The Yellow Meeple Starts a Board Game Group at Work - Week 10

This week was definitely a better week for attendance, although it’s definitely turned into a group for the people I can persuade in my team, plus one person who still attends from a different team in the company. It’s time to re-advertise the group and see if anyone new wants to come along and can do so on a Monday evening. But, for this week we were six, which is the most people for a long while, so let’s take a look at this week in my work board game group.

Week 10

Number of Attendees: 6

Games Played: Codenames, Dixit

The Challenges

The length of time people will stay

I start board game group 6.30pm - 30 minutes after work officially finishes, which means we often start playing at 6.45pm. This week, everyone essentially left by just after 8pm. We did fit 3 games of Codenames into that time and a short game of Dixit, but I just really want to spend a longer evening gaming to justify my effort in staying after work given that I probably live the furthest away from the office. I guess most people just don’t see board gaming as their full evening activity or don’t want to pay to eat food at the pub we play at, so I’m not sure how I can resolve this unless I lock people into longer games.

The Successes

New people

This week, my partner, Amy, joined us for the first time. Once again it’s definitely good to have a guaranteed extra person attending – it just looks better to have a larger group and encourages people to stay and keep playing games. However, I’m not really going to count Amy as a new recruit. One of my close colleagues did come along for the first time though. He’s always talked about playing Catan with friends and family but always backs out of coming to my game nights at the last minute. It was nice to have him along, but I will be surprised if he becomes a regular, even though I think he had a good time.

Fun times

Codenames was definitely the hit of the evening. Even though people found it a little difficult to grasp during rules explanation, it’s easy to understand once playing the game and after we were done once, everyone wanted to try again and we eventually played a best of three. In particular, our new player was amazing at giving clues, which is always a nice bonus for the new person to feel like they’re on a level playing field with the other people at the table.

Lessons for Next Week

Longer games

This is the same as I said last week, but I do seem to be stuck in a cycle of playing a couple of light games or party games, then everybody leaves. I need to break this cycle and only use the fillers or high player count party games when I need to wait for more people to join the group. When I think everyone is present we should jump straight into something a little more challenging and I’ll just have to hope that doesn’t scare people away!