Board Games, Systems, and Equity — An Inquiry — Week 18 Dark Moon
Dark Moon is the last game I am teaching students this year. Next week, they will move on to their next cycle of inquiry and their legacy game which will take us to summer holidays.
Because of the complexity of this game, I opted not to have a discussion related to systems to begin class. I don’t know if I mentioned this at some point, but of the almost 20 games we explored this year there were a very small number that I had any experience with when I started this inquiry. For the most part, I spent time preparing for each week by reading the rules, setting up the game board by myself to understand the pieces, teaching myself the game by watching ‘how to’ videos, and then watching game play videos that other players had posted to get an idea of how the game should flow. Most times when I stepped in front of the class I theoretically knew how to play the game, but I lacked any actual practical experience. In the second half of the year, the games got more complicated and so we stretched the teaching and playing out over two weeks so that students had time to relax and enjoy the games. In the first class, we focused on setup and understanding the mechanics of the game. In the second, students could focus on strategy and pure enjoyment.
In most of the games we played, this worked relatively well. However, as you might have noticed from my struggles with Betrayal at House on the Hill, I didn’t think this way of of teaching the game was particularly effective with some of the games we played. Dark Moon has some things in common with Betrayal. It has a betrayer element for one, and it also is very complex. Dark Moon, like Betrayal, also plays out in two phases. In the first, all players seem to be working together to survive, but at a player determined point of Dark Moon, the ‘infected’ players reveal their status and then work actively and in the open to sabotage the space station. There are many different actions available during a player turn, and there are lots of conditional things that happen based on what characters do.
I was worried. Because I was having a hard time keeping things straight, and I had no actual experience playing through things, I was struggling to build a plan for teaching a whole class. I usually create a graphic flowchart of what a turn/move looks like for a player and I refer back to that as I am teaching to try and work through problems — but for Dark Moon, the graphic was simply to dense and complex. So, I went back to the drawing board.
I decided after some thought to compartmentalize the game into 3 weeks worth of teaching. In the first, I would break down a player’s turn and the mechanics of the tasks they would have to do. I had them play without an ‘infected’ player and just had them focus on keeping the station’s systems working and staying alive.
In the second week, I introduced the ‘infected’ player, but we didn’t move to the second phase of the game. The ‘infected’ player stayed hidden and only worked to undermine the group secretly. This was good practice as one of the key mechanics of the game is to use dice, rolled secretly, to contribute to group tasks and determine the results of individual efforts. As each 6-sided dice has 4 negative sides and 2 positive, the odds are that negatives are rolled are high. Players roll all their dice and contribute one or more, but they do this behind a screen so that others cannot see the results. On an individual task, contributing one or more positive dice means success, and for group tasks, there is a numeric target that the players are trying to reach (say ‘7’ with their rolls). Each player that is involved in the task must commit at least one of their rolls, and the scores can go up and down (it is, essentially, a number line) based on which dice is contributed. Players never really know if another player is contributing a negative number because they rolled all negatives, or if they are trying to undermine the group. Learning how and when to undermine a task is important, as the ‘infected’ player does not want to reveal themselves until it is most beneficial for their play.
In the third week, we introduced the powers that infected players could use once they revealed themselves and how this impacted the systems of the station and the other players.
By the end of the third week, the students were really into the game. They really responded to the betrayal element and loved trying to figure out who the infected players were and then how to defeat them and complete the missions to win the game.
Many of the students claimed this was their favourite game, which both amazed and delighted me! The conversations being had at the tables were lively and focused and hilarious. One of the things that we have also spent some time on in the second term was separating the player from the game. Some games (like some systems) require us to act in ways or play roles that have little to no connection to who we really are. In the game world, at least, this role play is not (or shouldn’t be) high stakes. We can be passionate and engaged but in the end it is all being played in the name of fun. It should never be personal. In Dark Moon, the students really took this to heart, embracing the different roles in the game with gusto, and without allowing game conflict to spill over into the real world. It was really wonderful to watch.
Afterwards, it lead to some really great discussions with teachers about what we might do next year if we continued with games in some form. Should we play fewer games? What kinds of games should we play? How long should we play them for? What should we do after we were done with a game? What social-emotional/academic skills are we trying to develop? What curriculum connections can we draw? How can we build inquiry into this process?
I have left these questions with the classroom teachers. I think that if the use of games has value, then they will look for ways to engage with me to plan for next year. My preference again would be to co-plan, co-teach, and co-assess anything we do, and so it might be that I dig deeper into games with fewer classes if some are not interested. That’s OK. It was never intended to be a mandatory activity in the long-term. I thought it had value this year as a way to work with teachers in a risk-free environment. Whether or not we continue down this particular path, and what folks want to do with the relationships we have built as professionals and as people, is up to them.
Somewhat selfishly, I am hopeful that they all want to do something with me next year, as I love being in the classroom, and I really have appreciated the depth of conversations we have been able to have about them and their learners and about what they are trying to do in the classroom. I think that this can only help me to be a better instructional leader, and a better teacher.
Next week, we move into the first week of our legacy games. I am excited for the kids to crack those boxes and start to dig in to the secrets and surprises that each box contains. The plan is to conference with them and talk about their options.
Thanks for reading along!
