The first couple of times I tried a cooperative board game (one of those where everyone teams up to try to beat the Inexorable Forces of Chaos), I thought it was a novel concept… but after the second one, I got to really analyzing them, and realized that all such games are basically identical to each other. There are Bad Points which accumulate at a set rate up to some limit, which gives the game a deadline, and all of the players take turns trying to accumulate enough Good Points before then, through a largely-random process. There are usually a bunch of different resources available to the Good Guys, but they’re all basically interconvertible, which makes it just a question of the Good Points.
You can reduce any game to a basic structure. You will receive some resources. There will be set procedures to convert these resources into points. You will be able to raise your total of points and/or diminish other players’ totals. There will be a point at which everyone’s total will be compared and the person with the highest total will win the game.
I vote for Talisman. When you first get it, look through it, and start playing, it’s fantastic. But after a while, it gets boring and repetitive. “Bag of gold. Next!” By the time somebody reaches the inner circle and nobody else can get past the Guardian, it takes another hour of nickle-and-diming until that player finally wins. If you lose all your lives and have to take another character, you may as well give up. It will take you hours of catching up with everybody else.
There’s also expansions. Sure, if you don’t taking off a weekend to play a single game, but they’re just more time sinks.
I don’t mean to be snarky, but is it an advantage to have a game where a player will remain in the game for two hours during which they have mathematically no chance of affecting the game’s outcome? That’s the part that I consider to be a major bug: a game should be entertaining for any player who’s currently playing it, inasmuch as it offers them interesting, consequential choices throughout the game.
The problem is the alternative is probably worse. Winning shouldn’t be a random event. The player who played the game the best should win. And if a person is playing the game better than the other players, it’s going to be noticeable before the end of the game.
If anyone can come from behind and win in the final five minutes of the game then what was the point in all of the game that went on before those final five minutes?
Not sure what age your kids are, but the Firebug is 10 and he loves Blokus.
I’ll partly agree and partly disagree. Winning shouldn’t be a completely random event, because why bother playing, but lots of good games have some element of chance: the player who played the game the best will win most of the time, but not always.
For instance, I’m a way better cribbage player than the Firebug is, but he has beaten me on occasion, which is good because it helps keep him interested in the game as he improves.
Totally agree.
How about this: One player starts in London, and the other in Glasgow … on the same track. Before you take the first turn, you each write down at which station the crash will occur, but you keep it hidden from the other player. Now, play the game as normal. (Obviously, for the player who started in Glasgow, an instruction such as “Move back 2 spaces” means to go back toward Glasgow.)
Wait, is that how railways are designed in real life?!
I’m glad I don’t travel by train often.
I despise Risk. I played it one time in college and that was enough for me to announce, 14 years later, that I despise it. I was ready to kick the board over by about hour three and might have welcomed death by hour seven. I’m terrible at strategy games so I know I have no chance of winning. I hate games that last for hours and where the advantage is constantly turning. (I don’t hate Monopoly but Monopoly is like that, too. You think someone’s going to win, and… Nope, we need another two hours to resolve this.) Risk is a winning combination of everything I hate.
Did you read this post? I described three fairly different ways that three excellent games find their way out of this dilemma.
Any new board game that requires you to download an APP to play.
If I have to use a phone for it I might as well just get a coop phone game and skip the middle man.
Also more of a cosmetic issue but any copy of Monopoly where the board is folded twice into a square as opposed to just a single fold so it becomes a large rectangle.
I understand you do the square thing to save space but most “vanilla” copies of Monopoly fit just fine in their boardgame box with just the single fold, folding it into a square lets you make the box smaller but at the expense that when you unfold it it never lays perfectly flat unless you weigh it down, otherwise you get opposing corners that are uneven and slightly raised.
I’ve been wracking my brain for the name of this game the whole thread. (It’s been a long time since I’ve played it.) I whole-heartedly agree about Talisman. It’s too much like playing an RPG where instead of playing as a group, all the characters are chaotic evil jerks. Maybe it’s just the people I played with, but it didn’t leave a good impression.
The point of all of the game is to have fun. It’s not fun to be in game when one can no longer affect the outcome.
You need to break it in a little more. Flex the folds so they’re more loose. If there’s an overall warp to the board (which can happen no matter how many folds it has), you’ll have to press it.
It’s exactly like non-cooperative games except the Bad Points are accumulated by something other than another player.
Also, a deadline is not inherent to the system. My family plays a variant of Legend of Andor as a very simple RPG. We win when we eliminate the monsters and lose if there’s a total party wipe. Otherwise, the game can go on indefinitely.
That’s self-defeating. The counter-strategy is for everyone to adopt her strategy. So you have a stand-off until someone makes a first move, and then unending counterattacks.
I’m sure there are a number of us here old enough to remember Avalon Hill…I have a copy of “Kriegspiel” gathering dust on my bookshelf. Played it once. That was one time too many.
My problem with the cooperative games is that they are subject to one player taking over strategy and dictating moves.
Since this seems to be the way they do game boards these days, and since the Firebug is just 10 years old, we’ve got a number of game boards that fold this way. Monopoly, Life, two varieties of Clue (had to have the Firefly version of Clue!), can’t remember what else.
They all work just fine. Any deviation from ‘perfectly flat’ is so small as to make no never mind.
Yeah, this is why I like and hate these games. I tend to play them in groups where I’m the best person at strategy, and I’m always like, “Okay, what if you trade your green swordsman for her mortar, then you can build the wall, and on her turn she’ll be able to trade the green swordsman to him for the blue knight she needs, and on his turn he’ll have the green swordsman which he’ll need for his turn?”
It’s pretty fun for me and pretty irritating for other players–but that’s how the game is designed to be played.
Magic Realm was Avalon Hill’s attempt to answer the rising D&D craze of the very late 70’s. It had great artwork and some itneresting ideas, but was needlessly complicated and surprisingly boring. I played my set a couple of times and then it gathered dust on my shelf. To give you an idea of how hard it was to set up there is a seires of youtube videos that explain the setup. It is sa series of eight 45 minute-long videos.
The “alpha player” problem is definitely a known issue with cooperative games, though I don’t know that I’d say games are designed to be played that way. I think any game design’s goal is going to be equal levels of fun for all players. I will admit that I require a certain level of conscious detachment when I’m playing co-op games or else I slip into the exact same mode.
The XCOM board game addresses this very nicely by utilizing an app that (among other things) enforces pretty strict time limits. It’s also helpful that every player role is very distinct from the others.
The overall game setup makes it very difficult for any player to try and domineer the overall strategy. Most tabletalk is centered around asking other players about available resources. “Hey, do we have enough soldiers to do this?” “How much research can we afford this round?”
It’s pretty cool.