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  • Analysis
  • Idiots - Why I Dislike Cooperative Board Games

Idiots - Why I Dislike Cooperative Board Games

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Idiots
There Will Be Games

Consider for a moment -- you’re a soldier in a big concrete bunker.  Coming up the hill towards you are: a) a group of 20 men with rifles, and b) a tank.  Beside you in the bunker is an artillery piece, the words “Anti-Tank Gun” written on it.  Which should you fire at?  The men, or the tank?  This isn't a trick question; go with your gut.

If you picked the tank, you’re smarter than a cooperative game's deck of cards.  It's not the highest bar you’ll ever clear, but congratulations nonetheless.  You’re a more qualified opponent than every cooperative game on the market, and likely a lot more fun to be with.

If you haven’t guessed I've been off of co-ops for awhile now.  Initially I found the concept interesting.  I enjoyed Lord of the Rings and Shadows Over Camelot.  Both were intentionally hard, and that meant challenge, and bringing friends together in a team meant camaraderie and a shared spirit of victory or defeat.  Cooperative games should be just the thing for me and my buddies, but they’re not.  They’re flat; they’re lifeless.  They manage to be arbitrary and predictable simultaneously, which is a pretty impressive display of failure when you think about it.

So what’s my problem?  Why do I dislike cooperatives when everyone else seems to love them?  More than a few are very popular right now and game publishers are pumping them out with wild abandon, presumably because they’re in demand.  I've played my share in the last year or two (they’re almost unavoidable now) and with each I’ve come to the same conclusion: this one doesn't work either. They just don’t ring the bell for me.  When I recognized this was happening a few months back I spent the time I needed to figure out what my problem was.  This was my conclusion:

It’s not me, it’s you.  You’re all idiots.

Now hear me out – this theory is pretty compelling.  It's simple; it’s straightforward; it thoroughly resolves the question and makes me feel better about myself.  Since that may not be enough for you I'm going to spend time to lay out some indictments against cooperatives and as best I can tell they aren't the usual suspects that get trotted out on the subject.

Here’s the heart of the matter: cooperatives are puzzles.  It’s pretty much that simple; they’re inanimate objects.  There’s no intelligence, no insight.  There can’t be.  No amount of time or effort spent during development can breathe life into an opponent made out of cardboard.  Puzzles are fine and I have dozens, but I generally do them alone, and I generally do them once.  “Alone” and “once” aren’t two facets boardgame publishers can afford when fellowship is an imperative to the industry’s survival.  And to some extent I think that the “fellowship” concept is the primary driver behind the ever-growing number of cooperative titles.  Cooperatives provide a low barrier to entry emotionally, and publishers are using the concept to get unlikely players to the table.  A laudable goal of course, but it has pitfalls.  The game this wider audience sits down to needs to be engaging and worth returning to, and both are tougher to pull off with a puzzle.

Ok, so I dropped you in a concrete bunker in the first paragraph.  Now I’m going to drop you into an even less desirable location -- a cooperative game designer’s office.  Smaller, darker and less ventilated, those who dwell within deserve our sympathy, because they are working with one hand tied behind their back.  Instead of a big gun they get a blank sheet of paper, tasked to create a game whose requirement set is much larger than that for competitive titles.  They don’t merely have to create a level playing field.  They have to create an artificial game player as well, one that can compete against real live humans.  That’s very tough – there’s no computer program here.  In boardgames there’s no way to examine what’s on the table in order to respond.  The cooperative boardgame designer is required to develop narrative from an unknowing, inanimate object.  The inability to sense game state means they have to find a way produce an intelligent response with what is essentially a bag of puzzle pieces.  How on Earth do you do that?

By my measure, game designers have largely failed to achieve this herculean task.

Deaf and blind, cooperative games need to simulate some sort of decision-making process.  They need to fake it, and that means random bad news and plenty of it.  Generally done via a deck of cards, the theory is that a sufficient number of “events” for the players to deal with will provide a challenge.  But often these decks-of-doom do just the opposite.  I’m not speaking of a bad shuffle providing a too-easy or too-hard session (two very-real possibilities that you’ll see discussed aplenty.)  I’m speaking of a gaminess where players disengage, where players don’t feel obligated to make decisions based upon the reality defined by the game’s ruleset.  Against real opponents your decisions are scrutinized.  Each move is examined by a thinking individual that can react with competence, and if you blunder you’re going to pay.  That gets the scare up in you.  But a deck of cards can’t do that.  A deck of cards is as likely to hit you at the strongest part of your game as the weakest, so poor play often goes unpunished.  In fact poor play can even be rewarded when you leave one position vulnerable and exposed in order to super-power another.  You can (and likely should) leave some positions uncovered in hopes they won’t get hit by the random draw this turn.  The game begins to de-evolve, becoming a search for seams in the ruleset that take you away from the game’s conceptual goals.  That’s not fun, and when you explain to the new guy next to you that “you don’t need to cover London anymore because it's already in the discard pile” they aren't going to come away with a high opinion of the title.

Here’s the thing – this concept I’m raising isn’t about your unthinking cardboard opponent, it’s about you.  When you’re playing a real opponent he keeps you honest.  He forces you to play carefully.  He makes you develop a broad, unified strategy covering the entire board.  He makes you play hard.  A deck of cards can’t do that.  A deck of cards can be active, but it can’t be reactive.  At best you start gaming the rules and working the angles because there’s positive feedback in doing that.  At worst you just stop giving a damn.

The other issue I have with Event Decks is that they're essentially a simulation of my deaf grandmother.  You and your friends may tell each other to draw a card when you play cooperative games, but I have a different phrase – “Listen to Eunice.”

You see my Grandmother Eunice lost her hearing as she aged, and she was well aware that she couldn’t react to other people’s comments or questions anymore.  So if she wanted to be in the discussion, she needed to lead it.  Not just lead it, she needed to dominate it.  As long as Grandma Eunice kept talking she knew what the topic was, and that was just fine with her.  We kids had no choice but to listen to the same stories over and over without asking questions or making comments.  We loved Grandma, but it was awfully tedious.

That’s what an “event deck” has to do to maintain narrative.  It can't hear, so it can't react even to itself.  Regardless of game state, the deck is going to keep talking about whatever it wants.  We smile and nod like we did with Grandma, but c’mon.  It’s a lackluster session.  Generally nobody complains because cooperatives really can't get better.  We settle for second best because we want the fellowship.  

Now, the first time you try a new cooperative you’re likely not aware of what resides in that event deck and there’s some fun in discovery.  The first time we heard Grandma Eunice’s stories they were entertaining too.  But that’s fleeting – once seen assembled a puzzle loses its luster, and the assembly time is largely determined by the amount of cardboard in the box.  Arkham Horror can bring it for more than a few plays because there are so many cards.  Castle Panic . . . my boys were done with it in ten minutes.  To their credit they lasted a few minutes longer than I did.

Some cooperative games attempt to minimize the issue of arbitrary story by keeping the card deck simple and its actions smaller in scope.  D-Day at Omaha Beach (a game I like in spite of closely resembling the example I started this article with) uses its card deck for target selection.  No single card is of significant enough magnitude to throw the game off kilter or appear as a break in narrative.  Each card drawn activates attacks on multiple units (often from multiple locations), and has the effect of steadily degrading your position on the battlefield.  That’s a pretty reasonable reflection of the game’s theme, and multiple card draws of lesser effect mean that the law of large numbers is available to produce a more even-handed result.  This is analogous to drawing a disadvantageous card in solitaire, where no single event is significant enough to break the theme or produce a bizarre change of state.  You get a play that feels more like a balanced and well-considered response.  In my opinion this is better, but still not gripping.  Had I been playing a buddy he assuredly would have picked a soft spot and punched hard, trying to break my line to upset my battle plans.  That is reactive gaming.  It keeps me honest; it makes me play for real.  It makes try to figure out what he's thinking.  No deck of cards will ever be able to do that.  No deck can identify a weak position or capitalize on a lucky die roll.  I have yet to see one that is able to capitalize on combinations of powers.  If anybody knows of one I’d love to hear about it.

If the last few years are any indication, game designers are aware that they’ve wrung out the capabilities of static protocols and event decks.  In the absence of intelligence in the automated opponent, the concept of a “secret traitor” has become so common that I pretty much assume it’s in a cooperative’s ruleset before I read it.  A capitulation to shortcomings, traitors provide a real-live human to help the game’s response.  Voilà, real live decision-making magically appears in the play.  There’s an opponent now, and the game once again takes life.  But the group hug comes to a very abrupt end.  “Traitor” turns Kumbayah into a session of distrust and backstabbing, a game that shares nothing in common with the spirit of cooperative play.  Often someone will describe a game as “cooperative with a traitor element” and I bite my tongue to avoid blurting out “it’s a traitor game.”  It’s not worth debating since I don’t think there’s any game billing itself as a "traitor game."  I don’t particularly like the traitor concept, but that’s for other reasons.  Unfortunately cooperative and traitor are often conflated.

The remarkable thing that keeps falling out of this train of thought for me is this – the incredible lack of games with two or more teams playing against each other.  Teams are true cooperative play.  A powerful intelligence engine operates on each side of the table, yet the game successfully executes virtually all the benefits of cooperative gaming.  It’s better play.  The video game industry has spent fifteen years and billions of dollars getting off of AI, networking players in social cooperatives that actively compete with each other.  Meanwhile board games shun the concept.  I can think of maybe two dozen boardgames where teams of two or more players play in direct conflict with each other.  Frankly I’m stretching it on a couple of those.  I teach Rush ‘n Crush as a team game because the game kind of blows without them.  Last Night on Earth can be considered team vs. team if you shut one eye and squint a bit.  Wings of War is best played in teams and it makes perfect sense thematically to do so.  It’s truly team gaming.  But in public venues I get push-back from non-wargamers.  They want to play every-man-for-himself.  I’ve said this before: it’s almost as if team play isn’t considered honorable in the boardgaming culture.

So this is the Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot moment I come to as I watch yet another cooperative title play out on the table in front of me.  “We’re playing against an idiot” invariably passes through my mind as some out-of-context card comes off the top of the deck or some useless power is invoked that waste’s the game's turn.  I’m left wondering why the industry is on such a jag to produce games built on a substandard concept.  The short answer is almost assuredly “because they sell.”  But I’m done.  Cooperative games may sell, but I’m not buying anymore.

S.

There Will Be Games
John "Sagrilarus" Edwards (He/Him)
Associate Writer

John aka Sagrilarus is an old boardgame player. He has no qualifications to write on the subject, and will issue a stern denial of his articles' contents on short notice if pressed.

Articles by Sagrilarus

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Shellhead's Avatar
Shellhead replied the topic: #307665 04 Mar 2020 10:08
I still stand by my original points in defense of co-ops, though the lower quality co-ops tend to all resemble variations of whack-a-mole. But in recent years, I have developed a slight preference for semi-cooperative games. These are games where players can choose to work together or work against each other, depending on personal preference and potential incentives for either choice within the current game state.

Examples of semi-cooperative games: Saltlands, Camp Grizzly (especially with a couple of the expansions), Dark Venture, and Magic Realm. Magic Realm in particular is a game designed for 1 to 16 players, and the rules remain exactly the same if players decide to ignore each other, attack each other, work together as an adventuring party, compete as teams, or even betray each other when it is convenient. And the fact that all of these options are available every game allows players to enjoy the type of game that they want to enjoy.

My other examples are not quite as neutral with respect to intentions.

Camp Grizzly definitely is designed around a default co-op assumption, but allows for a situation where some players might abandon the rest in a desperate attempt to escape as soon as possible. Expansions added a couple of selfish characters and some cards that might encourage selfish actions.

Both Saltlands and Dark Ventrue require players to pick a play mode at the start: competitive, cooperative, or, in the case of Saltlands, semi-cooperative. Dark Venture doesn't have an explicit semi-cooperative mode, but the default competitive play has individual quests that can encourage temporary cooperation or direct PvP play.
hotseatgames's Avatar
hotseatgames replied the topic: #307667 04 Mar 2020 10:16
I just read this article for the first time. I get it, and agree with a lot of your points. And here's the BUT.... as a designer who has made a cooperative game, and currently has 2 others in development, I don't have an "inability to sense the game state." On the contrary, I have to think of ALL POSSIBLE game states.
Msample's Avatar
Msample replied the topic: #307668 04 Mar 2020 10:25
Team play - ANGOLA of course, one of the most brilliants wargame designs I've ever played.
mc's Avatar
mc replied the topic: #307676 04 Mar 2020 14:43
There are now co-ops that don't rely, or even use, event decks, and put the onus on the players to create the gamestate/events. I mean, the Mind, for one, but also stuff like the Grizzled.
UniversalHead's Avatar
UniversalHead replied the topic: #307678 04 Mar 2020 15:11
Yep, I agree with this article completely. Co-ops have left me cold for a long time now. There's just no substitute for a real opponent and the ending of a co-op (or solo) game always falls flat for me. "We beat the game - yayyyy ..."

And the Eunice story is something I'm currently experiencing with a relative too!
Vysetron's Avatar
Vysetron replied the topic: #307692 05 Mar 2020 08:21
Something like this has been bouncing around in my brain for a while. Thanks for putting it in words better than I could. I have some other thoughts.

Most coops are bad, full stop. Beating them for the first time -can- be satisfying if the puzzle is compelling and tricky enough, but remixing the same puzzle over and over? Nah. The handful of good coops offer something other than endlessly wrestling with a stupid pack of cards. Seal Team Flix balances straightforward goals and predictable "AI" with dexterity as opposed to just selecting and completing tasks. Darkness Comes Rattling never forces you to play whack-a-mole because you literally can't solve all the problems it presents. And then there's games like The Mind and Hanabi that get out of the way and become about player interaction again, which frankly should be to goal of most games. The very recent push for every upcoming game to have some kind of solo mode has made me realize that most people are only purchasing these boxes to poke bits around and learn a new system. That fundamentally makes no sense to me.

I'm glad you closed on team games too, because team games are GREAT. They're everything that's fun about coops in a far more satisfying framework. You get the camaraderie of bouncing ideas back and forth without ending every sentence on "assuming the game does X". Any game built around partnerships or teams is automatically elevated over most coops by not having to play against the paper idiot.
wkover's Avatar
wkover replied the topic: #307696 05 Mar 2020 11:35
I haven’t posted on F:AT in a while, so bear with me.

For at least 5 years, I’ve increasingly spent my time with co-ops rather than competitive games. To the point where, in my regular Wednesday group – an amazing tribe of Ameritrashers and wargamers - I’ve officially been dubbed the “coopinator”. Sometimes I’ll go weeks exclusively playing co-ops with people who lean in the same direction, and I don’t mind in the slightest.

A few reasons why:

I’m often a better person when I play co-op games. I’m highly competitive, frequently to my detriment. In single-winner games, I play hard and don’t mind crushing foes and their extended families. These games don’t bring out the best in me, so switching to the occasional co-op was a sound life choice. I still catch myself being a jerk in competitive situations, and I can usually put on the brakes when I start to slip – but not always.

Competition can occasionally make games less fun. Tired of mocking me for playing co-ops, members of my weekly group recently goaded me into a few competitive sessions. I was happy to break the hugs-all-around routine, so we started with Acquire. Through a combination of good play and lucky draws, I routed everyone else – doubling everyone else’s score, at least. (Note: I’m not terribly skilled, so this isn’t a brag. Just how things turned out.) The point is that – roughly 1/3 of the way through – everyone’s faces turned sour and glum when they realized I was definitely going to win. And not just win, but destroy. They kept playing and talking trash, but the mood had gone south when I became the clear frontrunner.

As a sidebar, I tend to dislike most multiplayer war/conflict games: Struggle of Empires, Blood Rage, Dune, and so forth. Not because I hate conflict, but because the downtime and endless negotiations drive me batty. (Negotiation and trading are my least favorite game mechanics, by far.) I was into the DoaM genre for a long, long time – but no longer.

Stuff unrelated to my weekly group:

Co-op games are amazing family experiences. When I was more active on F:AT, I posted at length how my family and I pretty much only played the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game for 4-5 straight years. I’ll always treasure those all-against-evil campaign experiences, and nothing will tarnish those memories.

If playing a brand new game, people tend to have a better time with co-ops than with AT games, wargames, or highly competitive euros. Many people (especially nongamers) are almost frightened of new games, as they don’t want to look dumb, ruin the experience for others, etc. I’ve found that newcomers welcome co-ops, since the tabletalk and advice put them at ease and make them feel like they are contributing to the game’s forward motion and success. I also happen to be one of the primary game teachers in my groups, so this characteristic of co-ops fits my style nicely.

More people could probably benefit from playing cooperative games. This involves a couple of life stories. Anecdotes aren't the most persuasive forms of argument, I know, but here goes.

When my kids (now eagle scouts) first joined scouts, all activities were framed as competitive exercises. Every single one, as far as I could tell. The kids would be enjoying a ropes course, for example, and suddenly the troop leader would declare that the activity became a race and the team with the best time would “win”. This was completely unnecessary, in my eyes, since the boys were having fun without the guiding hand of competition over their heads – and it actually made the course less safe. But the leader insisted that motivation was necessary, and competition was the best way to do it. Fast forward…

I was teaching a cooperative game at WBC a few years ago (Ghost Stories?), and I encouraged an observing tween to join us. Per my usual co-op explaining, I pointed out that we all won or lost as a team; then we played and happily won. After the game ended, our young guest wanted to know which individual player had really won. The team did, I explained. But he didn’t get it. He needed there to be a single winner, so he kept pushing me to name the victor. Presumably, that’s how every game he had encountered before had functioned, and his brain literally could not comprehend a game that functioned differently. It blew my mind, but I saw it happen firsthand and found it to be really interesting. And telling, I guess.

Honestly, I believe that people – perhaps just Americans – would be better off if we were taught to cooperate a bit more from time to time. Particularly in our formative years. As squishy as that may sound, it may be in our best interests.

Finally, I’m not saying there aren’t bad co-op games, or that I don’t get sick of them. But I truly enjoy them, ever since I received the Lord of Rings board game as a holiday gift in 2000 (before the movies!). As a Risk-fed youth, LotR opened my eyes to a new type of gaming that allowed me to experience human interaction in a new way. That was cool.
Gary Sax's Avatar
Gary Sax replied the topic: #307697 05 Mar 2020 11:51
^this is a really good post and reflects a lot of how I feel.
Shellhead's Avatar
Shellhead replied the topic: #307698 05 Mar 2020 12:19
There was a woman that used to play in our regular Jyhad games. Her boyfriend taught her how to play and build her own decks, and since he was one of our better players, she was also a decent player. But she was uncomfortably competitive, gloating unpleasantly when she was winning, and sulking miserably when losing. One time in a sealed deck tournament, she ended up contesting two vampires with me (her prey) and two vampires with her predator. That meant she had no vampires in play and couldn't really afford to bring out another, while losing four pool (life for you Magic players) every turn, which is an awful fate. She broke down and literally wept, then fled the table when she was eliminated a couple of turns later. Being competitive and that emotionally invested in winning is a bad idea when playing a competitive multi-player game, because the odds are that you will lose most games.

After three years of enduring her behavior, I was surprised one night at the game shop to see her playing a board game at a different table. They were playing that co-op Hobbit boardgame, back when there was just the base set. And she was so happy! After that, she gave up on Jyhad completely and focused on co-ops and low-interaction eurogames, and that was a great choice for her.
ubarose's Avatar
ubarose replied the topic: #307699 05 Mar 2020 12:23
Thank you wkover. Excellent post.

I think that the social aspect of gaming is sometimes neglected when judging games. Depending on the group I am playing with, there are many times when the priority is for us to have fun together, and for every one participate and to feel comfortable. For the reasons that you mention, coop games are the best choice.

There are other time where I really want to go all out, and compete on my own. However, I do need to feel safe and comfortable with the people I am competing against.
Gary Sax's Avatar
Gary Sax replied the topic: #307700 05 Mar 2020 12:25

Shellhead wrote: After three years of enduring her behavior, I was surprised one night at the game shop to see her playing a board game at a different table. They were playing that co-op Hobbit boardgame, back when there was just the base set. And she was so happy! After that, she gave up on Jyhad completely and focused on co-ops and low-interaction eurogames, and that was a great choice for her.


My spouse is like that and knows it. Won't play competitive board games because of it and I can't blame her. For her, it came from the role games played in her family growing up, which was a form of humiliation and ridicule as stupid on whomever lost.
Shellhead's Avatar
Shellhead replied the topic: #307702 05 Mar 2020 12:53
On the other hand, my athletic girlfriend only wants to play competitive board games. The one time I persuaded her to play Camp Grizzly, she played in a selfish manner and ran off to the Boat Finale while Otis stalked and murdered my character.
Shellhead's Avatar
Shellhead replied the topic: #307703 05 Mar 2020 13:01

wkover wrote: I was teaching a cooperative game at WBC a few years ago (Ghost Stories?), and I encouraged an observing tween to join us. Per my usual co-op explaining, I pointed out that we all won or lost as a team; then we played and happily won. After the game ended, our young guest wanted to know which individual player had really won. The team did, I explained. But he didn’t get it. He needed there to be a single winner, so he kept pushing me to name the victor. Presumably, that’s how every game he had encountered before had functioned, and his brain literally could not comprehend a game that functioned differently. It blew my mind, but I saw it happen firsthand and found it to be really interesting. And telling, I guess.


As a teenager, I was usually the DM for our role-playing group. It made sense for me to play host, so I could avoid hauling around all of my books and maps and tokens. My dad would usually check in with our group at least once every session, and ask "Who's winning?" Somebody would always take the time to patiently explain to him why that wasn't a relevant question, and then he would roll his eyes and say "Have fun." He was a competitive jock type when he was our age, so the idea of winning was deeply instinctive to him.

After months of this, my dad finally got it. And now he would stop by maybe two hours into a session and cheerfully ask "Who is dead or unconscious?" Usually one or two players would reluctantly hold up their hand, and my dad would grin and say, "Great! You can help me with this project out back." Like helping him build the shed, or fix the car, or pull weeds in the garden. And oddly enough, our group embraced that, because it made the stakes feel higher in combat.
Jackwraith's Avatar
Jackwraith replied the topic: #307707 05 Mar 2020 13:33

wkover wrote: (Something that would make a great blog post for the front page, with a little editing. And, welcome back, wkover.)

ChristopherMD's Avatar
ChristopherMD replied the topic: #307709 05 Mar 2020 15:04
Just to be clear here, is Sag calling me an idiot because I like coop games?
Shellhead's Avatar
Shellhead replied the topic: #307710 05 Mar 2020 15:26
A few years after Arkham Horror 2nd was published, I ran into Kevin Wilson at the original FFG Event Center. As it happens, I was one of the FFG warehouse monkeys back in late '03/early '04, when Kevin was working on Arkham Horror, and I loaned him my copy of Arkham Horror 1st edition. Anyway, I expressed thanks for the great job that he did with 2nd edition, and we talked about the game. And he shared an interesting insight to that design process: Arkham Horror's AI functions like a cardboard computer, and the mythos cards effectively run on the computer the same way that punch cards used to run on early computers.
ubarose's Avatar
ubarose replied the topic: #307712 05 Mar 2020 15:53

ChristopherMD wrote: Just to be clear here, is Sag calling me an idiot because I like coop games?


Nah, you know Sag better than that. It's hyperbolic humor.
san il defanso's Avatar
san il defanso replied the topic: #307715 05 Mar 2020 19:10
I think my patience with cooperative games runs out when I sense they are too easily optimized. Let's call it the Pandemic problem. The game is too simple and too stable for my taste, and demands optimization more than any other skill. It's not about one person quarterbacking the whole game, but it's the fact that the game is not nearly ambiguous enough with its information and the outcomes of decisions. Even though I only played it once, I actually greatly preferred Defenders of the Realm to Pandemic. What happened to that game anyway?

(Lord of the Rings has a bit of this, but that game has a lot of really harsh luck in it. The way the event tiles are flipped can be brutal, and it's harder to optimize that one.)

Anyway, most of my favorite co-ops these days tend to have a lot of dice in them. The one I play the most is WHQ: Silver Tower, which has become something of a staple with me and my buddy. That game has a generous touch of chaos at the center, and it's a game that clearly cares more about narrative than tactics in the first place. Arkham Horror fills that role for some people as well.

In general I agree with wkover that board games need to find more ways to embrace collaboration over competition, or at least to allow the player to choose which way they want to go about winning.
Gary Sax's Avatar
Gary Sax replied the topic: #307719 05 Mar 2020 19:36
Reminds me the spirit island expansions are coming out this year.
Jackwraith's Avatar
Jackwraith replied the topic: #307721 05 Mar 2020 21:59

Gary Sax wrote: Reminds me the spirit island expansions are coming out this year.


Yep. Kinda geeked about that. Spirit Island is the only co-op I regularly play anymore, plus the occasional game of Tiny Epic Defenders.
mtagge's Avatar
mtagge replied the topic: #307729 06 Mar 2020 07:36

Vysetron wrote: Most coops are bad, full stop.

I'll take this statement one further. Most games are bad, full stop. To throw out Lord of the Rings and Shadows over Camelot as genre defining is problematic. One isn't even a coop and the other is for children.

Then the article takes the tack that coops are puzzles ignoring the fact that almost all eurogames are puzzles. Look at all the worker placement games where the interaction's only purpose is to remove player options by the time the player's turn rolls around.

Then proceeds to give the example of a game state that continues on a path to folly as if I have never played against a human who has done the same.

Now I do appreciate that Sag might not actually think these things and is only presenting them for discussion purposes. He might just not prefer that type of gameplay. Kudos.
wkover's Avatar
wkover replied the topic: #307730 06 Mar 2020 07:54
@Sag - Have you tried 7th Continent ?

Not only is it unlike any co-op I've ever played, it's unlike any game I've ever played.

Try before buying, of course, but you might find it interesting.
Sagrilarus's Avatar
Sagrilarus replied the topic: #307753 06 Mar 2020 17:27

mtagge wrote: Then the article takes the tack that coops are puzzles ignoring the fact that almost all eurogames are puzzles. Look at all the worker placement games where the interaction's only purpose is to remove player options by the time the player's turn rolls around.


Please reference my article When The Game Gets Out Of Your Way.
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thegiantbrain replied the topic: #307761 07 Mar 2020 02:49
Whilst I understand what you are saying in regards to the decks that run most coops not being reactive, I don't think that is entirely the case. The Arkham Horror LCG does have a deck that is the main threat, but because you are immersed in a story, a narrative that justifies what is going on that deck can 'feel' reactive, if it technically isn't it.

This is further reinforced by some of the mechanics the design team have come up with to make certain scenarios feel like the mythos is fighting back, watching your every move and pushing back against you.

I 100% agree on team games. Captain Sonar is a personal favourite and it is something I would really like to see more of.