The school year here in New Haven is rapidly coming to a close with the last day of finals today. So this afternoon we had a final meeting of the HSC Game Club. It was a fun affair, with the four student regulars attending along with one of their significant others, a nice fellow from another school that I’m happy to host in my classroom. We also had an HSC alumnus from last year come back to play with us, and one of members of the Future Project team, Zachary Hill. This guy may have my dream career.

One of my students first met Zach a few months ago when he went down to New York City with other Future Fellows (students participating in the Future Project) from HSC. The student found out that Zach had some kind of affiliation with Wizards of the Coast when he mentioned that he liked to play D&D. (Well, specifically, we played Pathfinder, but that’s neither here nor there.) We wanted to invite him to a meeting of the game club, but we weren’t meeting because the students couldn’t make it for various reasons after school anymore. But today was our chance!

We started with Settlers of Catan, with the expansion, because there were six of us. It was everyone’s first time but my own (despite which I still lost due to a critical miscalculation at the end), and it was for this reason as well as another that the game took about two and a half hours. That other reason is the general pent up energy in my high school students. At any given time there were probably about five conversations happening between as many people, and few of them had anything to do with the game. I suppose it could have been worse, because no one was absorbed in their phone, but it was the best I could do to (continually) remind the kids that they could only trade on their turns, and to pay attention to the dice rolls. Nevertheless, the game was close, and fun as always.

Before the end of the game, Zach had arrived, and it wasn’t long after introductions were made that I learned that he was formerly a game designer for Magic: the Gathering and now affiliated with the MIT Games Lab. I don’t know much about what they do exactly, but I don’t need to know much more than “MIT Games Lab.” My first question was immediately, “How?!”

It turns out he used to be a competitive Magic player, and got enough of a name for himself as a player and critic to land a gig as a designer. Pretty sweet. Now he’s the COO for The Future Project along with the MIT setup, but not before, apparently, going political in Malaysia, where he says gaming is srs bsns. One example: he said a kid stayed home from school because he caused his guild’s raid to fail the night before, and he was too ashamed/scared to show his face at school. That’s intense. If you haven’t gotten the picture yet, Zach is a really interesting guy to talk to.

After finishing up with Settlers of Catan, I broke out Citadels. There were seven of us, which limits the games you can play together, but Citadels with the expansion could accommodate, if just barely! It was my first time playing with the expansion, and we didn’t even use the whole thing; we just added in the Artist so there were nine characters. This is because, as I quickly realized, you need to burn one character card anonymously before drafting and one after drafting, or else either the second drafter will know the first’s choice, or the second to last drafter will know the last’s not-choice.

The text on the Artist is unclear, and I didn’t have the rules with me, so I had to look it up online. The Warlord’s text is likewise incomplete, because it doesn’t specify on the card how much it costs to use his ability. This is pretty frustrating, and kind of an oversight, because the rest of the game is pretty clear without having to refer to the rules or ask your friend who knows better. This is particularly important, by the way, when you have students with short attention spans holding five conversations at a time.

It’s probably no surprise Zach won, even though it was his first time playing. I won my first time playing too. Does that suggest poor game design? Or maybe I was just better at games than my opponents my first time, and Zach was better than us. One of my students was not far behind him though! I however was well behind by the end of the game. Nevertheless, there were some good highlights, like when someone assassinated the Merchant, trying to cut me down, and everyone was convinced it had worked until I revealed that I was, in fact, the Warlord. I had some fun gloating for that small victory.

But now the HSC Game Club is behind me, to be taken up by my colleague Baker. So no more gloating about outsmarting my students. I could probably use a better hobby anyway.