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Incline Co-Op boardgames

Zephyr Arsland

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Hey, nice idea! My recommendations are already on the list, but I'll list them anyways:

Shadows over Camelot (and expansion): Had a blast playing this back in the day. Really well done, tight mechanics.

Arkham & Eldritch Horror: You can't go wrong with these. They're pretty different from each other, apart from the name. AH is claustrophobic, intense and mostly unfair in sometimes stupid ways. I don't know your or your group's tolerance to frustration, but be wary of AH. I love it, but being in this tabletop thing for quite some years now, I've found that it tends to upset some people. Unless you're a fan of the setting, in which case go bomb some dodongos go to town on those shoggoths.
EH is more "Indy Jones goes Cthulhu-hunting" and is awesome too.

Pandemic & Pandemic Legacy: If you like the original, I hear Rob Daviau's spin is really good. No spoilers, though!

Dead of Winter: Darn Matalarata , beat me to this one. This was a surprise when it came out (It was pretty hyped, but IMO it lived up to it). Immersive, challenging and really fun. Lots of replayability with many characters, scenarios and crossroads make this a good investment. Also, it's one of those games that create moments you'll be talking about for a week after the session's end.

BONUS OFF-THE-WALL recommendation: Mysterium. It's Clue meets Dixit and it's really, really inventive. Asymmetrical playstyles: up to four players are paranormal investigators out to solve a century-old murder mystery, and another player is the amnesiac ghost that will guide them, but only by showing them really wacky, onirical pictures in their dreams. It's genius.
 

Dickie

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I'd like to throw the Mage Knight board game into the pile. Sort of a deckbuilding game, mostly a gem management game (for the higher powers of your cards), entirely a math nerd's wet dream, it plays co-operatively (with use of a dummy player for pacing) competitively, and solo (also dummy player).

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/96848/mage-knight-board-game

I also suggest the lost legion expansion for it. It adds a bunch of neat scenarios, fills in a couple of holes in the game, and really brings the experience together. The Shades of Tezla expansion can be mostly ignored, but it is cheap and not terrible by any stretch of the imagination.

Would just like to throw in...Don't play with too many people. The game is slow enough with two.
I love this game. I've owned it for years and I've played it as recently as yesterday. I've actually played it four times in the last week. That said, I've only played it solo. I don't know how fun it would be in co-op. This is definitely my favorite board game.

One I haven't seen suggested is Warfighter: The Tactical Special Forces Card Game (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/149951/warfighter-tactical-special-forces-card-game) by DVG. You play a team of special forces operatives trying to overcome some objective. You choose a mission, objective, region, and hostile deck. The mission will tell you how many points you have to build your team, and you use these points to buy soldiers, skills, weapons, and equipment. The objectives are stuff like rescuing hostages or blowing up a village. I'd recommend getting a handful of expansions (and probably all of them), but even the base game was pretty cool. The expansions give you a lot more options for building out your teams.

As far as Arkham Horror, I think two expansions (one little box and one big box) is the way to go. Maybe you could do more if you have a lot of players, but that seems to work really well in a four-player game. I have the Dark Pharaoh and Dunwich Horror expansions and have never felt like I've needed more.

If you like Pandemic, you should also check out Defenders of the Realm (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/65532/defenders-realm). It's similar, but with undead, demons, orcs, and dragonkin instead of diseases, and you use dice for removing them. There are four generals moving towards the center of the board, and if any makes it, you lose. It's designed by Richard Launius, designer of Arkham Horror, Elder Sign, and Alien Uprising, which are all good games, in my opinion.
 
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barker_s

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Aliens - https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1770/aliens : a board game based on one of my favourite franchises. Co-op only, brutally difficult and, unfortunately, long out of print. It's available on ebay from time to time, but it will cost you an arm and a leg. Of course there are rule and print-it-yourself templates available online if you're into that kind of thing. Also, there's a pretty cool flash version if you want to check if it's your cup of tea - http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/408816 .
 

Snorkack

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Anyone tried out Pandemic Legacy?
It is basically Pandemic with a campaign mode: Roles get new abilities over time (or die and be gone for good), cards get their effect altered, the team's objectives change...
It's really high ranking on boardgamegeek. However, the fact that you are supposed to permanently shred cards or slap non-removable stickers onto the board makes me hesitant, especially at that price tag.

Edit: Oh, apparently Scrooge mentioned it already :)

Edit: Oh, apparently that's not Scrooge :)
 
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Snorkack

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Finally bought Battlestar Galactica... This is easily one of the best board games I ever played. Being a cylon and forging plans to frame others, or two players accusing each other all the time of being the traitor and trying to draw the others on their side just to find out both are human and being played all along is just too much fun. The only other game with such intense human interaction I know of is Junta.
There are quite a few expansions available for BG. Any recommendations? I only heard that the one introducing the cylon leaders is a rather mixed bag.
 

yeye

Augur
Joined
Dec 14, 2009
Messages
285
Having played around a million games of it with all the expansions, right now I'd say Pegasus is the best expansion since it doesn't really change anything, it just gives you more of everything. Characters, cards, locations, crisis cards etc. It also works fine with both later expansions. I don't recommend playing with the endgame rules that come with that expansion though. Just keep the base game's rules for endgame. The base game is so great that you can do this with pretty much any rule (in any expansion) you don't like and it'll work fine as long as you're careful they don't interact with other stuff you might also need to remove.
Exodus is what my group has played the most games with and we kind of ended up feeling the game breaks with the new cylon fleet board. We had a lot of fun with it, but once everyone was clear on what they're supposed to do it led to very one-sided games that felt like a chore to finish more than anything. The new mechanics are generally fun and this expansion has a great endgame rule variant.
Daybreak kind of doesn't work well with Exodus. It's new rules have largely been ignored by my group, but it works fine with the base game + Pegasus so that's what we're playing now. The new endgame is kind of shit but you can't use Exodus' endgame if you don't add a lot of the rules from it. At least it's not New Caprica. I love playing Starbuck in this expansion for reasons that will become obvious if you get it.

When it comes to Cylon leaders, you just pick one if you want to lose no matter who wins. Kind of silly, but it can work if your group has an even number of players. You can always just ignore them. I don't think I've ever played one.

Overall, I'd recommend you get them in order. I'm sure Exodus will give you a lot of great games even though I kind of hate on it here. Or you could just find the characters and their abilities online and print em out to have the best part of all the expansions without spending a dime.
 

Dustin DePenning

Literate
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May 15, 2016
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42
Read reviews because I haven't opened my copy yet, but specter ops is an interesting asymmetrical team game from the publisher of dead of winter. Basically shadow run, with a team trying to find and destroy an nearly invisible agent hiding in the base. One player is the agent, all the others are the strike team.
 

Sothpaw

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Mar 2, 2015
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Warhammer Quest: The Adventure Card Game: https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/warhammer-quest-the-adventure-card-game/ Was looking for something to do with the wife and decided to get into board games. This is our first game (just got it 2 weeks ago) and we both really enjoy it. Just a fun coop dungeon crawler.

Also bought all 4 D&D Adventure System games. Haven't played yet, but they look like a lot of fun and really looking forward to them after we complete the Warhammer campaign.
 
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H
Shadows over Camelot (and expansion): Had a blast playing this back in the day. Really well done, tight mechanics.d investment. Also, it's one of those games that create moments you'll be talking about for a week after the session's end.
Shadows over Camelot is mostly a game to charm people who don't play boardgames; mechanically, it's shit - it's just matching poker suits and there's a 100% winning strategy for the base game if there's a traitor, which is to build siege engines every turn. You can say that it's pretty, atmospheric, whatever, but not that it's mechanically sound.

As for my coop game suggestion, I would say Tales of the Arabian Nights; it's not a coop game per se, but the very nature of storytelling makes it collaborative. The basic rules are also not very competitive at all, even though you do have a "winner" (it mostly works as a game clock). There are more advanced rules for direct competition, but I wouldn't recommend playing with them. Overall, it's a fantastic game. Recently re-edited by z-man games.
http://www.zmangames.com/store/p40/Tales_of_the_Arabians_Nights.html
 

Archibald

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I think Forbidden Desert wasn't mentioned yet? There is also Mysterium if you are interested in talking/interpretation games like Dixit.
 

Lord Rocket

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Feb 6, 2008
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There's also the just-released new version of Warhammer Quest:

https://www.games-workshop.com/en-US/Warhammer-Quest-Silver-Tower


People seem to like it, so far. I may pick it up myself in the next couple of weeks.

Did you pick this up in the end? I played the original version way back when and I remember it had a lot of goofy random charts to roll on outside of the dungeon crawling itself. Is that still part of the game, or did it get streamlined out?
 

Matalarata

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Since we already have a convenient thread I'll just ask here... Has any of you gentlemen tried Shadows of Brimstone? I'd buy the two core boxes for the theme alone (Wild Lovecraftian West) but the price isn't exactly cheap and, as far as I know, it comes with dozens of miniatures I'd need to assemble and paint.

Pls gib monocled opinionz.
 
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Ebonsword

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Mar 7, 2008
Messages
2,326
There's also the just-released new version of Warhammer Quest:

https://www.games-workshop.com/en-US/Warhammer-Quest-Silver-Tower


People seem to like it, so far. I may pick it up myself in the next couple of weeks.

Did you pick this up in the end? I played the original version way back when and I remember it had a lot of goofy random charts to roll on outside of the dungeon crawling itself. Is that still part of the game, or did it get streamlined out?

I never did end up picking it up. I probably will at some point, but I haven't felt like spending a weekend assembling miniatures.

However, my understanding is that a lot of the post-dungeon stuff was removed in the new version.
 

Fray

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May 28, 2014
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Shadows of Brimstone seems to be pretty heavily inspired by the original Warhammer Quest in some ways. If you like dungeon crawls you'd probably like it. I think though most of the fun comes from building a character and getting loot in the end, if you're more interested in in depth combat you'll probably need to make a fair amount of house rules. The game does seem to be well suited to modification though if you're willing to put in some effort. One potentially nice thing is that unlike most games of its type you don't need a GM, but that's also why it can be so easy sometimes. The board and encounters are also random so there's decent replayability and it's easy to bias things if you want a bit more flavor or challenge.

There is a lot of bookkeeping though. And setup is intensive and needs quite a bit of room. The rule book can be vague at times, (for instance I don't remember it ever explicitly saying when you can use items and tokens.) and aside from that I think the expansions are overpriced.

But overall I've had quite a bit of fun with it although I really like that kind of game anyway. (Just as a side note, if you do end up getting the game I'd recommend the city of the ancients over the swamps if you only get one. I found the monsters more interesting and dangerous and the other world cards were more varied from what I remember.)
 
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The original Warhammer Quest is fun, dunno about the new one. Having a dwarf party go to the tavern and getting way better stuff than from the dungeons from massive drinking bonuses, having your wizard resurrect everybody over and over in a difficult battle, powered by a life-draining chalice while the shaman struggles to keep him healed in turn... I don't think the new game will be as rich in mechanics, nor as unforgiving when it comes to the essential GETTING FUCKED experience of co-op games.

Doom is also great, it's a dungeoncrawling game with scenarios, level-ups, descriptory read-outs and doom guns and monsters. Onee player has to be the DM and you need to modify a few rules, such as disallowing stacking armor any higher than 3 because otherwise the players become invulnerable to weak monsters. I think there's a great fan-made downloadable rules expansion somewhere.

There's a deckbuilding co-op game called XenoShyft but I thought it involves too much waiting for your turn and other players talking out the optimal decisions you should do. I believe co-op games should be inherently difficult, and have something that prevents a few knowledgeable players from dictating the game to others, such as how it's also a competition in WHQ (he who kills the monster gets the XP).
 
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Snorkack

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Sooo...

Gloomhaven (2017)

...is possibly the best dungeon crawling boardgame I have ever played and ever will play. Still waiting for the 2nd print to get my own copy asap.
In my opinion, Gloomhaven renders Descent 100% obsolete, makes Sword&Sorcery basically dead on arrival and is just pure fun. Most of my nitpicks I had about Descent are basically solved, only the setting up is even more time-consuming. Also, once you're in the mission, there is really 100% killing baddies, no side objectives (well, except the personal goal). The legacy features are pretty awesome (unlocking new classes throughout the campaign, for example). It's one of those coop games that enable setting up effective team strategies while avoiding the Alpha Gamer issue. But solo play is possible - and entertaining - , too.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/174430/gloomhaven
 
Self-Ejected

Lurker King

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Watched a few of their videos. They keep on mocking the games I love the most, guess they are not really fond of euro style board games like I am.
Well, to be fair some of their criticisms are motivated by butthurt because some boardgames are overrated or have an unjustified cult status. They are not infallible but they are really knowledgable players. You should at least try their recommendations. I tried Pandemic because of them and I don't regret.
 

MicoSelva

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Snorkack, I'm a layman in this subject, but the guys at "Dice Tower" are not. They have a shitload of suggestions.
Watched a few of their videos. They keep on mocking the games I love the most, guess they are not really fond of euro style board games like I am.
They do love Gloomhaven, though, just like you.



I would buy it if all of my gaming group was proficient enough in English. Alas, they are not, so we are sticking to Descent: Journeys in the Dark and Pandemic: Legacy.
 

Azalin

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Watched a few of their videos. They keep on mocking the games I love the most, guess they are not really fond of euro style board games like I am.
Well, to be fair some of their criticisms are motivated by butthurt because some boardgames are overrated or have an unjustified cult status. They are not infallible but they are really knowledgable players. You should at least try their recommendations. I tried Pandemic because of them and I don't regret.

Don't forget to check their top 10 overrated games video,it's pretty funny
 

Snorkack

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Watched a few of their videos. They keep on mocking the games I love the most, guess they are not really fond of euro style board games like I am.
Well, to be fair some of their criticisms are motivated by butthurt because some boardgames are overrated or have an unjustified cult status. They are not infallible but they are really knowledgable players. You should at least try their recommendations. I tried Pandemic because of them and I don't regret.

Don't forget to check their top 10 overrated games video,it's pretty funny

This video actually makes up 95% of what my post is based on. Dixit? Dominion? That's just edgy. Eclipse?! Come on.
They're fun to watch, but when I browse their top 100's, I get the impression they generally value huge game boxes with oversized plastic miniatures higher than tight mechanics.
 

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