TL;DR
Next series of post is about my takeaways from Brighton TestBash2017 conference. First was pre TestBash meetup.
That meetup was day before workshop day. I came late, and everybody was already in the game mood. I noticed that a lot of games were played.
I joined to table with following setup. One card was on the table, three testers were asking questions, and one was answering them. Game was Dark Stories. Each card represents a puzzle in story form that is written on one side, answer is on other side. One person reads puzzle at loud and keeps answer for himself. Others try to guess the answer.
My takeaway. This is excellent game for practicing critical thinking. Answer is not obvious, so you need to do focus/defocus thinking about the puzzle. You need to have some common general knowledge in order to solve some puzzles. I played with excellent testers, and by listening their questions, I learned about their approach to puzzle problem. Pairing of testers, in this case testers tetrads, is great way to learn, test and solve a puzzle!
Second game that I observed was Otrio. Think of it as tic-tac-toe with more dimensions. Triplet can be made with same size or different size in ascending or descending order. Each element has three sizes.
Third game was Cockroach Salad. Pace of this game is very fast. it trains your brain to think fast, as rule of games could change. You have four card type: Pepper, tomato, salad and cauliflower. For each card type, there is taboo card. You play a card and say vegetables that is on the card. But:
- If your vegetable matches the previously played vegetable, the player must lie.
- If your vegetable matches the claim made by the previous player (perhaps because that player lied), then the player must lie.
- If you play a taboo card, he shouts “Cockroach!” and the next player starts a new pile next to the first one so that the taboo card remains visible.
- If your vegetable matches a visible taboo card, he must lie.
If you can not lie and you are supposed to (nightmare of every politician!), you must pick all cards from the table. First player without cards wins.
I was in situations when I was testing application that had feature rules similar to this game. How about you?
That was it. No beer party because I need a good night sleep for workshop day. I walked back to my bed and breakfast place despite the fact that weather had changed three times since I arrived to Brighton.
