I've accidentally discovered something more important than flawlessness

I never expected college to bring out so much of my creative side. Never would I have guessed that in one year, I would have invented my own language, written a play, and helped to create a board game. By far the hardest of the three was inventing the board game. Though Jim, Tristan, Michael, and I had several meetings, 2/3 of them were spent coming up with a concept. Thinking back on it, we had a plethora of terrible ideas (including one which had the word "shank" in the title), and when we finally stumbled on a good one, we realized we had accidentally recreated Agricola, a German-made game centered around 17th century farming. But luckily, this slight error was merely a drought in our planting season, followed by a thriving and lush field of ideas.

Once we came up with a concept, our biggest problem was remaining on topic. One minute we'd be talking about whether or not we'd be using cards or a board, and the next, we were discussing card design. Constantly, we had to interrupt each other with exasperated cries of "but what is the point of the game?!" It seemed, that far more difficult than coming up with interesting visual design was inventing a cohesive and sensical mechanic that would allot for maximum fun. Throughout our discussions, we strived to keep as many things in mind as possible: don't make the game take too long, don't make it too easy, don't make it too difficult, don't make it offensive (at one point, one of us suggested the name "Queebo," to which another responded with a chuckle, "sounds like an anti-homosexual slur." When another person laughed and said if we're going to call it that we may as well call it "Gayme," we realized we had going hilariously off-topic). But it's difficult to please everyone, and especially difficult to make a game appropriately complicated without making it terribly difficult to master. I don't even think we came close to doing that until our penultimate meeting, where we fine-tuned Gemtastic to the best of our ability in such a short time period. Too me though, the most rewarding part of that experience was working with a group to achieve a common goal. So rarely does a group function well together. Usually there's a slacker, or a person who takes charge, and while I group had both of those stereotypes to an extent, mostly, I just enjoyed spending time with my group members, and it's always fascinating to hear what they have to say, and even more fascinating to discover their abilities to create things that I never would have thought of. Conversely, I discovered things about myself that boosted my self-esteem. My group members took my ideas and actually implemented them, rather than sloughing them off as silly comments. I had honestly never been in a group with such polite, respectful people before. 

But besides being extremely polite, each of them were incredibly, almost intimidatingly brilliant. Michael had an excellent ability to come up with card statistics, Tristan had amazing marketing ideas, and Jim, ah, Jim... One afternoon he asked me "Want to see something a little disturbing?" Naturally, I chirped, "Always!" and flounced after him. When he opened the door to his room, there were game prototypes littering every inch of it. There was not one corner that wasn't full of little hexagonal tiles or cut up pieces of paper. But rather than find this pathetic, I simply felt lucky to have Jim in our group. Jim, who was clearly born to do this sort of thing. So even though our game design may have been rough, (yet extremely pretty if I do say so myself), what I take away from this project is social experience, and I couldn't have felt more achieved if our project were as honed as a farmer's scythe.