Real life is full of games such as contract bidding, gift exchanging, and national voting — a topic that I’ve previously touched upon in a few different posts about “real-life mechanics”. These real-life games are no less competitive than the board games that we play around tables, and in fact might be much more important. As I wrote in my “Burning Freeways” article on blind bidding, the winning bidder earned $800,000 more than Cal Trans expected and could have made as much as $3.5 million over costs. In that article I also briefly touched upon how the blind bidding of house sales can be affec ..read more

So on January 1st, I moved to an island: Kauai, the least populated of the four major Hawaiian islands. It’s got a population of just over 70,000 according to the last count, which makes it a fair amount smaller than the city of Berkeley where I used to live — let alone the whole California Bay Area. So the question was always how hard or easy would it be to find gaming. Fortunately, a nice little game store called 8 Moves Ahead appeared on the island a bit more than a year ago, and even more fortunately they’re heavily focused on play. But the downside so far has been that that play has mostl ..read more

Recently I’ve been writing about Eric Vogel’s Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game. I wrote about how it encourages players to even out resources here, then I wrote over on the Meeples Together blog about how its solo play differs from true cooperative play. When my co-author and I at Meeples Together realized that we hadn’t yet published the Meeples Together case study on the game, which is actually one of the oldest in our archive of bonus case studies, we decided we’d better do so. Here it is! This article was originally published on the Meeples Together blog. The Dresden Files Cooperative C ..read more

Pandemic Legacy was innovative enough that it’s worth talking about twice, so here’s a look at the second entry in the trilogy. And, whereas we played just a few games of Season 1, we played through the entire Season 2 campaign, with a win-loss pattern that resulted in 21 total games(!). Definitely a top co-op (and we’re looking forward to Season 3). This article originally appeared on the Meeples Together blog. Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 by Rob Daviau & Matt Leacock Publisher: Z-Man Games (2017) Cooperative Style: True Co-Op Play Style: Action Point, Card Management, Exploration, Legacy, S ..read more

Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 was an amazing innovation when it was released in 2015, and it continues to be one of the newest foundational games in the co-op hobby. What made it so great? It’s not just that it broke new ground with its Legacy-campaign play, but also that it integrated that fully into its existing simulation. This article originally appeared on Meeples Together. Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 by Rob Daviau & Matt Leacock Publisher: Z-Man Games (2015) Cooperative Style: True Co-Op Play Style: Action Point, Card Management, Legacy, Set Collection Overview The players take on the role ..read more

Food. It seems a far stretch from game design, but it turns out to have puzzles and challenges of its own, and some of them could be great designs for board games too. So, this week, I wanted to talk about a few food-related design problems that have shown up in games (and one that perhaps hasn’t), because they could all be expanded and used more. I feel like it’s a space that’s just ripe for plucking new ideas. I Cut, You Choose. This is a classic problem that’s already been put to good use in the game space. It answers the problem of how you divide up a resource (like a slice of cake) b ..read more

The Resistance by Don Eskridge Publisher: Indie Boards & Games (2010) Cooperative Style: Hidden Teams Play Style: Voting Overview In The Resistance players are secretly divided into one team of rebels and one team of spies. Though the spies know which team everyone is on, the rebels do not. Gameplay centers on missions that are assigned by a rotating leader. Each leader chooses a fraction of the players around the table to join the mission. The players then openly vote whether to OK the members for the mission. Once a mission has been OKed, its members secretly vote to determine whether th ..read more

In October we discussed a few hidden-teams game. We’re back this month with two of the best known ones, starting with Saboteur, which followed in the footsteps of Bang! (2003) and is another of the foundational games of the hidden-teams genre. Saboteur actually gets some attention in Meeples Together, where we talk about its relations to both partnership games and co-op traitor games, but here’s a full case study. This article originally appeared on the Meeples Together blog. Case Study: Saboteur by Fréderic Moyersoen Publisher: AMIGO Games (2004) Cooperative Style: Competitive, Hidden Te ..read more

2019 was a bit of a changing of the guard for me. After 30 years living in Berkeley, across the Bay from San Francisco, and after more than 15 years of gaming with friends at Endgame (and later Secret) on Wednesdays and at my house on Thursdays, I’ve moved to the Hawaiian island of Kauai. I’ve been here almost two weeks now, and I haven’t had time yet to search out my next board game opponents, but they’ll certainly be different from the friends I had out in the Bay Area. So here’s my last look at new games played on the west coast of the United States. As usual, these are games that were new ..read more

Dead Men Tell No Tales by Kane Klenko Publisher: Minion Games (2015) Cooperative Style: True Co-Op Play Style: Action Point, Adventure Overview Dead Men Tell No Tales puts the players in the roles of pirates looting a ghost ship. Their goal is to recover sufficient treasures before the boat goes up in flames or the defending deckhands overcome the piratical forces. Challenge System The challenge system in Dead Men Tell No Tales centers on a rather unusual two-phase challenge system. At the start of each player’s turn, he reveals more of the pirate ship by randomly drawing and placing a ti ..read more