Board games played in IT offices - 3
Hello!
I do board games. On that beautiful day three years ago, when it became clear that all Yandex was being purchased from us using one discount card, it suddenly became clear that IT specialists are among the best customers of nastolok stores. I think - because it’s mostly positive people who love games, communication (which is often not enough at work) and clearly understand how good it is to play hard things.
Below is a traditional annual review of what is played in IT offices, a little about what happened during the year at the intersection of this business and IT, stories about a funny commentary on a past post, feedback from players of Habraigra Startup and, of course, tips for the choice of a couple of pieces that you may want to receive or give to someone for the holidays.
Plus, traditionally - a small gift to the masters .
')
Last year, there was a similar post about desktops, in the comments to which a “drunken Monopoly” was attached (although a UFO sawed out a user for a year along with a comment, so I’m just not going to attach a picture). The essence of the game - you need to walk around the field with trolls in cubes and drink. A few months later we already had two samples in our office, here they are:
A bigger box is from a Moscow publisher (piles were included in it), a smaller box and cheaper is from a Petersburg one. They did not know about each other. We did not take any of these boxes into the network.
Starcraft was no longer supplied to Russia, Warcraft, Twilight Empire (by Master of Orion), Roboralli are hardly found.
Three interesting games have been reissued - Sid Meier's Civilization and the Game of Thrones (according to Martin's cycle): they have new boxes, and in the case of the Game of Thrones - a new price tag (although both games are still difficult to find before the holidays). Reissued in a new gift box and " Overboard! "- a game based on the old Hitchcock film about survival on a lifeboat, which habrazhiteli fell in love with for black humor and training of communication skills of the team leader.
Overboard!
The coolest start of the year was Imaginarium - a domestic crowdsourcing game, assembled by a number of comrades from one non-existent collective blog. One of the authors of the project, after counting money after the new year, promised to roll out 10 additions for the year, but so far only rolled out 3. At the same time, his company released a stunning Zen player device (a regular stone from the beach with a hole for headphones for 1000 rubles), in which listen to the silence - and a couple more equally stubborn pieces. Crowdsourcing taxis.
Imaginarium Cards
According to Rummicub (a logical game created when cards were banned in Romania), a big tournament was held, which was won by a guy from Moscow State University, and went to play for us in the world championship in Sicily (but didn’t win there). It is noteworthy that he learned to play almost a couple of hours before the tournament.
Hive
The Beehive came out with additions - this is a very cool European logic game, which is often chosen from the section “ Gifts for IT ”. By the way, the second most popular logical game in this segment is the favorite by many Go (in which a person still plays with computers).
Go
A very interesting story about the wooden tower of the Jangu , where you need to remove the bars, until it falls with a crash. At first it was a megahit in two versions - usually about 750 rubles and present about 1300 (they differed only in the box). The manufacturer brought the usual version out of the line - and the “pirated” versions, more precisely, it seems, legal, but in some cases with surprisingly similar logos, names and design, just poured into the market. The price is, of course, lower - from 340 rubles (rough bars) to about 1000. On the other hand, this greatly affected the popularity of the game: from the “best gift to the girl” she became an obligatory thing when playing at a party. For some reason it seems to me that it costs the main manufacturer to return the version for 750 rubles to the market - and they will get a very good profit.
Jenga
Last year, almost all classic games moved to the tablets. And if this was understandable with the Monopoly or the Ticket to the train, the fact that it was possible to successfully transfer Jangu - playing on fine motor skills - is a surprise. The trend continued this year - we are constantly knocked on licenses for games for porting to iOS and Android, plus we tried to make a couple of free pieces, sat for a week in the top Appstore and were generally satisfied. In addition, there has been a reverse process - a lot of licenses for movies and major games have become available for the development of board games (unless Mass Effect was not yet serious).
Last year, Mosigra, in partnership with Habr, launched Habraigra Startup about IT projects, negotiations and the economy in general, in which you play as a young businessman (here's a post about a game , but about development ).
Over the year, we collected a bunch of comments and suggestions, held several tournaments, and generally played enough. After the third tournament, we sat down, sifted through all the comments received and made a lot of changes. A new box is on sale, you can identify it by the inscription "v1.2" near the name.
The main gift of the year was Resistance - a completely freaky game that uses the mafia engine, but makes it very unusual. The trick is that the classic mafia is great for negotiation training and the development of communication skills in general, but it has a couple of drawbacks: first, the players take off and miss, secondly, you need 10 people for a balanced game, and third, often the one who screams louder and more often wins, and not the one who thinks better. Resistance after that is just a fairy tale: only deduction and cold logic rule, nobody flies to the end, you can play from 5 people, plus on top of it all - the atmosphere of something like “1984” or “Equilibrium”. On the side of the box is a guy who looks like a cloud atlas resister from Neo-Seoul, but the game came out a couple of years before the film: apparently, just a popular image.
Resistance
There was a game about robots - Robotrok . I strongly advise, a good thing on the road or play with the child. The game is generally amazing of its kind: here is a very accurate balance, and simple rules. Children trudge from robots and their assembly, adults - from a very thoughtful and deep tactics. Half of the game you need to collect parts at the dump (according to the environmental legislation, robots can only be made from them) - this is the solution of the traveling salesman (Dijkstra) problem, taking into account the prediction of the actions of other players. The second part is pure bluff, the third, quite simple, is an assembly according to the optimal scheme.
Robotrok
Another completely insane thing, just outgoing the brain - a small game " 7 by 9 ", where you have to put cards in a pile in the middle of the table. Each card has a number and a modifier: for example, you can put either 5 or 9 on the “7 plus or minus 2” card, so there are no moves, so everything is done in a fun, noisy and very, very fast manner. The game literally reboots the brain in 5 minutes - disconnected from work, played a couple of games, started to play back with new forces, and at the same time the eyes moved.
There is another story connected with this game: the fact is that it is very difficult to explain to the humanities why with numbers from 1 to 10 in the game 9 + 2 = 1, and 1 - 3 = 8. People associated with IT understand this by the phrase “ circular buffer ”, which even some female animators have already learned for an early explanation.
It turns out the "Project Manhattan" - a hardcore game about the US nuclear program. You play as a project manager and develop, assemble and test new products. The game perfectly combines the entourage of a nuclear race and good project management mechanics.
Here is such a cool setting. Localization has already been completed.
There is good news for Munchkin lovers: the Brigade is already being printed - a toy that the Russian author created (then she was a clone of Munchkin about specific boys), and which had to be rebuilt almost from scratch, that is, in fact, was being developed anew. The result was a thing where, among other things, you need to quickly negotiate: after each successful hike in the area you need to divide the prey, which is not divided equally: for example, mobile and trunk for three. The highlight of the game is just this: 30 seconds to negotiate - or no one gets the mining. Thus, a fair player gradually appears who can divide in such a way that everyone in the future will share equally. At the same time, this communicative training is wrapped in the entourage of domestic criminal areas. In general, the scheme of a “bad and desirable” game with mechanics, which inevitably teaches the useful and the good, I really like - and this is exactly what the author wanted on the first version.
Here is a brief assembly of board games that were leading as a gift for an IT specialist:
- Munchkin. There are no comments here, everyone knows him.
- Table hockey. There is a good old Soviet one , who is still doing in Omsk, and sometimes a trendy foreign one arrives at the gate. It is sold in two scenarios: either they take the game to the office, or a fragile woman drags a big box as a gift to her boyfriend. In recent years, by the way, hockey has become popular among girls - for example, at the Next Castle Party (this is such a game festival with old Amigs and consoles), where we organized a small tournament, one girl reached the semi-finals.
- Bet - here as a council, because it is popular in the West, and not in Russia. Quiz with bets: the winner is not the most erudite, but the one who understands who is better to bet on. A very interesting engine for the desktop.
- For children - the headheads , a very cool game for the development of memory, was the best children's game of 2010.
- Patriotic Evolution (there was another addition to it this year).
- Kukhandel ( backstage bargaining ). A rather rare thing with amazing auction mechanics, one of the favorite games about economics. Extremely simple, fun - and at the same time requiring non-child bluffs and calculations. I advise you to take the usual drawn version - art is better.
Hockey
PS Yes, the secret word " Habrahabr " when ordering in Mosigre immediately gives a small nice discount. Valid until January 10 inclusive in the online store (with delivery in the Russian Federation), Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ufa, Nizhny Novgorod, Kiev, Orenburg, Omsk, Ulan-Ude, Kazan, Stavropol, Yaroslavl, Tula, Krasnodar, Vladivostok, Chita, Astrakhan , Kaliningrad, Minsk, Chelyabinsk, Tolyatti, Perm, Saratov, Donetsk, Lipetsk, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and even snowy Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.
Please tell us what you play in your company.
I do board games. On that beautiful day three years ago, when it became clear that all Yandex was being purchased from us using one discount card, it suddenly became clear that IT specialists are among the best customers of nastolok stores. I think - because it’s mostly positive people who love games, communication (which is often not enough at work) and clearly understand how good it is to play hard things.
Below is a traditional annual review of what is played in IT offices, a little about what happened during the year at the intersection of this business and IT, stories about a funny commentary on a past post, feedback from players of Habraigra Startup and, of course, tips for the choice of a couple of pieces that you may want to receive or give to someone for the holidays.
Plus, traditionally - a small gift to the masters .
')
Post 2011 year
Last year, there was a similar post about desktops, in the comments to which a “drunken Monopoly” was attached (although a UFO sawed out a user for a year along with a comment, so I’m just not going to attach a picture). The essence of the game - you need to walk around the field with trolls in cubes and drink. A few months later we already had two samples in our office, here they are:
A bigger box is from a Moscow publisher (piles were included in it), a smaller box and cheaper is from a Petersburg one. They did not know about each other. We did not take any of these boxes into the network.
The development of familiar games
Starcraft was no longer supplied to Russia, Warcraft, Twilight Empire (by Master of Orion), Roboralli are hardly found.
Three interesting games have been reissued - Sid Meier's Civilization and the Game of Thrones (according to Martin's cycle): they have new boxes, and in the case of the Game of Thrones - a new price tag (although both games are still difficult to find before the holidays). Reissued in a new gift box and " Overboard! "- a game based on the old Hitchcock film about survival on a lifeboat, which habrazhiteli fell in love with for black humor and training of communication skills of the team leader.
Overboard!
The coolest start of the year was Imaginarium - a domestic crowdsourcing game, assembled by a number of comrades from one non-existent collective blog. One of the authors of the project, after counting money after the new year, promised to roll out 10 additions for the year, but so far only rolled out 3. At the same time, his company released a stunning Zen player device (a regular stone from the beach with a hole for headphones for 1000 rubles), in which listen to the silence - and a couple more equally stubborn pieces. Crowdsourcing taxis.
Imaginarium Cards
According to Rummicub (a logical game created when cards were banned in Romania), a big tournament was held, which was won by a guy from Moscow State University, and went to play for us in the world championship in Sicily (but didn’t win there). It is noteworthy that he learned to play almost a couple of hours before the tournament.
Hive
The Beehive came out with additions - this is a very cool European logic game, which is often chosen from the section “ Gifts for IT ”. By the way, the second most popular logical game in this segment is the favorite by many Go (in which a person still plays with computers).
Go
A very interesting story about the wooden tower of the Jangu , where you need to remove the bars, until it falls with a crash. At first it was a megahit in two versions - usually about 750 rubles and present about 1300 (they differed only in the box). The manufacturer brought the usual version out of the line - and the “pirated” versions, more precisely, it seems, legal, but in some cases with surprisingly similar logos, names and design, just poured into the market. The price is, of course, lower - from 340 rubles (rough bars) to about 1000. On the other hand, this greatly affected the popularity of the game: from the “best gift to the girl” she became an obligatory thing when playing at a party. For some reason it seems to me that it costs the main manufacturer to return the version for 750 rubles to the market - and they will get a very good profit.
Jenga
Intersections with the software market
Last year, almost all classic games moved to the tablets. And if this was understandable with the Monopoly or the Ticket to the train, the fact that it was possible to successfully transfer Jangu - playing on fine motor skills - is a surprise. The trend continued this year - we are constantly knocked on licenses for games for porting to iOS and Android, plus we tried to make a couple of free pieces, sat for a week in the top Appstore and were generally satisfied. In addition, there has been a reverse process - a lot of licenses for movies and major games have become available for the development of board games (unless Mass Effect was not yet serious).Startup
Last year, Mosigra, in partnership with Habr, launched Habraigra Startup about IT projects, negotiations and the economy in general, in which you play as a young businessman (here's a post about a game , but about development ).
Over the year, we collected a bunch of comments and suggestions, held several tournaments, and generally played enough. After the third tournament, we sat down, sifted through all the comments received and made a lot of changes. A new box is on sale, you can identify it by the inscription "v1.2" near the name.
List of changes in v1.2
- Significantly simplified the rules. In mechanics, the most important thing is to reduce the amount of routine and leave only the high point, that is, the actions that create the game. It turned out that you can safely throw out almost a third of the basic actions of the move, and this has very little effect on playability. At the same time - they made the game more dynamic.
- They balanced the projects and projects: many did not like that a long-long project could go through the forest because of one mistake. This is the reality, but in the game we slightly reduced the random factor.
- We changed the physical components: there used to be pencils and erasers for cards, now there are special washable markers, because for some reason the supplier of pencils sometimes made tough ones right in the normal lot.
- They made a lot of small details: they added a 6-player card, redid plastic coins, and so on. By the way, Habr asked to put the Freelansim project card - put.
New items
The main gift of the year was Resistance - a completely freaky game that uses the mafia engine, but makes it very unusual. The trick is that the classic mafia is great for negotiation training and the development of communication skills in general, but it has a couple of drawbacks: first, the players take off and miss, secondly, you need 10 people for a balanced game, and third, often the one who screams louder and more often wins, and not the one who thinks better. Resistance after that is just a fairy tale: only deduction and cold logic rule, nobody flies to the end, you can play from 5 people, plus on top of it all - the atmosphere of something like “1984” or “Equilibrium”. On the side of the box is a guy who looks like a cloud atlas resister from Neo-Seoul, but the game came out a couple of years before the film: apparently, just a popular image.
Resistance
There was a game about robots - Robotrok . I strongly advise, a good thing on the road or play with the child. The game is generally amazing of its kind: here is a very accurate balance, and simple rules. Children trudge from robots and their assembly, adults - from a very thoughtful and deep tactics. Half of the game you need to collect parts at the dump (according to the environmental legislation, robots can only be made from them) - this is the solution of the traveling salesman (Dijkstra) problem, taking into account the prediction of the actions of other players. The second part is pure bluff, the third, quite simple, is an assembly according to the optimal scheme.
Robotrok
Another completely insane thing, just outgoing the brain - a small game " 7 by 9 ", where you have to put cards in a pile in the middle of the table. Each card has a number and a modifier: for example, you can put either 5 or 9 on the “7 plus or minus 2” card, so there are no moves, so everything is done in a fun, noisy and very, very fast manner. The game literally reboots the brain in 5 minutes - disconnected from work, played a couple of games, started to play back with new forces, and at the same time the eyes moved.
There is another story connected with this game: the fact is that it is very difficult to explain to the humanities why with numbers from 1 to 10 in the game 9 + 2 = 1, and 1 - 3 = 8. People associated with IT understand this by the phrase “ circular buffer ”, which even some female animators have already learned for an early explanation.
Expected
It turns out the "Project Manhattan" - a hardcore game about the US nuclear program. You play as a project manager and develop, assemble and test new products. The game perfectly combines the entourage of a nuclear race and good project management mechanics.
Here is such a cool setting. Localization has already been completed.
There is good news for Munchkin lovers: the Brigade is already being printed - a toy that the Russian author created (then she was a clone of Munchkin about specific boys), and which had to be rebuilt almost from scratch, that is, in fact, was being developed anew. The result was a thing where, among other things, you need to quickly negotiate: after each successful hike in the area you need to divide the prey, which is not divided equally: for example, mobile and trunk for three. The highlight of the game is just this: 30 seconds to negotiate - or no one gets the mining. Thus, a fair player gradually appears who can divide in such a way that everyone in the future will share equally. At the same time, this communicative training is wrapped in the entourage of domestic criminal areas. In general, the scheme of a “bad and desirable” game with mechanics, which inevitably teaches the useful and the good, I really like - and this is exactly what the author wanted on the first version.
Games, popular in past years
Here is a brief assembly of board games that were leading as a gift for an IT specialist:
- Munchkin. There are no comments here, everyone knows him.
- Table hockey. There is a good old Soviet one , who is still doing in Omsk, and sometimes a trendy foreign one arrives at the gate. It is sold in two scenarios: either they take the game to the office, or a fragile woman drags a big box as a gift to her boyfriend. In recent years, by the way, hockey has become popular among girls - for example, at the Next Castle Party (this is such a game festival with old Amigs and consoles), where we organized a small tournament, one girl reached the semi-finals.
- Bet - here as a council, because it is popular in the West, and not in Russia. Quiz with bets: the winner is not the most erudite, but the one who understands who is better to bet on. A very interesting engine for the desktop.
- For children - the headheads , a very cool game for the development of memory, was the best children's game of 2010.
- Patriotic Evolution (there was another addition to it this year).
- Kukhandel ( backstage bargaining ). A rather rare thing with amazing auction mechanics, one of the favorite games about economics. Extremely simple, fun - and at the same time requiring non-child bluffs and calculations. I advise you to take the usual drawn version - art is better.
Hockey
PS Yes, the secret word " Habrahabr " when ordering in Mosigre immediately gives a small nice discount. Valid until January 10 inclusive in the online store (with delivery in the Russian Federation), Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ufa, Nizhny Novgorod, Kiev, Orenburg, Omsk, Ulan-Ude, Kazan, Stavropol, Yaroslavl, Tula, Krasnodar, Vladivostok, Chita, Astrakhan , Kaliningrad, Minsk, Chelyabinsk, Tolyatti, Perm, Saratov, Donetsk, Lipetsk, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and even snowy Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.
And what are you playing?
Please tell us what you play in your company.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/163309/
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