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Carcassonne

Matalarata

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My friend has that one but we've yet to try it

Dead of winter is one of the nicest surprises I had in the last years. It's a coop game, with an interesting betrayal mechanic that's both thematically and statistically well conceived. Basically each player controls a small "faction" inside a colony of survivors from the usual zombie apocalypse.
The catch is that you have both a global objective, which determines if the game has been won or lost as a whole and individual goals you need to fulfill in order to win as a player. Said goals remain secret for the whole game and are randomly assigned at the beginning from a pool of (N of players)x2 secret objectives cards. While building said small deck you also add a single betrayer card, that is a goal that actively kills the whole colony. Since you may or may not draw the betrayer card as a group but everyone has a secret goal anyway, the tension and paranoia build-up is one of the selling point...
 

Gragt

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Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin
I just got the original game of Carcassonne as a (belated) birthday present. This is going to be fun. I’ll have some time before I check any of the expansions.

I’m a happy Codex troll.
 

Konjad

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Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I've bought this game recently. So far played only once with friends, but it was lots of fun. One of the best games I have played, though I didn't play lots of them. I also liked Catan, but Carcassonne is even better. Well worth the price, and it isn't even that expensive, it's cheaper than other similar games. Funny that Monopoly is twice the price, but in comparison it's quite shit.
 

Archibald

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Dead of winter is one of the nicest surprises I had in the last years. It's a coop game, with an interesting betrayal mechanic that's both thematically and statistically well conceived. Basically each player controls a small "faction" inside a colony of survivors from the usual zombie apocalypse.
The catch is that you have both a global objective, which determines if the game has been won or lost as a whole and individual goals you need to fulfill in order to win as a player. Said goals remain secret for the whole game and are randomly assigned at the beginning from a pool of (N of players)x2 secret objectives cards. While building said small deck you also add a single betrayer card, that is a goal that actively kills the whole colony. Since you may or may not draw the betrayer card as a group but everyone has a secret goal anyway, the tension and paranoia build-up is one of the selling point...

Anyone else had problems with this? Some players are bad when given too much freedom and some don't know what they are doing in general (especially if you are introducing someone new to the game) so we had quite a few times situations where someone is doing illogical things and we think that he has to be traitor. But nope, turns out that he just doesn't understand what he is doing. So for me it looks like such games (and betting/auction games I think) really require whole group to be on somewhat even skill level to not ruin the experience for everyone.
 

spectre

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Anyone else had problems with this? Some players are bad when given too much freedom and some don't know what they are doing in general (especially if you are introducing someone new to the game) so we had quite a few times situations where someone is doing illogical things and we think that he has to be traitor. But nope, turns out that he just doesn't understand what he is doing. So for me it looks like such games (and betting/auction games I think) really require whole group to be on somewhat even skill level to not ruin the experience for everyone.

That's the problem with coop games in general (I'd discuss it in a separate thread, though), usually the difficulty is pretty tight and it pisses experienced players off when somebody doesn't optimise their actions well enough.
Consequently, if some players are lagging behind, usually one guy assumes the leading role and "solves" the game. Usually, this takes away from the other player's fun.

I'd argue that it's actually less of a problem with coop games with traitor mechanic (Battlestar Galactica also springs to mind here), because I actually don't see the situation as you describe above to be detrimental, it keeps the experienced players on their toes,
and the less experienced player isn't immediately coached to play "the right way".

In my opinion, coop games require a specific frame of mind to work, it should be less about actually winning, and more about the experience of actually working together and making sure everybody is having fun, it's not unlike pnp RPGs.

You are right of course, it's always better with players of similar skill, but experienced players, in my experience, should try "moderating" the game so that the new players can still have fun while learning the ropes. I kept encountering this problem when teaching people competitive games like Netrunner or Warhammer Conqest, the games are so skill intensive, that it's easy to dominate the game vs. a new player, problem is, it's not a good experience.
 

Matalarata

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Anyone else had problems with this?

Actually... nope. DoW mechanics are so easy to explain and resource types so limited that I've never had such a problem, and I frequently play with random noobs. That said, you can simply choose to avoid betrayals while teaching the game. Hard versions of the scenarios are balanced around full co-op, in some of them there's really no time to fuck around to find the traitor.

Now, that said, I did have a very unpleasant experience with DoW, a moronic player that suddenly went "there's no chance I'll complete my personal objective, let's just fuck everyone else's game by playing like a dick". He wasn't dealt a betrayer card, mind you.
 

Howdy

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A semi co-op game I really enjoyed was archipelago, because there's no team win but everyone can loose if a certain track causes a rebellion, so the balance between individual goals and not all losing is tight. Add in the fact there is pretty much complete freedom with negotiations and trading resources, you need to have a very open mindset and not get hung up on optimisation of your turns. All round an excellent game and up there with dead of winter.
 
Self-Ejected

CptMace

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You are right of course, it's always better with players of similar skill, but experienced players, in my experience, should try "moderating" the game so that the new players can still have fun while learning the ropes. I kept encountering this problem when teaching people competitive games like Netrunner or Warhammer Conqest, the games are so skill intensive, that it's easy to dominate the game vs. a new player, problem is, it's not a good experience.

Pretty much all FFG competitive card games are like this i think. Netrunner and Conquest are even more hard to dive into as a total newbie with their particularly complex (yet excellent) rules and mechanics. But it's although true for AGOT2.0 which has a much more intuitive turn structure.
I tried to introduce my brother to agot but he just couldn't, and I can't blame him, in the first two rounds of the game, he encountered the keywords Insight, Pillage, Renown... had to deal with how the plot phase impacts the whole game etc. So even if we used the tutorial decks (stark vs lannister), he was still overwhelmed with subtilities and specific rules that made it even harder to get into the basic core rules (challenges, plots, dominance). So he told me how frustrating of a game it was, yet I'm sure that if he had time and will to dive into it, he would love it.
A video game equivalent to these games is dota I guess, a competitive game with a learning curve caused by a shit ton of rules topped by just as many exceptions. Dota would be way more played among RTS games if it wasn't for thess really tedious first 150 games :lol:

Although Eurogames tend to be simpler to get into. Even the hybrid genre eurotrash is pretty simple to learn, or is made to be so. I'm thinking of Andor, which is structured around a handful of scenariis. The first of these scenariis is an actual tutorial, which takes the time to describes the very first round step by step, but still narrating the lousy story and all. German autism does wonders in this case, as Andor could have been intimidating, it's actually virtually OK for pretty much any profile of boardgame player.

Although since we're talking eurogames : stumbled upon a Not Alone little box in a shop. Cost around 20€. Game is marvelously simple and yet entertaining. Was not surprised to read a random tweet about how 2 little expansions were planned.
Keep these tight, tiny well-filled boxes with minimalist components, low-cost games going please !
 
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Archibald

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Good thing about Dota, and other similar things, is that you have 5 players on your team. So you might be screwing up like a retard, but if you have couple of good players on your team then you can still end up winning the match. On the other hand if your team gets raped in the ass you can blame some other guy(s) from your team and pretend that you sucking had nothing to do with that.

When you get in 1vs1 environment it is much harder to shift blame (or win by accident) from yourself to someone else so I feel that frustration builds up faster.
 

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