Easy to pickup coop games

Forbidden Island
Forbidden Desert
Pandemic
The Grizzled
Hanabi
Sentinels of the Multiverse

I've heard that Robinson Crusoe does nothing but kick your dick in for most plays

Coop games are impossibly hard to make. There's one that works, and it's a Japanese card game where you don't see your own cards but the other players do.

Many cardboard boxes come with coop, but there's no game in there. The FFG Mythos and 40k games come to mind. Pandemic is not really a game. Red November is even fun, just not a game as such. Games need competition.

It does work if there's a traitor angle, although how much that suits the coop premise is up to your sensibilities. Battlestar Galactica and Dead of Winter are great players vs game experiences, but there's always someone secretly playing against the others.

>Hanabi
>a Japanese card game
That's it. It isn't Japanese, just the name is.
Players draw fireworks cards and show them to the others who can give clues. The objective is to blindly match fireworks together all around the table.

>Games need competition.

I don't understand this. I know we're talking about traditional games here, but most videogames have you compete against the computer like board games have you compete against the mechanics.

Are solo games like legend of zelda actually not games by your definition ?

Board games, dude. Let's not put the goal posts on one of Elon's Dragons just yet.

The usual mechanism for generating random challenges is drawing cards, and many games do this. Only the novelty of this wears of really quickly. By the time you understand the rules you already know half the cards. What's worse is that players know it is a random challenge, and which range the challenge will be contained in. There are no surprises.

To trot out roleplaying for an analogy, it's like playing an RPG with nothing but random tables for a GM.

Games have become much more dynamic these last 2 decades. Now we can get into Orthogames and Idiogames, discern whether watching a movie with friends is maybe playing a game on some level. But when someone is asking for a game on Veeky Forums, we try not to tell them Minesweeper.

Also, Hanabi has an alternate ruleset called Ikebana, which is a nice not-quite-a-co-op variation.

Kawaii!

Hence why the grizzled is great, no one is.allowed to share info on what's in their hand, nor who they are supporting when they withdraw from a mission. Everyone gets fucked left and right and alpha dog plans crumble from the very outset. You are truly all in it together, as miserably as it can get.

I know I'm getting back to videogames there, but to me, they arent that different. Some types are especially comparable. I would argue that your typical full coop dungeon crawl is very close to a randomized dungeon game like diablo. A deck of cards can act as a primitive A.I.

You make some interesting points, but I feel that dismissing Pandemic as "not a game" is a bit harsh. Especially since these types of games are generally my favorites, and the few coops that you tout as "actually games" are games I generally dislike. Especially Dead of Winter.

Don't compare game mechanisms to game mechanics. One is a rulebook, the other is a dexterity challenge.

Also:
youtube.com/watch?v=3LApMfULEak

>Don't compare game mechanisms to video game mechanics.
There, all better.

Not a big fan your vid. They provide no actual argument against Pandemic except the old alpha gamer thing that I never quite understood and then just wank to Hanabi (which I profoundly dislike) for the rest of the vid.

Listen, I'm not saying you're wrong or anything. If you love Hanabi that's super, but calling pandemic "not a game" is pushing it and is borderline insulting to all those who love such games.

>this game isn't a game because I say so
That's nice, dear.

I'm not saying you can't call those games because I don't like them. I do like some of them.

I'm saying these cardboard boxes expend a lot of effort on keeping players busy with things that have no real relevance to the outcome of a round lest they realize that. These games are only fun as long as you haven't figured that out. And some people never do.

But if you have a mildly analytic mind trained in recognizing game dynamics and exploiting those to the extend that the rules allow, i.e. playing, then those 'games' quickly become pointless.

"What is a game?" is a vague question easily subverted by two young children having a blast without any help or rules. But on an imageboard about traditional games I think we can try to be more precise in our language. So for me to call a cardboard box filled with dice, cards, tokens, and a rulebook a game it has to hold up mechanically, no matter how many times we pull the box out.

Chess is a great game. But by my reasoning, /real/ players who know the moves from literature and just remember statistics are no longer playing, they are competing in a memory sport.

So, I'm trying to summarize your viewpoint here
Once you can completely comprehend the meta, your enjoyment of the game becomes reduced to just pushing mechanics until the win condition is achieved. At that point, it's less a game then an exercise. Yes?
Like, the difference between people who play magic like "I want to make a spider deck" and the players that think a deck is shit if it can't win on turn 1

If under those conditions the resolution is just luck then it is lame. If it depends on decisions then it isn't.

See: Catan.

Eldritch Horror has been out for a while, it's Arkham Horror with more streamlined rules, better use of components, more content and a quicker play time.

Or maybe you're just shit at it.

I recently played in a Pandemic: Survival event, where everybody plays the exact same game (same order of player and infection cards). I was the first to go while there where other people with three cures and only 1 outbreak. Sounds to me like they played better.

Yes, but you made mistakes, not gambles that failed to pay off.

Got Pandemic

Played it once with friends. Pretty boring, but maybe we did it wrong. Anyway, turns out there's cards missing in the box. Box was sealed, cards were sealed, still missing some.

Now you might think, so what. Probably not game breaking, right?
Nope. cards count the rounds players have. Cards missing means less rounds to beat the outbreaks. We never had a chance.

Tried to get a replacement from the store it was bought at. It's been over a year.

So if you want to purchase Pandemic, count the cards in the store before you go.

Sounds good, but it also sounds like you wrote the thing.

Nah, just a fan and think it's underrated.

Seconding The Grizzled, it's a fantastic filler-length game. Hanabi is great too. Love games with communications restrictions.

Sentinels I think is OK, how much enjoyment you get out of it probably depends on how much you enjoy the superhero theme. It does do "dynamic" very well though, there's a shit ton of combinations of heroes/environment/villains with all the expansions out.

Pandemic

Dude just call or email z-man games and they will send you another deck within like a week.

zmangames.com/contact.html