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Incline Co-Op boardgames

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Well, that's the thing with party games: most of them are very light on the rules and mechanics side, so the enjoyment they provide depends for the most part on the social interaction within the group; more than on good, tight or intricate mechanics. I think theme is also more important than mechanics in the party game genre (or more specifically, that the group enjoys the theme).
Ok, but the enjoyment in the social interaction you have playing the game relies on the mechanics. A game with a good theme without decent mechanics is broken.

I agree, that's why I don't like party games. :smug:
 
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Couldn't you have acquired a Pandemic recommendation from literally anyone else? It's basically baby's first coop game. Just as Dominion is the standard first deck-building game.
I'm aware, but it's precisely because everyone was saying it is great that I needed further reassurance, especially because I don't play with groups and don't visit stores - it is just me and my fiancé for now. My few friends are scattered around the country or living abroad. I made a 'to buy' list and Pandemic was the safest bet. I didn't play a boardgame since I was a kid. It feels good, man.
 

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I love my pnp, because I like games and I often like playing with my friends, not just against them. The older I grow, the less time I have at disposal for evening-long or even weekend-long pnp sessions. So quite a while ago I started getting into board games
Same here. My PnP group transformed into a board games group now that everyone except me has jobs and wives and kids, and can't commit to a regular schedule. I don't know if we'll ever be able to go back to RP, sadly. We'd have to shift to an episodic story to accomodate players being absent at certain sessions, and we really like continuing stories better (and can never manage to finish a scenario in one night unless it's a 1-pager). Plus sometimes board games give a better experience if we're a bit tired and not at our top creative shape for a good RP session. PnP is a lot more demanding, yet it can end up being less rewarding if good circumstances aren't there.

I really like them board games, but always feel shitty that they come at the cost of sweet PnP. And then I remember the occasional meh sessions, the times when we're building a story, coming up to a player conflict or a betrayal reveal, and then the player can't be there for the game and it fucks up all the carefully built setup. Yeah, I'm really conflicted about PnP vs board games.
 
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Well, that's the thing with party games: most of them are very light on the rules and mechanics side, so the enjoyment they provide depends for the most part on the social interaction within the group; more than on good, tight or intricate mechanics. I think theme is also more important than mechanics in the party game genre (or more specifically, that the group enjoys the theme).
Ok, but the enjoyment in the social interaction you have playing the game relies on the mechanics. A game with a good theme without decent mechanics is broken.
Well, dixit has shitty mechanics. The whole 'move your pawn across the board until you hit the last field and you win' is so disconnected from the rest of the game, it feels like it was an afterthought. It's like they didn't realize the game lacks a winning condition and they had to act fast because the game would go to press the day after. But that doesn't even matter. I play dixit with the kind of guys who think Monopoly is the pinnacle of board gaming and who don't want to play Risk because it is too complex and hardcore. They don't want to win the game and devise brilliant winnong strategies - they want to enjoy the ride, have social interactions and have a good laugh. And there is where Dixit pretty much outshines most other 'party' games imo.
 

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So here's my opinion on co-op board games: I love them, but I hate pure co-op games. I need for there to be some hidden information and objectives, possibility for traitors and betrayals, and therefore bluffing while we co-op, for the game to be interesting to me. I play with people to play the people, not the board. Anybody else feels the same?

I feel that pure co-op games are basically just a question of playing the board optimally. They're mechanical, just do the math type of shit. And so the game falls into some patterns: everyone plays every move by commitee to ensure optimal play, or some motivated guy is ahead of everyone on the optimal calculations, and just calls the optimal moves while others follow. In both cases, your moves aren't really yours. There's no reason to go against an optimal move, no personal objective that differs, so there's no social conflict there, no arguing for my move instead of yours, it's just an ocean of bland that reduces 3-6 minds to one. All there is to go against optimal moves are mistakes, rather than intentional player-engineered crises. Pure co-op games are basically single player games where someone thought it would be fun to split the player's actions amongst multiple people.

So obviously, I hated Pandemic. I admit I only played it 3 times, and maybe I need to give it another chance, but all 3 games, though at high difficulty, felt easy like butter, no challenge, no bluffing, no playing the players.
 
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So here's my opinion on co-op board games: I love them, but I hate pure co-op games. I need for there to be some hidden information and objectives, possibility for traitors and betrayals, and therefore bluffing while we co-op, for the game to be interesting to me. I play with people to play the people, not the board. Anybody else feels the same?

I feel that pure co-op games are basically just a question of playing the board optimally. They're mechanical, just do the math type of shit. And so the game falls into some patterns: everyone plays every move by commitee to ensure optimal play, or some motivated guy is ahead of everyone on the optimal calculations, and just calls the optimal moves while others follow. In both cases, your moves aren't really yours. There's no reason to go against an optimal move, no personal objective that differs, so there's no social conflict there, no arguing for my move instead of yours, it's just an ocean of bland that reduces 3-6 minds to one. All there is to go against optimal moves are mistakes, rather than intentional player-engineered crises. Pure co-op games are basically single player games where someone thought it would be fun to split the player's actions amongst multiple people.

So obviously, I hated Pandemic. I admit I only played it 3 times, and maybe I need to give it another chance, but all 3 games, though at high difficulty, felt easy like butter, no challenge, no bluffing, no playing the players.
I kind of agree with you. Have you played either Hanabi or Mysterium? Those are both "purely" cooperative (i.e. everyone wins or loses toegther), but the hidden information makes things interesting.
 

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Have you played either Hanabi or Mysterium? Those are both "purely" cooperative (i.e. everyone wins or loses toegther), but the hidden information makes things interesting.
I haven't. Hidden info would for sure make a pure co-op game more interesting, because it obfuscates what the optimal move is, so there's estimating/guessing added, and planning for contingencies. But it wouldn't alleviate the problems I mentioned earlier, and I figure that after a couple plays, after you know the cards/effects and their approximate probabilities, you have enough info that the game loses much of its edge -vs- an open info co-op game.
 

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Have you tried Fury of Dracula? One person plays as Dracula and the rest plays as the investigators. If the investigators wants to share information with each other they have to reveal that information to Dracula as well. Makes the co-op part for the investigators a bit more tense.

I bought it after the news with FFG and GW and I have only played it once, but I liked that session a lot.
 

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Maybe you should try Dead of Winter and Shadows over Camelot,both have traitor mechanics so they are semi co-op
 

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Have you played either Hanabi or Mysterium? Those are both "purely" cooperative (i.e. everyone wins or loses toegther), but the hidden information makes things interesting.
I haven't. Hidden info would for sure make a pure co-op game more interesting, because it obfuscates what the optimal move is, so there's estimating/guessing added, and planning for contingencies. But it wouldn't alleviate the problems I mentioned earlier, and I figure that after a couple plays, after you know the cards/effects and their approximate probabilities, you have enough info that the game loses much of its edge -vs- an open info co-op game.
Hanabi solves this problem. You should try it out.
 

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Traitor mechanics are terrible because they hinge on everyone knowing the rules well and bluffing well. Basically impossible to find a group capable and interested in that which wouldnt prefer an actual pen and paper experience.
 

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Traitor mechanics are terrible because they hinge on everyone knowing the rules well and bluffing well. Basically impossible to find a group capable and interested in that which wouldnt prefer an actual pen and paper experience.

Agree, but a very good DM, assembling the right people COULD pull this off to good effect.
 

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I haven't talked about the semi-co-op board games I played/like yet, didn't want to overload the thread. Here goes.

The ones I like:

Battlestar Galactica (link): This is the semi-co-op game that started it all for our group. Perfectly realized theme, all about rooting out the traitors while trying to keep the ship afloat, the crew fed and happy, and escaping the Cylon attack ships. It's got ways for the traitor to manipulate discussion to push suboptimal moves on others, way to subtly tank crises, and ways for the others to deduce who are the traitors, given the cards played on crises. I must've played at least 50 games. Yet, even though everyone in my group loves it, we don't play it anymore. It's only really balanced for 5 players, where there is 2 hidden traitors. The base game and each expansion offers a way to balance even-numbered games, by having some kind of half-traitor, but it's really not as fun as having an actual hidden traitor. It's also a pretty long game, and we don't always have that time. We used a short game variant from BGG, but it just wasn't the same, with less time the ship play becomes an aftertought. BSG needs the slack time so some moves make sense to be played, such as making everyone draw cards, contesting the presidency... So we moved on to shorter, more adaptable traitor games.

New Angeles (link): This is a recent gem in the vein of BSG, set in a cyberpunk universe where you play corporations "cooperating" to exploit the city while keeping the unrest to a minimum and trying to prevent the conditions upon which the governement would intervene and fuck up your profiteering plans. It's got maybe a traitor (the Federalist), otherwise you get a personal objective which is to have more points than another player. So it's not purely good guys vs traitors, rivalities can happen when two players must have more points than the other to win, so it's pretty tense. Each turn, a player proposes a plan of action (a card) to act on the board. Others can propose counteroffers, and then there's a vote (with cards) to see which plan wins and is executed. You can bribe others to vote for you or not vote with victory points, so there's a lot of negotiation happening. It's great if you like to argue, defend plans, and sometimes convince others to back a shitty plan. If you argue a lot like our group, the game can get long, so we often play our homemade short version (basically 2/3 of a game), with nothing lost. It also scales much better to the # of players than BSG.

Homeland (link): This is basically a shorter BSG focused exclusively on the same crisis mechanic, with more way to interact with it, and with 3 hidden roles (loyalist, terrorist mole, political opportunist) instead of 2. It's based on the shit tv show but it stays in the background, it's basically an agency vs terrorists theme. We just got it recently, but with this and New Angeles, BSG has basically been replaced for us, all but theme and nostalgia. The 3rd role, the political opportunist, wins with the good guys but must tank some crises to get VPs, so it allows for scalability to the # of players unlike BSG, and it allows the mole to redirect suspicions. The mole (if any), has to hide as either the political opportunist or loyalist, but they both have different tokens as VPs (one gained when stopping a terrorist threat, the other when making it succeed), so the mole must accumulate the right tokens to defend his chosen cover. It's pretty great, but also somewhat more competitive, because though the agency works together against the terrorist, only one gets the promotion in the end, the one with the most VPs.


The ones I'm ambivalent about or dislike:

The Resistance (link): This is basically a hidden traitor party game, 15-30min short. I first got it for when we wanted a really short BSG, but ultimately I find that it's either not complex enough when we want to board game, and often just a bit too much for when you're out drinking with friends, not focussing on the game at all times. It's ok, great if you got the right causal-but-not-too-much group.

Dead of Winter (link): I admit I played this only one time, and I intend to give it a fair chance. But our first game kind of fizzled, went nowhere, no tension. And that fan fiction level writing everywhere, oh god. We were holding our sides all night laughing at the game. There might be something good underneath. We just have way too many good games still for anyone to suggest it again.

Dark Moon (formerly BSG Express) (link): This was bred on the BGG forums to be a fast BSG, and got enough exposure that it got published under a The Thing type theme for legal reasons. It's basically a very streamlined BSG, with dice instead of cards for playing in crises. It seemed great, but my group found that there was not enough leeway to bluff, as, unlike in BSG where you play cards facedown in a crisis, in Dark Moon you roll behind a screen but submit the rolled dice face up, everyone seeing you put in a shitty roll. Maybe it's my group, maybe we haven't played it enough, but it didn't work for us.

Archipelago (link): This is the game New Angeles is based on, in a more euro style. It's got that great theme where you land on an island, enslave the natives to work the land for you while co-operatively trying to prevent their uprising. Good clean worker natives are represented by a white meeple, while rebels are black. Feels like colonialism. But the game seems absurdly long, even though we played the shortest version (supplied by the game). It also has way too many components, like 6 boards to track shit in addition to the explored hex map. It could've been streamlined a bit without loss. Great for a weekend day, like once a year. Get New Angeles instead.


Have you tried Fury of Dracula?
Sounds right up my alley, will check it.

Maybe you should try Dead of Winter and Shadows over Camelot,both have traitor mechanics so they are semi co-op
I talked about DoW ^, but I haven't played Shadows over Camelot. I've heard it was a great semi-co-op game until other games came and did it better. I intend to try it one day, but it's not high on my to-buy list, unless there's something special about it that I don't know.
 
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Traitor mechanics are terrible because they hinge on everyone knowing the rules well and bluffing well. Basically impossible to find a group capable and interested in that which wouldnt prefer an actual pen and paper experience.
Right. "Like who do you think we are, knowing the rules before we play?!" :P

You've got a casual group, if they can't/won't learn rules enough to play. That's ok, but you can't blame the game or the traitor mechanic. It can definitely not work for your group though, social mechanics are very group dependant, and sometimes we bring in new people into the group who can't take the heat. It's not for everyone. Still, the people in my group weren't all good bluffers when we started, some sucked pretty bad. But they adapted, we all got better with practice. Also, it's very important for us, when we play a semi-co-op game "seriously" (not to learn it), to make sure every mechanic is understood by all, especially what the traitor role can do, otherwise it's no fun. We want the traitor(s) at full power.

About board games -vs- PnP, I talked about it earlier. RP campaigns are a much bigger commitment than board games. Not every group is always ready for it.

Also, my PnP campaigns have all been "semi-co-op". I've often had traitors in the players' group, often temporarily, given a character's weaknesses, background, deals with others, survival needs, and desires. PnP and traitor mechanics are not mutually exclusive. My bad guys are great IMO because they make the players turn against each other. Player conflict is much more interesting to me as a game master and as a player than fighting random faceless puzzle/guy #57. It prompts the players to direct the story and drive the conflict. It's a lot harder to GM for because it's all prepared improv, molding to what players do. But because everyone invests some creative juice in it, it becomes memorable. My last D&D campaign climaxed in a fight between the players, who during the campaign had developped diverging sets of principles.
 
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I feel that pure co-op games are basically just a question of playing the board optimally. They're mechanical, just do the math type of shit. And so the game falls into some patterns: everyone plays every move by commitee to ensure optimal play, or some motivated guy is ahead of everyone on the optimal calculations, and just calls the optimal moves while others follow. In both cases, your moves aren't really yours. There's no reason to go against an optimal move, no personal objective that differs, so there's no social conflict there, no arguing for my move instead of yours, it's just an ocean of bland that reduces 3-6 minds to one. All there is to go against optimal moves are mistakes, rather than intentional player-engineered crises. Pure co-op games are basically single player games where someone thought it would be fun to split the player's actions amongst multiple people.
Another approach to circumvent this is real-time/time limit gameplay with each player being assigned a specific role. That way, you cannot have lengthy discussions about the optimal turn and there can't be a shotcaller/alphagamer who tells each other player what to do because everyone has barely time to mind is own task already.
The X-Com boardgame does this, for example (I'm not as fond of this game anymore as I used to be when starting this thread. It does come with its set of problems: Most poor decicions made during real-time phase can be mitigated during the resolve phase up to the point where the real time phase is rendered almost meaningless. Also, the luck from dice rolling can be infuriating. Not Eric Lang's best game but still very funny for a few sessions).
Captain Sonar is another recent example (although it is Team vs Team and not Coop). It doesn't live up to the hype though imo. If you play bad/make a mistake, it's the enemy team who gets punished instead of your own.
Space Alert is another real time coop game where you simply lack the time to be the alpha gamer and have to rely on your team. Still haven't played it tho :argh: Judging by bgg reviews, it actually stands the test of time.
 

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So, how many of these coop board games are actually fun to play single player?
To add a bit to my previous post: The thread reminded me of the mobile app of Descend 2nd Edition ('Road to Legend') and I decided to play a few maps on my own. It's decent (heh, heh) fun and if you have a copy of it at your disposal you should check it out. But if you'd have to spend money anyways, I'd still go for Gloomhaven tho.
 

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Another approach to circumvent this is real-time/time limit gameplay with each player being assigned a specific role. That way, you cannot have lengthy discussions about the optimal turn and there can't be a shotcaller/alphagamer who tells each other player what to do because everyone has barely time to mind is own task already.
Yeah that might make it interesting. I admit I might've judged pure co-op games too harshly. Haven't tried any with a time limit though.

Captain Sonar is another recent example (although it is Team vs Team and not Coop). It doesn't live up to the hype though imo. If you play bad/make a mistake, it's the enemy team who gets punished instead of your own.
Space Alert is another real time coop game where you simply lack the time to be the alpha gamer and have to rely on your team. Still haven't played it tho :argh: Judging by bgg reviews, it actually stands the test of time.
Yeah I've heard of those, want to try them but haven't had the occasion yet. Btw there's Sonar (BGG), the 2-4 player version of Captain Sonar, that comes out soon. I might get this one, as I've heard it's a better version, the original had some less fun roles that are now merged, and would be hard for me to get to the table since it's optimal with 6 or 8 players.
 

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Battlestar Galactica: This is the semi-co-op game that started it all for our group. Perfectly realized theme, all about rooting out the traitors while trying to keep the ship afloat, the crew fed and happy, and escaping the Cylon attack ships. It's got ways for the traitor to manipulate discussion to push suboptimal moves on others, way to subtly tank crises, and ways for the others to deduce who are the traitors, given the cards played on crises. I must've played at least 50 games. Yet, even though everyone in my group loves it, we don't play it anymore. It's only really balanced for 5 players, where there is 2 hidden traitors. The base game and each expansion offers a way to balance even-numbered games, by having some kind of half-traitor, but it's really not as fun as having an actual hidden traitor. It's also a pretty long game, and we don't always have that time. We used a short game variant from BGG, but it just wasn't the same, with less time the ship play becomes an aftertought. BSG needs the slack time so some moves make sense to be played, such as making everyone draw cards, contesting the presidency... So we moved on to shorter, more adaptable traitor games.
I love this game. One of my favorites, perhaps even THE favorite. For a "long" game, it does a great job of keeping interest throughout. The crisis step is simply brilliant design, and effectively solves the "downtime" problem that a lot of games with turns end up having. I disagree about it not scaling well with even-numbered players. The initial sympathizer card with the base game was a bit weird, but I personally think playing the cylon leader from the first expansion is a lot of fun, and interesting in that he can arouse suspicion from BOTH human and cylon players, which is interesting. Then there's the conflicted loyalties option from the second expansion, which I haven't had a chance to play yet, but which looks like it could spice things up a bit, and make it "harder" for the humans, if that's a problem.

New Angeles: This is a recent gem in the vein of BSG, set in a cyberpunk universe where you play corporations "cooperating" to exploit the city while keeping the unrest to a minimum and trying to prevent the conditions upon which the governement would intervene and fuck up your profiteering plans. It's got maybe a traitor (the Federalist), otherwise you get a personal objective which is to have more points than another player. So it's not purely good guys vs traitors, rivalities happen when two players must have more points than the other to win, so it's pretty tense. Each turn, a player proposes a plan of action (a card) to act on the board. Others can propose counteroffers, and then there's a vote (with cards) to see which plan wins and is executed. You can bribe others to vote for you or not vote with victory points, so there's a lot of negotiation happening. It's great if you like to argue, defend plans, and sometimes convince others to back a shitty plan. If you argue a lot like our group, the game can get long, so we often play our homemade short version (basically 2/3 of a game), with nothing lost. It also scales much better to the # of players than BSG.
I've been looking into this recently. It's definitely something I'm interested in playing.

The Resistance: This is basically a hidden traitor party game, 15-30min short. I first got it for when we wanted a really short BSG, but ultimately I find that it's either not complex enough when we want to board game, and often just a bit too much for when you're out drinking with friends, not focussing on the game at all times. It's ok, great if you got the right causal-but-not-too-much group.
Have you played the Avalon variant? Much more fun in my opinion.

Dead of Winter: I admit I played this only one time, and I intend to give it a fair chance. But our first game kind of fizzled, went nowhere, no tension. And that fan fiction level writing everywhere, oh god. We were holding our sides all night laughing at the game. There might be something good underneath. We just have way too many good games still for anyone to suggest it again.
I agree on this one. It's basically a poor man's BSG in every way. This one's especially galling to me because in the gaming scene at my current city there's people who like to play this a lot, but I can't get anyone to play BSG with me. Pisses me off.
 

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Battlestar Galactica
I love this game. One of my favorites, perhaps even THE favorite. For a "long" game, it does a great job of keeping interest throughout. The crisis step is simply brilliant design, and effectively solves the "downtime" problem that a lot of games with turns end up having. I disagree about it not scaling well with even-numbered players. The initial sympathizer card with the base game was a bit weird, but I personally think playing the cylon leader from the first expansion is a lot of fun, and interesting in that he can arouse suspicion from BOTH human and cylon players, which is interesting. Then there's the conflicted loyalties option from the second expansion, which I haven't had a chance to play yet, but which looks like it could spice things up a bit, and make it "harder" for the humans, if that's a problem.
Cylon Leaders were indeed much better than the Sympathizer, and so was the Mutineer in Daybreak (3rd xp). But having one Cylon to root out isn't as fun as two, and Cylons have no chance to find one another and co-op subtely. With 2 Cylons, I've had a game where I, as a Cylon, exposed and took down the other when suspicions arose, and put myself in a position of trust, only to exploit it later. So 3-4 player games are really suboptimal, I found, especially if one player's loyalty card is a known quantity. And if you got 5, there's no way I'd replace one of the two hidden Cylons with two Cylon Leaders.

I also haven't had a chance to play the 2nd xp of BSG, sadly it's now out of print, can be found for like 150+$. Making it harder for the humans would be great, as I feel it becomes a tad easy for an experienced group, chaining those Executive orders. I don't know if it would be worth it for my group, we might only have a couple plays left in us.


New Angeles
I've been looking into this recently. It's definitely something I'm interested in playing.
Get it man, seems like your kind of game. But know this: this is a heated game, much more than BSG. Winning conditions are harsh -- needing to get more points than somebody to win, while he might need more than someone else, etc -- make negotiation with VPs feel like they have very high stakes. People get emotional. We once invited someone from outside our group to play it (that had played semi-co-op games with us before, and even one game of NA); he ended up rage quitting, just set his cards on the table and left (!). He wasn't ready for the bluffing in a high pressure cooker atmosphere it gets to. And he wasn't even the traitor. Know your group.


The Resistance
Have you played the Avalon variant? Much more fun in my opinion.
That's the one with the hidden roles right? I haven't played it, but there's an expansion with roles for the sci-fi version of the game too now. Roles would have made it more complex for drinking parties, and my group didn't like it enough to want to expand it. It's a game we play when we're with casuals.

The short hidden roles game my group turns to is usually Coup (link), in the same universe as The Resistance. Short and slick, no fat at all, pure bluff. A game can be 5-15mins. And casuals can play it. It killed all our interest in the Resistance. It is really good. The other short bluffing game we're trying now that feels like it could be as good as Coup is Skull (link). For that time length, I feel Coup and Skull destroy The Resistance. EDIT: I might be biaised against The Resistance because it only plays well with 6+ players, while Coup and Skull play great at 3-5, which is what we usually are. And when we manage to be 6, it's surely not to play the Resistance.
 
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