I would be curious about your favorite coop games. I often find them a big lacking, often being a bit unbalanced. An example is Battle for Hogwarts, where one game can be a walk in the park and another absolutely impossible and rarely is there a balanced match.
My absolute favorite is Betrayal at the House on the Hill.
It’s just designed so well. The pre-haunt phase allows new players to learn the basic rules of the game by playing. Like, we were playing this, and a somewhat seasoned member of the boardgame crew was late and she missed the base rules. We just shoved her a character, she was confused how no one explained her stuff, but after 1-2 turns of other people, she understood 90% of the base rules without explanation. That’s really impressive from a design standpoint.
And then, the game flips into the post-haunt phase, and some antagonist scenario happens. This is when things go nuts. One game, one player turned into Doctor Frankenstein, and Frankensteins Monster was placed on the board. And we as the normal players had to scramble to kill it. In another game, I turned into a giant snake god to kill everyone - but a bad cellar layout saved the players.
In other cases, there is a hidden, randomly chosen antagonist and things go nuts. People steal items from each other, because of good ideas and things go nuts.
I love this game. It starts out as a really approachable coop-game if you know action-point-based games. You bumble around in a haunted mansion, Bob usually almost dies because of bad luck (and we make fun of him), and then the haunt hits and it becomes everyone against Bob, except Bob is a horrible monster now.
No matter if you win or lose, you will have a funny story to tell how Bob is a jerk, or we were heroic.
wow, interesting concept, so it starts out as a coop game but later is a 1vsAll kinda deal?
Maybe. There is 120 different engame scenarios depending on the board state.
Most of them have the haunt-triggering player turn into an obvious monster - Frankensteins Monster, a Hydra, a Mummy. Then it’s a fight.
Other scenarios mean that whomever has all the artifact pieces (scattered across the board) wins. So now it’s a free for all and it turns into a very messy brawl.
Even other scenarios mean that one secretly chosen player wins, if they have a specific set of items. This one is especially gnarly, because this is the one that causes the words “Alright. I fire the shotgun at Jane as my first action.” and everyone is like “Oh my god! wat!”
that sounds like a lot of fun! Is the game with a lot of reading about things that happen?
Spirit Island is really good as you can adjust the difficulty and it’s always different Stars of Akarios if you want a Gloomhaven Light Experience with some 7th Continent sprinkled in.
I like Ghost Stories, quite imbalanced but fun to play (/lose)
Hanabi and The Crew, both card games — and both limited-information games. Hanabi is basically Klondike Solitaire distributed over a team of players who can’t see their own cards (and have a limited number of pieces of information they can tell each other); The Crew is a trick-taking game with variable goals and scalable difficulty.
My partner and I really enjoy mini rogue.
It can be brutal at times but often you can track your downfall back to a risky decision earlier.
It’s a one or two player dungeon crawl. Some light rpg mechanics, dice based combat and events, some traders and items to find.
To me it captures games like deep dungeons of doom and legends of grimrock very nicely.
Single player rules also feature a campaign mode, the old gods expansion adds a couple cool events and new bosses.
Sounds interesting, I kinda like dungeon crawlers. Its probably a remnant of playing diablo2 when I was younger. I will have to check it out. Do you prefer 1 player or 2?
I basically only play it with my SO so can’t comment on single player.
From scanning the rules, the campaign sets certain events and “layouts” for certain levels and consecutive runs. It also adds a little bit of meta progression to give your character’s two abilities a bit of variety.
Ah another thing: it’s very portable!
portable mashes well with our lifestyle, we are very much on the move. At most places we have already stashed some games but often bring 1/2 with us as well
