Our team won its first Family Feast, and I was amazed by that. Plenty of people have come and gone since then. Life goes on, with or without Yahtzee.
A team member came to me with a crazy idea a couple of months after the Feasts were introduced: Delay our start and get into a less competitive pool of teams. It doesn't guarantee a win, but it avoids having to compete with super teams. As we've learned, some teams will earn more than 100,000 points in a Feast.
I liked the idea, floated it in the group chat, and others liked it to. We were about to start a Feast, and I thought it was too early to expect 50 people to be on the same page, but we tried to get everyone on that same page at the suggestion of several team members, and we delayed our start long enough to give us a less insane pool of competitors. It was very encouraging.
Moving forward, I determined we needed a more organized campaign, so I recruited team "captains" to send reminders to players prior to the start of each new Feast. In addition to private message reminders, we repeat our messaging in the general chat room. It does not take hours of our time to do this, but I have spent time organizing teams twice and communicating with the captains at the start of each Feast. We all spend time trying to make sure everybody is paying attention and on the same page.
I have never made winning the Feast a team priority. I don't pay close attention to the contributions of our members. I don't set participation benchmarks that team members must reach. It's just not that important to win a limited edition dice set or team emblem.
The current Feast started about four days after the previous Feast ended. A Facebook group I recently joined noted that the Feasts were starting about 7-8 days after the completion of the previous Feast. Somehow the current Feast had to start four days after the previous Feast, and without a 24-hour notice. I think we had about two hours notice.... too short to expect the captains to send reminders to the team members. We limited the announcement to our group chat and hoped for the best, knowing everyone on our team knows our strategy.
As I said, I recruited several people to help me keep 42 other players in the loop when a Feast is about to start. We've benefited from our communication/delay effort seemingly every time, but for whatever reason, it's just too difficult for our team to accomplish our one declared goal, to wait until the following day to start playing the Feast.
I can no longer ask people to dedicate their time toward a goal we can't accomplish collectively. We've been through several Feasts using a delayed start. When I add new team members, I communicate with them and make sure they understand that we skip the first day of the Feast. They all understand that. And yet, one of our veteran players has some extraordinary circumstances that necessitates starting the Feast.
I'm not interested in pointing a finger at any one person. It has happened a handful of times now, and I have no reason to assume it's not going to continue happening.
I won't ask the captains to spend any more time reminding everyone that we have one goal, and only one, on this team. There's no 75-bag requirement during each Feast. There's no 10 bags/day requirement. There's no help points requirements. But we can't, collectively, leave the Feast alone for 18-24 hours. We just can't. And asking team captains to work toward that is something I can no longer do.
You're all welcome to do what you want to do during future Feasts. My work is done.
Yahtzee is supposed to be fun, I'm told. If being part of our group and not paying attention to the one goal our team has agreed to makes it more fun, who am I to argue?
Good luck out there!
