After playing "Pandemic: Legacy" to find out what all the fuss was about and having a really good time with it our little group has mostly been playing cooperative games. So far, we've probably sunk the most hours into "Eldritch Horror" (which made Arkham Horror tempting only until we heard it was even more fiddly). It does a pretty good job of keeping everyone involved: each player's turn is less one person making decisions while the others watch and more of a group effort to decide how the team can best achieve the shared goals and divide up tasks. Just beware: the box says "1-8 players", but that is a big fat lie. Unless you literally have all day or play with machine like efficiency any more than 5 isn't really playable.
I've honestly thought about starting a board game thread here for the better part of a decade, so good on you. I've got maybe 80 of the bastards now.
Ticket to ride is such a beautiful in its simplicity game. But I've never had a game that didn't involve some level of verbal abuse. There is a perfect sweet spot for tension where some cunt builds the route someone else needs and has been planning for 10 turns (Usually I am that cunt).
Oh man I like that game and I've had my copy for 10 years, but the flaw that Italy is obviously handicapped is obvious to everyone. By no means the best game ever if best even means anything in the capacity of having fun. It certainly isn't for everyone.
The problem with co-op games I find is that they can easily lead to one player telling everyone else how to play. Which is a problem that mostly can't be solved. Hanabi is a cute game in terms of not outstanding its welcome, and not feeling tense. The 'Forbidden X' games are a good game for drumming up tension on quite a light rule set.
Played Robinson Crusoe the other week which is quite heave on the rules for a co op but is a rewarding puzzle to solve. And for the orientalism loving gamer>>22519 the co op game of choice is 'ghost stories'.
>>23126 > The problem with co-op games I find is that they can easily lead to one player telling everyone else how to play.
Indeed, Pandemic is particularly vulnerable to this if a more experienced player doesn't know how to keep their gob shut guide the game experience without being overbearing for the other players. Other than that it's pretty great.
>>23125 Eldritch Horror is also genuinely good fun if you use the companion app to take some of the faff away. The major sticking point is that each game takes 2h+ easily and while I find time flies while playing the duration alone may put some people off. If you're playing in a casual pub meet, you may also struggle to find a table large enough for both the game and everyone's pints to safely co-exist.
We gave the Fallout co-op game a shot, but it got really repetitive really quickly. Even if you like the Fallout series, I'd avoid it or buy it second hand.
Star Realms Frontiers is a co-op capable pack for Star Realms, a deck builder with oodles of intercompatible expansions. The base game is normally played 1v1 but the "Frontiers" version has rules and a set of missions for 1-4 player to take on cooperatively. If you've played a deck builder before you'll feel instantly at home, if not it won't take more than a few turns to get the basic hang of it. It's fast to setup and pack away and each game shouldn't take more than 20-30 minutes. While the expansions are technically intercompatible, if you play the missions using Command expansion decks you'll have basically no challenge.
Legendary Encounters: Alienssorry, "Legendary Encounters - An ALIEN Deck Building Game" is a purely co-operative deck builder which commits strongly to its theme. You play through scenarios resembling the three original movies on a provided playing mat. It plays well and has a support mechanic where other players can help you with resources on your turn that helps to keep everyone engaged in their down time. Unless you're some kind of card savant or have a lot of practice, however, it's quite fiddly to setup particularly the first time you open the box. On the plus side, you can generally mix-and-match Legendary Encounters games and, true to theme, there are a special rules to combine this one with "Legendary Encounters: Predator". I'd generally only recommend this one if you think you'll play more than one game in a row, otherwise you'll spend near as much time setting up and packing up as you do playing.
Still card based but basically the opposite of a deck builder is the Dresden Files co-op card game. Each player picks a character (one player has to be Harry Dresden), draws their initial hand and then basically never draws again making cards valuable resources. The players are faced with two rows of cards rach consisting of enemies to fight, cases to solve, obstacles to overcome or advantages to take and have cards for dealing with each of those four things. Using a shared resource pool, players take turns either spend resource to use one of their cards or replenish the pool by discarding. The end goal is that they must have more solved cases than enemies remain alive once they run out of cards. There are some dice rolls during the game and a "show down" at the very end where dice rolls can help bring the players over the line if they didn't quite get there. The game doesn't take much space, is fairly quick to setup and consistently takes very close to 30 minutes. You don't need to know anything about the "Dresden Files" series to enjoy the game, but some familiarity adds more colour to the characters and their abilities.
>>23133 If you like co-operative games and can get a regular group together, it's also worth looking into "legacy" games. They turn into simple role playing games very quickly, but do require a group of 3-4 people that can commit to regular play at least once a week (otherwise we delve into D&D style want to but never get to).
Pandemic: Legacy requires 12-24 play sessions of ~1h each, and a couple of games of Pandemic to understand the premise to get started. It's shlock writing, but really fun to play through and leaves you with a playable board at the end if you ignore or peel of stickers. It's Pandemic with a story, basically.
Aeon's End: Legacy is a deck builder, but you get to evolve the cards you get to chose from as you progress through the story as well as building the characters you play. It has cosmetic issues if you made certain choices, so it's not perfect, but it's still very much worth playing through. It's also got decent rules for replaying scenarios as well as selling a "reset" pack that lets you start from scratch; but that pack is half the cost of the base game so yeesh.
Tales of Arabian Nights is technically competitive, but those mechanics seem perfunctory and it's more like co-op story telling with training wheels. It's like a giant choose-your-own-adventure book, and if you ditch the win conditions and instead set yourself a time limit you each get to build a character that goes on an adventure (and experiences various strokes of luck or misadventures). If your group is at all RP capable, it's really good fun.
I went round to someone's house and she must have had at least a dozen different versions of Monopoly. I don't get it; as far as I'm aware they're all exactly the same game but with different pictures and figures.
>>23165 The trouble with Monopoly is that no fucker plays it properly. If you stick to what's printed and don't make up your own house rules, you should get a clear winner in 60 minutes, and game over within 90. The only house rule I use is no purchases on the first lap, to cancel out the advantage of playing order.
>>23167 Monopoly is not a fun game, at this point (it's a good game, but not a fun one). Monopoly Deal half captures the spirit and does a much better job.
>>23163 I don't get it either, Monopoly seems almost like a tea set collection. Fluxx sets don't offer much in the way of new mechanics but at least they differ more than in just names, and Munchkin could probably offer Monopoly a run for its money and at least there's some variation for Munchkin.
>Mandarin
A personal family favourite and quite difficult to find at reasonable price.
>>23163 It's a bit similar to Monopoly, but with a tile aspect that means rather than buying property you get property by chance (collect 3 tiles of the same animal from the dispenser) based on Chinese zodiac it's relatively fun until late game when all the tiles are gone and one fucker, Me, has every tile someone else needs, and needs to be overtaken, or baited into a deal to sell them.
That is an amazing price, but I've always felt weird about expansions for carcassone, the game felt like it was a perfect design and adding more takes away from it.
There might be other games I will like more as my flavour of the month, but if you ever ask me what the best game ever is I always say that.
>>23730 If you put the rules up on here or in a pastebin, we can come up with new and revised mechanics for exciting things like phone hacking, upskirt photos and dodging taxes.
Joking aside, what was the gist of the rules, was it accumulating points by acquiring cards that could also be used to throw your nemesis off the case? I'd imagine it'd be a game your grand/parents had in the loft for a power cut.
I need you lads and your pedantry to clear something up on Pandemic. The rules state:
Cure - At any research station, discard 5 City cards of the same disease colour to cure that disease.
Now that is saying to me that it would be possible to cure the blue disease at a research station in a black city rather than only being able to cure it at a research station in a blue city, but I've just played with someone who was adamant otherwise.
>>23796 Addendum for Legacy S1:
You can get upgrades that reduces the number of cards needed, obviates the need for a research station or even to spend and action. The only viable question a pedant could have is if a player can cure a disease that needs no action or research station when its not their turn.
Addendum for the base game: If you play the Scientiest, obviously the card total reduces to 4.
What's a decent board game for young teenage children?
I'm buying someone one of the Quacks of Quedlinburg expansions as a present, which will be about £15 when most gaming sites have a minimum of £20 for free delivery, so I might as well look to buy an extra game now for my daughter's birthday in June rather than paying about a fiver for postage but I'm not sure what to go for.
I've been playing Twilight Imperium with a bunch of mates from work and it's fucking brilliant. Although it takes about 9 hours to finish at present, but I'm not bored for a single second of those 9 hours.
If you roll a “7,” no one receives any resources.
Instead, every player who has more than 7 resource cards must select half (rounded down) of their resource cards and return them to the bank.