If you’re open to the idea of co-op vs one villain player, Betrayal at House on the Hill and Descent: Journeys in The Dark are both great games. Betrayal is quite easy to pick up for a casual group of people, while Descent is a good stand-in for D&D players who want a dungeon crawl.
Brilliant but shallow is my verdict. I really love it, but I love it because it is silly and random and gets everyone shouting and rolling all at once while ominous music plays.
Lots and lots of fun! Not very strategic, but that’s not a metric that should really be applied to a game as tactile as this one. There’s something satisfying about madly rolling your dice and yelling for someone to come back and help you out of this damned pit! OH NO THE GONG!!!
OMG I remember that game. Only played it once at a parents friends house. Thought it was awesome.
I ended up picking up Mice and Mystics which was featured here a few weeks ago. My 8 year old girl loved it, and we played with a couple older boys and they liked it too.
I am in the middle of making the rules for “Family Quest” or “My First Dungeon” - which mixes elements of Candyland, Shoots and Ladders, and Dungeon, with 4 skill/rule levels allowing player from 3-adult to play and have fun. I am working on co-op rules, so you can team up, or try to go it alone.
Ghost Stories shout out!
I would argue it is different because each individual player has significantly more agency. Therefore, it’s harder/less likely for one person to make all of the decisions. The most enjoyable Arkham Horror games tend to be the ones where greedy, uncooperative adventurers are devoured by an Elder God.
I like the closed hand idea. The main problem with Pandemic/Forbidden Island is that there is no incentive for individual action - it’s like Solitaire with multiple players. Hanabi which is actually Solitaire with multiple players resolves this by letting you see only other people’s hands. Limited information means that each player has something to contribute.
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Agreed with commenters noting the Alpha Gamer issue some commenters have mentioned; i.e., the person who has played the most or is the bossiest tells everyone else how to play. Two great games that both solve a game with asymmetrical starting player positions are Sentinels of the Multiverse and Plaid Hat Games’ Dead of Winter. In Sentinels, each player is a super hero on a team of super heroes fighting against a super villain in an environment. each player has her own deck of cards unique to a sepcific hero, which has some thematic mechanic. On another player’s turn, it’s hard for the alpha player to know exactly what’s in that player’s hand, encouraging each player to play cooperatively. Dead of Winter is a zombie colony survivor simulation. The group has a combined goal (hoard food, build barricades) but each individual player has his own goal (a Junkie, for instance, might need to end the game with pills). A player wins if her personal goal AND the group goal are simultaneously met, unless she’s the traitor. You can’t tell me what to do with my turn, unless you have my goal. And how do I know you aren’t the traitor? How do you know I’m not the traitor. Makes for some great paranoid gaming sesssions, since, like Shadows over Camelot, each game may or may not have a traitor.
I found Forbidden Desert to be a bit better than Forbidden Island in that regards. Though it still had issues with the possibility of one bossy player attempting to hijack the game, the increased difficulty made it feel like less of an issue.
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Just be certain not to buy the 1st edition of Betrayal if you’re buying secondhand. (Recognizable by the red box it comes in, as opposed to the current edition’s green box.) The first edition has some serious printing errors, not all of which were fixed in the errata. (Underground lake in the attic, anyone?)
Other excellent additions:
Escape: The Curse of the Temple (already mentioned and linked in an earlier post)
Eldritch Horror
Robinson Crusoe: Adventure on the Cursed Island
Different groups have different tastes. Mine won’t even bother with Shadows unless we ensure a traitor – we find it boring and uninteresting without one. I far far more enjoy being beat by the traitor at Shadows than win without one.
And if we have the time, Battlestar Galactica is a far better hidden traitor co-op game, and a far richer thematic experience. If the traitor mechanic bothers your group, don’t even think about BSG…
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Not sure about the etiquette, but as I have been actively promoting these reviews via my site and social media outlets I can probably safely do a little log rolling of my own. My podcast Blue Peg, Pink Peg (I won’t link to it but you can probably figure it out :)) reviewed Escape in Episode 8 on October 14, 2014. FYI- We are a podcast that focuses upon couples and family board games.
Or Letters from Whitechapel?
Also played the Alien Legendary. Also very interesting Coop game.
Monopoly.
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Isn’t one or maybe both of the walking dead games that are out cooperative? There is one with artwork from the comic and one from the show… Anyone played either one? Thoughts on them?
Not sure if that’s the same Lord of the Rings game I played at a party a decade or so ago, but if so, it’s partly cooperative and partly competitive. If Sauron gets the ring, you all lose, but if that doesn’t happen, different players win more or less of the credit. If you’re trying too hard to beat the other players, Sauron tends to win, but if you’re not trying hard enough, you lose to the other players. Was fun; I think we had one game where we beat Sauron and one where we all died.
Well played.
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naked twister!
(i’ll let you do your own goolgle search on that one…)
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If you want even younger, my daughter and I like Count Your Chickens (3+). This place has a bunch of coop games for younger kids:
http://www.peaceablekingdom.com/Products/Count-Your-Chickens-Cooperative-Board-Gamebrbr__GM108.aspx
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Can someone explain this to me? Searching just gives me a load of NFL sites that don’t look relevent.
Oh man, the errata for that thing has its own errata. I was thrilled to finally get the new edition.
