Games Reveal A Lot About You
It’s become tradition that when my wife and kids head to Japan for their annual visit, something beautiful (and a little ridiculous) happens in our house: GAMEAPALOOZA. The all-caps is part of the branding.
What started as a casual get-together is now a full-fledged board game marathon. I‘m happy to announce that GAMEAPALOOZA VI just wrapped, running over three weeks with a total of 45 different people walking through our doors. We played well over 50 games. One particular Saturday alone ran from 2 p.m. to 1 a.m. It was amazing.
Board games have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. Not because of a love for competition (though let’s be honest, I don’t mind when I win), but because of what happens in the game. It’s all about making memories with people I enjoy spending time with - or with new friends. Sometimes the early banter morphs into a tense silence of concentration, inside jokes that last for years spontaneously form, alliances wickedly get betrayed, and of course there are “stand up moments” where everything lies on the result of a single dice roll.
My active mind often travels, and lately, I came across an article from someone in our board gaming community talking about the history of my hobby. Games have been with us since the beginning. Archaeologists have found what they think is a 10,000-year-old game board in Jordan. That’s older than the Pyramids and even agriculture in some parts of the world.
Over ten thousand years ago, humans were strategizing, bluffing, playing, and probably accusing each other of cheating. The lineage is mind-blowing in Asia alone. There’s Go, born in China over 2,500 years ago, still played in China, Tokyo apartments and Seoul cafés today. There’s Chaturanga, the Indian ancestor of chess, Shogi in Japan, Janggi in Korea, and even Sugoroku (a dice game the Japanese aristocracy played in the Heian period), which can still be seen played today.
What fascinates me is the staying power of games and the fact that they were rituals more than they were pastimes.
There’s a reason games remain our foundation in revealing patterns of people. The overly dominant “Alpha Gamer” is the player who speaks but doesn’t listen. The players in a real-time cooperative game who forget to check in until it’s too late. You see it everywhere, whether in Catan or Pandemic. Or when your nine-year-old daughter destroys you in Ticket to Ride because you were too busy monologuing your plan to notice she had a secret coast-to-coast route.
Games are more than entertainment. They’re human, and like the best kinds of humans, they evolve and find new ways to matter. That’s exactly why they’re so powerful in leadership training and team development training - they reveal habits, highlight communication styles, and uncover how people collaborate under pressure.
Here’s to the next GAMEAPALOOZA. It’s not only a personal tradition but also inspiration for our work in leadership escape room training. Just as board games have been used for millennia to connect people, our world’s first B2B escape room Singapore experience was designed as an innovative blend of team building and leadership training Singapore companies can use to strengthen trust, sharpen problem-solving, and create lasting bonds.
