We run the game with 4 class members (Carina, Caroline, Michael, Lucy) and 2 members who have no experience with CS377G. We played with the classroom rule.
We ran the game for 4 rounds with each class member as the puppet master, and we started modding the game from the second round. Since we have an odd number of players for each round, there is always someone idle during the first round of attacks. We had some discussion about what counts as a holiday (does the day have to be completely fictional or can this day exist but not as a holiday), we decided to use the latter definition.
In the first round we ran with the initial rules, we observe that people were talking over each other at the beginning of the interaction, but then they will take turn to finish their sentence. We observe that due to our small group size, the 30 seconds time-out made the game very stagnant. In the next round, we asked the player to physically separate in a draw but removed the time-out; in addition, we asked people to declare their action option (A, B or C) before proceeding. Interestingly, we see people mainly stick to option A and C in this round. There is much less confusion and hesitation about who won each round, but we also lose some factor of surprise. Removing time-out allowed the game to move at a much faster pace. We kept this rule for all remaining rounds.
In the next round we added physical activity: players have to run around the room for 3 laps before challenging other groups. We see players started strategizing during the running as the game go on, but running gets tedious as people get more tired. This also slowed the game down, but players seem to like physical activity since it utilized all the spaces available. Our final round is speed round where two sides do not need to attack at the same time, rather the teams can sneak attack the other team, and the team that finishes the attack first wins. This is a lightning round where the game finished faster than any other ones, there is much less strategizing and much more chaos as people try to finish their attack while making sense of the opponent’s attack. Team collaboration becomes much harder due to the fast pace and we see that spokesperson is picked within group to execute the attack.
