morbid and uncertain reality that we were living in. With this in mind, the purpose of this article is to share some thoughts on the benefits of starting aboard game hobby in graduate school—both in terms of a source of self-care in graduate school, and source of self-care throughout the pandemic. I also end the article with some recommendations for board games to try—many of our favorites to play on game night. Given that this is meant for individuals who may not be familiar with board games, my recommendations are based on games that are relatively accessible and affordable. However, I decided to not include games like Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride, or Codenames, as these have become more popular in recent years and many students may already be familiar with them.
5 Benefits of board games:
- Escape stress without turning off your brain:
As much as I love watching Netflix or (insert your favorite streaming service), sometimes I need more from my self-care than to turn my brain off. There is no doubt that I need an escape from my stress and responsibilities, however, sedating myself with TV shows often does not help me to replenish my emotional and cognitive wells. I fare much better when I have something else for my mind to engage with other than school. Consider an athlete. When an athlete is not performing, they do not go and lay in bed until they have to perform again. They are actively engaged in recovery, which often means engaging the muscles that have worked the hardest via stretching, heat-ice, electrical stimulation, diet, etc.
Like with an athlete’s recovery, I find that board games allow me to engage my mental muscles that are most tired, but in a way that replenishes them. One of my favorite parts of board games is the strategy, that they often require the player to comprehend and think across several inter-working systems. While the systems may be more related to agrarian economies than contemporary psychological science, playing board games is nonetheless a good stretching exercise for all the difficult cognitive work we do. Additionally, board games give us rewards for practicing our analytical thinking that we often do not get in our daily life as students. Given that the graduate student experience is often marked by an endless workload, a lacking sense of control/autonomy, and self-consciousness about one’s competency, board games provides a forum to have goals that are obtainable and experience control in how to meet those goals.
- Great source of communion:
However, one of the more understated social aspects of playing board games is what happens before and after the game is played. No matter the game that we play at our game nights, sharing food is always a component. Some evenings that is what I look forward to the most. No matter how much planning we do, its inevitable that our group will spend the first hour enjoying some food, drinks, and casual conversation. The same is true for once the game finishes. It is hard to get friends out of the door after a game, and the more likely scenario is that we continue discussing events from the game for some time and begin planning our next game night. In many ways, it is in these moments that I feel closest to my gaming group. Unlike other graduate students, I don not feel like we are spending time together out of convenience or boredom, but rather that we share a common interest—and life—outside of graduate school.
Finally, board games also help to facilitate communion via the rich community of board gamers that exists online and across the country. One of my favorite things to do on a Saturday morning is go to our local board game and comic book shop. As much as I enjoy browsing, I almost always strike up a random conversation with store owners or customers about games. On one occasion I even shared numbers with another couple who were interested in starting a board game group sometime in the future. I also have enjoyed going to board games cafes in different cities around the US. Prior to entering these spaces, I was not aware how diverse the board gaming community is. However, one of my favorite experiences I had in the past several years was going to a board game café in San Francisco with my partner, and playing board games will drinking a beer or two with random strangers.
- Affordable
- Pandemic proof (somewhat)
One potential option is to play games in a virtual space, such as that offered by Tabletop Simulator. Tabletop simulator is a relatively affordable software, that allows to play board games or do other table top activities with your friends virtually. Tabletop simulator can be purchased from Steam. Although the controls can be a little difficult to learn, I’ve played several games with friends this way. In such cases, we would also Zoom or video-chat while playing to get some of the player interaction that we all love. One other benefit of Tabletop Simulator has a massive user-created library of games, which means that you can download different board games (for free) that you want to play with your friends, even if you or your friends do own the game physically.
A final option might be to play games via iOS or Android apps. While this is maybe my least desired option given that it pretty much eliminates player conversation (expect maybe if there is a chat room), it is probably the easiest way to play games with friends remotely. However, this method does require that all players have purchased the same game app for their phone or device, and there are only a limited number of games that have been ported to smartphones. However, if you do not have friends that want to play board games with you, you can often play games with random people online. Playing a game on a smartphone app is also a good, affordable way to try out a new game you are interested in, but maybe don’t want to spend $50 on without ever playing.
- Something for everyone
There are many people who have told me that they don’t like board games. While it possible, I often assume they just haven’t played the right one. My partner was an example of this. When we started dating, she was not very interested in playing games. However, after coercing her into a few game nights, she flipped. In fact, she, like many other people who once said they didn’t like games, remarked “that they didn’t realize what board games really were”. Interestingly, since she started to play board games she has also found out that many of her friends from high school and college have board gaming hobbies, a topic that she had never discussed with them before.
Recommendations:
Light social games: These are some of the games we play the most. They are easy to learn, quick to play, and often can be played with larger groups. These games are great for waiting around for the last member of your group to show up or unwind after tense strategy game. They also are great to break-out when you have a group that does not have the attention span to learn complex rules.
The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine is a cooperative game where players coordinate laying cards from their hands in a specific order, without speaking to one another. Each round different rules are generated which greatly affect what cards are laid and in what order. While that description may sound vague, it is partly because the rules of the game are rather simple and uninteresting. What makes the game fun is trying to read each other’s mind, and the fulfillment that comes from a round when everyone is one the same page.
Wavelength is another game that will have you reading minds. Wavelength is team game with basically no maximum number of players. In each round of the game, a card with a continuum is drawn (e.g., attractive to unattractive) and a chosen player gives a clue (e.g., tattoos). Each team must then guess where the clue-giver would place the clue along the dimension. In the example, one team may think that the clue giver finds tattoos more attractive than the other team, thus leading them to guess a position on the continuum closer to attractive. The team that guesses closest to the clue givers true feelings gets a point and a new round begins. The best part of Wavelength is generally the conversations that follow each round. In most cases players forget about keeping score, and the game is really just a catalyst for interesting debates.
Cockroach Poker is for people who enjoy bluffing, and all of the social dynamics that comes with it. Unlike most games, cockroach poker does not have winners, just a loser. In cockroach poker, players hand each other face down cards and try and convince each other that the cards are specific suits. Like the other games in this section, the game fun part of the game is the player interaction that comes from this deception game. Cockroach poker is one of my favorites because I can take it to any group, whether its my parents or other graduate students, teach it in a few minutes, and know that they will be some funny moments that come from the gameplay. Have no winners is also somewhat unique and makes the game more about not being the worst, than being the best. The game is lighthearted enough that everyone feels like a winner in the end though!
Cooperative Games: One common deterrent that some people have to playing board games is the competitiveness. It can be overwhelming enough to learn a new game, let alone have to compete with a players who experience playing. Since losing generally feels bad, there is little momentum to learn a new game if you are likely to lose. Cooperative games are a great solution because they often have many of the elements of competitive strategy games, only instead of playing against each other, all players compete against the game. In many ways this leads to a very different type of gaming experience, that cultivates a lot of player dialogue and teamwork. Particularly after a heated competitive game, our gaming group will sometimes play a cooperative game just to facilitate some communion and lighten the mood.
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective is a game where you work as a group to assist Sherlock Holmes in solving murders around Victorian London. When starting a mystery, the group is given a description of a murder, a map of London, and a newspaper (provided by the game). As a group, the team decides locations on the map to look for clues, either based on the description of the murder, interesting leads from the newspaper, or leads they have found from looking into other clues. Once the group travels to a place on the map, a corresponding passage is read which tells the group what they found there and may inspire other leads. The game ends when the players feel confident that they have solved the murder. The group then tries to answer questions about the murder, and the amount of questions they answer correctly dictates the groups final score. My favorite part about this game is how open-world and thematically rich it is. It also makes for some great player interaction. It took us three separate evenings to solve the first murder in the game, and in between each gaming session, our group would converse about clues, and which ones we wanted to check in on again. I even found myself dreaming about the game.
Pandemic and Pandemic Legacy are a family of games in which the players work together as members of the CDC to cure a worldwide pandemic. With this theme alone, this was a game we played a lot of the past year. The original Pandemic is fairly mainstream, similar to Settlers or Catan or Ticket to Ride. Pandemic Legacy is an alteration of this basic game. Legacy games are a type of game that builds on itself from game to game, usually following a narrative. So in Pandemic Legacy, rather than resetting the game each time you play, you start from where the last game ended. This means, for example, if Atlanta was rioting at the end of game one, game two starts with Atlanta rioting. One of the most fun parts of this game is seeing how the story changes and the game mechanics shift based on what has happened in game. I will not give away spoilers for the plot, but it basically means that the choices you make at one point in time may cause a different sequence of events to occur down the road, and the sequence of events that your group experiences may be nothing like what another group experiences.
Dungeons and Dragons is the daddy of all games. It does not require a board, so its not technically a board game, but it certainly captures the best elements of cooperative games. It has a fairly large learning curve, but that is more about the number of options one has in choosing their role and play strategy, rather than it being hard. I think most people do not think DnD is for them, either because it sounds dorky or feels intimidating. My experience has been that most people love it once they give it a chance, and that there are a TON of resources that make getting started easier than you would think. Probably one of the biggest barriers with DnD is that it’s a time commitment, and it can be hard to find people dedicated to playing weekly or bi-weekly. If you think you would like to try DnD, I 100% encourage you to look into it. However, if you do not think it is for you or would struggle to form a reliable DnD group, playing cooperative board games may be easier to get started with.
Strategy games: As much as I love social and cooperative games, competitive strategy games are my favorite. I really enjoy the number crunching and systems learning that comes with them. That is not something that everyone loves though, and admittedly, some of my favorite games are ones that take hours to learn and whole afternoons or evenings to play. As this is not something I would encourage a burgeoning board gamer to do, in this section I list some games that have many of the mechanisms included in heavy strategy games, but are much easier to learn and quicker to play. I think these are great gateway games to heavier games, though they are certainly more complicated than some of the games above.
Isle of Cats is a game about saving magical cats from a doomsday scenario. The game would remind you somewhat of Tetris, as the main mechanic is drafting oddly shaped cat cutouts and fitting them as neatly as possible on your player board. The player who covers the most space on their boat and has similar colored cats touching generally scores the most points. I really enjoy this game because it requires complex visio-spatial reasoning, whereas many games rely on more verbal reasoning. The other appealing aspect of this game is the artwork, and quality of the game components. Along with being fun, it is just enjoyable to look at.
The Quacks of Quedlinburg is my partner’s favorite game. It is one that we play often when our group is looking for some strategy, but not all the number crunching that comes with other strategy games. At its heart, Quacks is a press your luck game. Each player draws random ingredients from a pouch to try and the highest selling potion, however, each time the player pulls an ingredient out they increase their chance of the potion exploding (and being worthless). After each player makes potion, they can use the money they earned from selling the potion to add more ingredient to their bag, increasing the value of future potions. The game is played over several rounds with the person who earned the most from potion of the game winning. I think the best part about Quacks is that it is fun to lose—something that one can’t say about most games. Because the press your luck aspect of the game is so exhilarating players end up having more fun drawing from their ingredient bag, than focusing on who is winning.
Wingspan is one of my favorite games that came out in the past year or so. It is critically acclaimed and won Game of the Year in 2019. In Wingspan, each player is a bird enthusiast who is seeking to attract the best birds in their wildlife preserve. As the player brings birds into their habitat, the habitat grows and allows the player to bring in more birds, more efficiently. The winner is the player with the highest scoring habitat, based on the number of eggs that were laid in the habitat, the number of birds, the types of birds, and so much more. Wingspan is one of my favorites of several reasons. First, there are so many different ways to win, that no two games are ever the same. In fact, the game rewards you for playing dynamically, and it is unlikely that using a strategy from a previous game will pay off the same in future games. Secondly, like Isle of Cats, this game is just so beautiful and well made. It is such a joy to bring this game to the table and share with others. Finally, Wingspan encapsulates many of the aspects of the board gaming community that I have come to value. One of those aspects is the inclusivity of the community. Wingspan is quite unique in that it was designed and illustrated by women.
Particularly in a field that has been dominated by men, it is inspiring to see diverse representation in board game design and consumption.