The last couple of days were days of goodbyes, as I leave my job at High School in the Community. My coworker, and one of our elected leaders, Cameo, threw me a going away party in her backyard. When she was first planning this party, she told me that we would do at the party whatever made me happy, and wanted to know what that was. The answer was easy: let’s play games.

I’ve been trying to set up a game of Ultimate Werewolf between the staff for months, because it’s a game that can accommodate many people, it’s highly social, and it’s easy to learn how to play. It also doesn’t take very long, so if someone isn’t into it, then they needn’t suffer long. At the party on Monday, I finally had the chance to make everyone play it.

It was definitely a success in that people were having fun, and that is, of course, the most important part. I enjoy being the moderator, as I always enjoy leading people through new games, but normally all that leading happens before the game starts and before they become my opponents in the game. As the moderator, I have no opponents nor objective but to make sure the game runs well, so I get to dedicate the whole game to facilitating and teaching.

The only trouble was that the villagers really didn’t stand a chance. It was everyone’s first time playing, and usually this means that the werewolves have the advantage, because the villagers don’t yet know how to root them out. I think this was made even more difficult by the fact that we were playing outside with other things going on, so there were both a lot of distractions from scrutiny as well as sunglasses being worn that hid people’s expressions.

In the first of the two games we played, the villagers didn’t manage to kill a single werewolf. When the hunter was killed on the second night, the tanner tried to get him to kill her, but she was unsuccessful in convincing him, and he ended up killing the seer instead. After another lynching of an innocent villager, I tapped one of the villagers, Sheryl, to become the new seer, in order to try to lend the villagers a hand. I even let her choose three people to reveal as villagers or werewolves. She found one werewolf, Erik, and tried convincing the rest of the town to lynch him the following day, but she was unsuccessful. The enjoyable part of that dynamic was that Erik is the building leader at HSC, a position that Sheryl held three years ago before becoming principal at the middle school where I taught geometry this year. Seeing them accuse and counter-accuse each other amused everyone.

In the second game, I gave the moderator job to my friend Baker, who did a great job running the game her first time. I changed the makeup of the deck for her, both because there were fewer people playing this time and because the villagers needed some help, it was clear. I was excited to be a werewolf, and even though I got lynched, my team managed to secure victory shortly thereafter. In this game the seer was lynched very early on, which seems likely to happen in a game of new players because the seer might have a reaction consistent with a werewolf upon receiving such a unique card.

Erik brought his copy of Smallworld to play (which ended up getting interrupted when it started to rain), which I had bought him for his birthday a few days earlier. When he showed up, he said that he wanted me to pop out all of the cardboard bits and put them in his box. (Plenty of sexual innuendo was made of this.) He wanted me to do it for him because every time we had played with my set, I had made a big deal about how poorly the pieces fit inside the box, because I never seem to have quite enough room for everything. Erik both enjoyed the schadenfreude and didn’t want to have to figure it out himself. But I think he enjoyed my (played up) indignation even more when we discovered that his box had plenty of room to spare for all the pieces. Days of Wonder, the company that make Smallworld, must have gotten some complaints and started making a bigger box since I bought my set. Well, good for Erik. Happy 41st birthday, a good prime number.

There was one other game circle made up of children that wanted to play with some of the other board games I had brought. Those games were Tsuro, Kill Doctor Lucky, Citadels, and Settlers of Catan (with the 5-6 player expansion). When they asked if they could play with one of my games, I should have just said no, but they wanted to play with Tsuro, which has pretty durable pieces that would be easy to locate if they were tossed asunder by young hands. I didn’t want to be stuck-up about my games, so I said to go ahead and play with Tsuro.

I discovered later, just before we started Smallworld, that they were playing with Tsuro, Doctor Lucky, and Settlers all at once on a table whose legs had been folded up and that had been placed on the grass. One of the dads was helping them to clean up the pieces and put them in the boxes, but I was sure that something was going to turn up missing. Amazingly, I didn’t find anything missing (although I didn’t count to make sure I had all the number chips for Settlers), but was dismayed to discover that my Tsuro board had been torn neatly in half. Lesson learned: adult supervision required, kids.