A Roll of the Dice for Tabletop Gaming

I came to class last week with mixed expectations for this semester. Games are something that I consider myself to have very little experience with, which was probably apparent to my group when I announced that my favourite one was Bananagrams. 

So when Avalon was placed in front of me, I was very unsure of what to expect from the experience. An experience which probably turned out to be a learning curve for all of us. 

On the topic of learning, one thing I worked out from week one is that games are so much more than just cards and tokens. As Egenfeldt-Neilsen et.al (2008) write, the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that in defining any game, “we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and cris-crossing: sometimes overall details, sometimes similarities of detail”. In fact, a whole cohort of factors come into play when considering any…