Metagame over CardTAMEN

For many years, I've used the CARD-tamen games during the second week of my game design class. CARD-tamen is an educational party game in which players engage in short debates about the impact of classical Rome or the natural sciences. I would have students elect into one of two groups to play. After playing, we would do an MDA analysis of the game, following the one used in the previous class session when did a similar exercise with Buffalo. The games are similar enough, yet different enough, that students tended to sort out in the second MDA analysis what they had mixed up in the first—usually confusion between the dynamics and the aesthetics. 

In 2019, the previous time I taught the course in-person, I had a student push back on my selection of CARD-tamen. The CARD-tamen games, I always explain to my classes, are designed for integration into university coursework on classical culture and biology, respectively. My game design students usually know relatively little about this, and it seems they often have fun bluffing there way through arguments about, say, whether the Coliseum or the Optimates are more influential to modern life. The student who pushed back asked a simple question: isn't there another game, similar to these, that would serve the same purpose, but which features things we may actually know about? Ah, if only all students would engage in such meta-educational discourse!

It didn't take long for me to find an alternative game since I already knew one by reputation: The Metagame.  The Metagame is designed in part for use at large gatherings of people who do not know each other, so in many ways it's perfect for an interdisciplinary classroom. The topics it contains are, by design, much more accessible than CARD-tamen. I bought my copy in late Fall 2019... and then we had the pandemic. 

This semester was the first time I was able to roll the game out in class, and it worked like a charm. There was a lot of laughter and listening, and I could tell that everyone in the room was engaged. One thing the students struggled with was that they could move around and form ad hoc groups at any time. Of course, the classroom is designed to inhibit this, so they were working against the furniture and the architecture. They also didn't help themselves by all remaining seated, which meant they could only go where they could comfortably roll. Next time, assuming all the students are ambulatory, I'll have them stand up first,  or maybe even go outside, and then start playing.

The Metagame is a keeper, which means CARD-tamen may get abandoned on my shelf of classroom tools. Perhaps I will look around campus and see if any professors in classics or biology want to try it out.