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 (
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: 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 (
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: 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 (
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: 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 (
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: 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 (
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: 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) (
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: 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 (
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: 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.