For the last few years, I’ve been working on a book about the design of cooperative tabletop games with my co-author, Christopher Allen. We’ve recently finalized a contract with a publisher, and we hope to be offering the book to the public before the end of the year. That means that it’s our last chance to consider new co-ops before we lock the text down on July 1. So, this quarter, I played a lot of co-op games, and they’re all discussed here. (This isn’t the first time I’ve had a co-op heavy quarter, and it’s all been because of this book.)
As usual these ratings are my own feelings about the game, as a medium-weight gamer; they don’t necessarily represent the overall quality of the game. In fact this time, I’m well aware that I low-rated a few different games that are well-loved, and might be good designs for the right audience. And, as usual, these games are new to me, though a few are slightly older.
The Great
Robinson Crusoe (2012). Co-op #1. This is already a classic co-op — and a well-received one. After a play, I can see why. The heart of the game is serious resource-management play. If I wrote an elevator pitch for this game, it’d be, “what if Agricola were a co-op?” So you have to feed everyone, and that’s tough enough because it requires dangerous hunting and slightly dangerous gathering. But you’re simultaneously choosing a lot of other actions, such as exploring your island, building inventions, improving your shelter, and doing whatever’s required to finish the game successfully.
Robinson Crusoe is one of those games where you simultaneously feel like you need to do everything, and where you don’t ever have enough actions to do so — which is a tension that’s at the heart of many very successful designs. This feeds very well into the co-op system, creating a nail-biting game where things seem to be getting constantly worse, as your team becomes increasingly wounded and demoralized, but where you’re simultaneously advancing toward victory.
The game’s other strength is its great theming. Everything in the game feels very thematic, but to make it even better there are a half-dozen scenarios, each with a different setting. You can play anything from Swiss Family Robinson to a King Kong filming — and they all feel very theme-appropriate.
(The only deficits of the game are that it’s dense and long, so YMMV depending on what you think of that.)
The Very Good
The Quest for El Dorado (2017). This is Reiner Knizia’s newest racing game. He mostly designs light games nowadays, and this fits into that category, but it’s got enough variability and exciting play that it’s still quite enjoyable to play (and replay).
El Dorado is also a deckbuilding game: you’re buying cards that help you to move and to manage your deck. They can of course be used to purchase new cards as well. That goes hand in hand with a hexagon racing map where you’ve moving across lots of different terrain. If you build the right deck, you can take the shortest routes, but if you don’t, you’ll be taking the long route to El Dorado.
There isn’t a lot of variability in the deckbuilding, but that’s hopefully made up for by the variability in the map building. You construct a race course of five or six large hexes from about sixteen different possibilities. Different maps can have different challenges and encourage the building of different decks.
Overall, this is an excellent game if you’re OK with lighter fare — right up there with my other favorite Knizia race, Marco Polo Expedition (2004).
Sub Terra (2017). Co-op #2. This co-op is all about exploring a cavern, avoiding monsters, and making your way to the exit. Its most innovative element is probably its focus on cooperative tile-laying, and it works because you can get good tiles or bad tiles — so you’re always hoping for the best and then figuring out what you do with the worst. The draw of event cards each turn then causes the bad tiles to do horrible things, which is a great integration of the co-op and tile-laying systems.
Another fun element of this co-op is that it highly encourages you to split up, so that you can play through enough tiles, while simultaneously punishing you for doing so, if you get too far apart and can’t get everyone to the exit. There’s another great tension, where there’s never a “right” answer.
A lot of Sub Terra is deceptively simple, allowing it to play quite quickly, but there’s also some depth as you figure out strategies that take into account the various abilities of the players and the treacherous terrain of the caves.
Most importantly, Sub Terra is both thrilling and fun.
Dark Moon (2015). Co-op #3. This traitor game started life as a fan-made print-and-play game called “BSG Express” (2011), and that pretty accurately describes the foundation of the game: it’s the core mechanics of Battlestar Galactica (2008) pared down to their essential core. “What if BSG were a lighter game?” Some dice are thrown in too.
Dark Moon is fundamentally an action and response game. You take an action to try and improve the lot of the crew, then you have to respond to a task. If you succeed at enough tasks, you’ll eventually win the game. The catch is that some of the players are working against you!
The cooperative elements of the game are excellent, because they give even more cover for traitorous actions than Battlestar Galactica. Every turn you can put bad dice into a task and every turn you can choose bad tasks. The dice also add a lot to the traitorous play, because they make it possible for good players to look bad. Overall, it’s a strong design.
Compared to Battlestar Galactica, this is a tighter, simpler game, with all that involves. In other words, it doesn’t have the depth, richness, or complexity that makes Battlestar Galactica great — but it does offer very similar gameplay in a fraction of the game time, and it’ll be much more accessible to new players.
The Oracle of Delphi (2016). This Stefan Feld is a logistical design. You’re trying to do four different things: deliver some goods to temples; deliver some other goods to statue spaces; reveal some tiles of a certain type; and get lucky enough to kill some monsters. This is all done on big hex maps, which means that you need to be constantly thinking ahead to maximize your efficiency; like most pick-up-and-deliver games, the most efficient player wins. (I actually found the game on the border of what’s fun, because there’s so much careful planning, but I say the same of popular favorite Power Grid.) Of course, you can’t entirely predetermine your actions, as they’re partially dependent on dice, because Feld loves his dice. You have to roll specific colors to take a variety of color-coded actions.
As usual, Feld doesn’t leave you beholden to your dice. Not only does he introduce a resource to help you control your dice rolls, but he also offers “god powers”, which can give you big power boosts from time to time.These elements add a lot of freshness to the game, as does the fact that the board is very modular, creating variety from game to game.
Besides concerns about over-thinkiness, there’s also big opportunities for AP and downtime in The Oracle of Delphi. But, if you can get past that all it’s a pretty strategic game with some nice color that’s not quite like Feld’s other serious dice-driven games, such as The Castles of Burgundy and Bora Bora; I’m happy to have it on the shelf next to them.
The Good
The Gaia Project (2017). So I should start off by saying that I’ve never played Terra Mystica (2012), and this is the second release in that series of games. It’s a deep, complicated resource-management game where you’re balancing money, workers, and powers that can be used to expand your stellar civilization by terraforming planets, building mines, and upgrading them. There’s a technology tree and there are a lot of one-use actions that create a variety of options and some interesting contention. Generally, these are pretty standard elements for resource-management and civilization-building games. Nonetheless, there are some innovations: the power resource is particularly interesting because it has some management puzzles where you have to move power cubes forward twice in order to activate them; but you can throw out cubes at the first level of power to get others to the second.
The greatest strength of the game is its variability. You lay out a new board from hexes then lots of tokens are randomized, changing per-round scoring, end-game scoring, end-round powers, and other bonus tiles. I recently said that “variability is the new key [to game design]”. I was talking mainly about games that select their cards from a larger set, but this shows an even more expansive methodology for varying lots of different things in a game. Both The Quest for El Dorado and The Oracle of Delphi similarly showed big picture variability, with variable cards, boards, and victory conditions.
With all of that said, I did not love The Gaia Project and probably wouldn’t love Terra Mystica either. I’ve placed it down in “good”, because, as usual, the rating represents my personal desire (or not) to play these games as a medium-level eurogamer. So why didn’t I love what’s quickly become one of the hottest games of 2017-2018? Basically, it’s very long and it’s very prone to AP. That’s due to a high level of complexity and a lot of fiddly resource maintenance. I’ve seen almost all of it before, and I just don’t feel that it needed a 2-3 hour game to play out these particular mechanics. At half the length, it would have been great for me without losing anything.
Obviously, YMMV; obviously, many folks’ mileage does vary.
Exodus Fleet (2017). I just got done saying that there really aren’t pure auction games any more, yet that’s pretty much what this is. You’re trying to build up a fleet of ships, complete with purple passengers. You do so by choosing one of five different actions, four of which result in auctions. Through them you gain money and a variety of cubed resources, which you use to win future auctions and to pay for actions. There’s also a bit of tableau management that feels a bit like Race for the Galaxy (2007) as you build ships that give you benefits when certain actions are selected.
The various auction, action, resource-management, and tableau-building aspects of Exodus Fleet give it some nice depth, while keeping the auctions front and center. Unfortunately, the auctions are also the weak part of the game. They’re simple once-around auctions that heavily favor the last few players and they get a bit repetitive over the course of the game. Still, the resource-management can be thoughtful and the tableau building can be fun.
SteamRollers (2015). This was the game that really got me thinking about elevator pitches, because it’s: “What if Age of Steam and The Castles of Burgundy had a baby, but it turned out to be a casual game?” I think the description is pretty apt: in SteamRollers you draft dice and then use them build track, improve your engine, move goods, or take special powers. Like any good dice game, it rewards you for specific rolls (much like The Castles of Burgundy, you need specific rolls to take specific actions), and like any good dice game, it allows you to control you luck (using those special powers).
The game plays pretty well as a reinvention of Age of Steam. The idea of grabbing goods before other players do and moving them along purposefully inefficient tracks based on your engine size is pretty much taken precisely from the classic Martin Wallace game. In fact, SteamRollers may be the most interactive game I’ve ever seen that has the players quietly working along on their own game boards. However, the game is fairly simple and outlasts its welcome a bit by the time the game is over.
Aventuria Adventure Card Game (2016). Co-op #4. This is another roleplaying-based deckbuilder co-op, like the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game (2013), but it’s got a very different focus. For one, it tries to more fully encompass the roleplaying experience. That means there’s narrative text to read aloud and a real storyline to each adventure — albeit an entirely railroaded one. Beyond that, its focus is on a card-based tactical combat game, and this is quite well done. You alternatively lay cards down for their special abilities and to power those special abilities. There’s a nice power curve to the combats, and a nice feeling of dread early on, which the players then get to overcome as the combat continues.
Oh, and the deckbuilding is actually pretty minimal: just a card here and there at the end of combats. You’d have to play a lot of adventures for it to really add up. Are the narrative, the skill rolling, and the tactical combats enough to keep your interest? Some of my players like it more than Pathfinder ACG, some less, so it was at a similar level (albeit with weaker development).
Ascension: Valley of the Ancients (2017). It’s the 12th Ascension set! This one is another one with fairly minimal mechanical expansions. The big one is that there are Temples which you gain control of by spending new life and death resources. They give a slightly different path to victory, which is nice, but they also add a lot of chaos to the game, as the Temples can be stolen away by different players.
There are also some new keywords that relate to player discard piles: one goes off when a pile is empty and another when matching card types are in the discard pile. Generally, deckbuilder powers that require looking through the discard pile are a pain in the neck, but these mostly work.
However, my complaint with this set, and the one that keeps it at the bottom of my Good rating instead of the top is that the card quality seems to have gone down. These were the flimsiest Ascension cards that I’ve played with.
The OK
Mansions of Madness 2e (2016). Co-op #5. The second edition of Mansions of Madness is generally considered better than the first. And, I have to agree that some of the redevelopment is for the best. It seems to have a larger scope, in large thanks to lessons learned from the original Mansion’s supplements. And, it has a great system for wounds and madnesses that turns them into a whole game subsystem. The revamped skill system also feels better polished.
But the main change from Mansions of Madness 1e to 2e was the replacement of the keeper with a computer app, and I think that was much to the game’s deficit — and I say that having played it long after the troublesome bugs that early adopters complained about are gone. Yes, the keeper role of Mansions of Madness 1e had problems, as it was balanced in such a way that the keeper couldn’t play full out with breaking the game. That could have been balanced. But instead we have an app that’s worse in a lot of ways.
I should say flat out that I’m not a fan of app-driven games. They mean that some day your game’s not going to be playable because the app won’t get ported to newer smart devices. But even absent that theoretical concern, I found the app quite problematic in this game. Part of that is another philosophical issue that I have with apps: too often players are working with the app instead of interacting with the other players at the table, and that definitely happens here, especially for puzzles. But the biggest problem with the Mansions of Madness app is that it’s a halfway implementation: it tracks the exploration of a map in a slowly expanding way, which is marvelous, and it also tells you about bad Mythos effects and records your march toward victory. But because it doesn’t track player or monster movement, the monster movement ends up being a bastardized process where you hav to consult the app, then the board, then the app again, then the board again. You compare that to the singular ability for a keeper to make a decision and implement it in the original game, and you can see a big difference: you now have a game that’s fragmented by its app interactions.
Our five-player game of Mansions of Madness 2e, which the app said would last 90-150 minutes took five hours. I’m sure at least half of that extra time was lost due to app-driven inefficiencies. I can’t see playing the game again, despite the things it had going for it, though I could definitely see playing 1e again, despite its flaws.
First Martians (2017). Co-op #6. Speaking of rebooted co-op games, this is basically a reinvention of Robinson Crusoe, but with the systems redeveloped to be about building a Martian base that’s falling apart, rather than trying to survive on a jungle island.
The reason that I rate it so much lower than Robinson Crusoe is that it’s gotten much more complex. And I say that with Robinson Crusoe already being a tough, complex game. This one has more resources, a dizzying array of systems, and amidst all of that a rulebook that’s pretty vague about some of the complexities. This all makes the game run quite long, not anywhere close to the laughable 60-90 minutes quoted in the rulebook. (Our initial game was more like 150 minutes, following about 75 minutes of setup and teach.)
It’s too bad, because I love the idea of the campaign games and the legacy games that First Martians includes. I just don’t think I could bear to play this game five times through in quick succession. But maybe if you had a regular group that was really familiar with how it worked, this game would be OK.
Oh, and this is another app-driven game, but First Martians is a much better example of how to actually design an app that works well. The app is basically a replacement for several decks of cards, which keeps it nicely constrained, and keeps it from infringing too much on the player interactions. Mind you, I still managed to hit a wrong button once and couldn’t get back, so it hasn’t fixed all the problem with apps.
The Cards of Cthulhu (2014). Co-op #7. This is another Cthulhu co-op. The goal is to survive going through a deck of cult cards, which tend to generate gates, minions, and horrors. There are some nice interactions between these different sorts of cards and there’s an interesting dice and resource system that lets you dispatch these horrific problems. I was worried about the game’s simplicity, but it was fine for its length of play (though probably less fine for replays).
However, The Cards of Cthulhu has a serious problem as a co-op: it’s way too easy. It also isn’t really developed for co-op play. It seems pretty obvious that this was created as a solo game, as the cooperative elements aren’t particularly intriguing. (Oh, it plays fine, but it’s mostly about resolving a joint menace without really taking advantage of cooperative strategy; I mean there’s even the chance for player elimination!)
I also wasn’t that impressed by the production. The artwork is great, but the cards are flimsy, the rules aren’t that thorough, the player aid is super flimsy, and there aren’t enough components to support multiplayer play.
(Solve all those problems, and The Cards of Cthulhu could become a Good game.)
Mistborn: House War (2017). Co-op Adjacent. This is a competitive negotiation game that feels a lot like a co-op. That’s primarily due to its challenge system: every round new problems come out and old problems potentially trigger. Then you can try and expend some resources to solve problems, but you probably need help from others, which leads to the negotiation. That negotiation, focusing on resources and victory points, feels like it owes a lot to Cosmic Encounter (1977), though the mechanics and gameplay are largely different.
The game is very American. It’s full of take-that play. You can mess with people with cards, you’re encouraged to mess up negotiations, you’re pushed to lie, and you can also manipulate the challenge system to hose your opponents. That alone will tell you whether you like the game or not.
I obviously don’t have much interest in this very American gameplay, which is why it’s down here in the “OK” section. It’s the only game down in the “OK” session that I feel is purely about my biases, and not the quality of the game and its presentation. Other players would certainly rank it higher, though it has some issues of high randomness dramatically pushing the game one way or another and though it also has some issues with it being really easy to punish individual players, a common problem in take-that games.
I also know that I’m not alone in finding the theming of the gameplay problematic. It’s based on Brandon Sanderson’s fun Mistborn books … except you inexplicably play the bad guys. Most folks who liked the Mistborn books seem pretty nonplussed by the choice. (Which is too bad, the theming is otherwise pretty good.)
Apocrypha Adventure Card Game (2017). Co-op #8. Apocrypha is pretty much Pathfinder Adventure Card Game 2.0. While PACG is one of my top-five favorite-ever games, Apocrypha is pretty much … not.
I have to admit, I don’t love the theming. I find fantasy much more evocative than modern supernatural weirdness. However, I also don’t love the ways that the game system has been (fairly totally) revamped. Some of this may be the presentation. The rulebook was fairly horrible and the cards have all kinds of archaic icons on them. Whether it’s actually the case or not, that combination of elements makes the game feel much more complex than PACG.
Apocrypha also makes use of a lot of keywords, and though they could have made the game clearer (as is the case with classic Magic: The Gathering and with its spiritual successor, the Ascension Deckbuilding game), here it just feels like it straight jackets play. And all of these keywords and associated game jargon (and its wacky stuff like “gifts” and “fragments”) are just another thing that makes the game feel complex.
From the way the game’s laid out, as a sandbox rather than a linear story, I also don’t believe you’ll see the same great progression of characters that’s my real joy in PACG. Discussions of the game seem to back this up (but I did have to get that info from discussions, as no one in my group was willing to go back for a second try, especially when it would have replaced a PACG session).
It’s certainly possible that some folks will adore the changes (and especially the theming), that they’ll be able to dig through the artificial complexity of the rulebook and the keywords to find a gem, but the enthusiastic PACG players in my group were all at a loss as to why this one felt like such a drag in comparison. But it did feel clunky and kind of tedious to us.
The Meh
Mountains of Madness (2017). Co-op #9. So Rob Daviau does still do non-Legacy games. This one is a Lovecraftian game based on the novel At the Mountains of Madness (1936). The gameplay is vastly simplistic: you flip over less than a dozen tiles and try to meet the conditions for each by playing the required cards as a group.
With that said, the cardplay is harder than you might expect. The group needs to play cards of a specific type within a very small range of value. And they have to figure out how they’re going to do so as a group with just 30 seconds of time.This real-time element is certainly the most exciting and interesting thing about the gameplay.
Oh, and there are genuine madnesses to make things even harder. These are problems that the players accrue as they fail. Each limits in some way what they’re able to say or how they’re able to act in the short discussions. The idea is frankly brilliant. It codifies the idea of madness into the game rules, instilling a horror that most games can’t. It also creates cooperation limitations, something that greatly benefits co-op games. Unfortuntaely, Daviau choose to make many of the madnesses funny or even embarrassing, requiring high fives, shouted exclamations, or other physical silliness. Not only does it not really match the feeling of horror that this game should evoke, but it also will deter many players.
You stack that on with the simplicity of the core game, and what could have been a Great game is kind of icky (and as I’ve learned since, kind of annoying to play near too).