Enthusing about co-operative boardgames
I've always been a fan of co-operative tabletop games - it's probably a lot of why I like roleplaying, and I enjoyed Pandemic more than most people who played it at Games Evening. In the last couple of years, though, the format has recieved something of a shot in the arm, with a few pretty impressive new games coming out - and even more importantly, some of these games have now made it to Games Evening (you can kind of tell, by the way I tend to recommend the same games most weeks...). I've played two co-op games in particular that I've really enjoyed in the last few weeks, so now I'm going to enthuse about them.
The first of them is Space Cadets, which might be considered a "party game" inasmuch as it largely consists of a series of dissimiliar minigames, and the strategic planning involved is not (for most people) particularly heavy. The basic idea is that you're the crew of a starship which has been tasked with a mission, and you've got to go about fulfilling it while protecting your ship from the general hazards of space, which naturally enough includes hostile aliens. The crew fills in the normal set of roles you'd expect on a ship - captain, helm, engineering, damage control, weapons, sensors and so on, and each of them plays a different minigame. In the game I played I was the weapons officer, meaning I was making patterns out of Blokus pieces (Tetris pieces, if you don't know what Blokus is, except made up of 1-5 squares rather than just 4) to arm torpedoes and then playing shove ha'penny to fire them. I turned out to be something of a crack shot at this, at least in alextfish's estimation based on previous games. Both of these acivities - and almost everything that everyone else does, from the helm officer playing RoboRally to the shields officer trying to match poker hands are run to a fairly sharp time limit. This means that things do inevitably go wrong, leading to the shields officer gesturing rudely at the helm when they merrily plot the ship's course so as to face the opposite way around to the way they said they were aiming for, meaning that now the bit that is pointing at the aliens is unshielded...at which point you all get to play the core breach minigame, wherein you have to find matching sets of cards and pass the deck to the next person, while still doing your actual job, inside the standard time limit - or the ship explodes. It's pretty tense. There's some strategic planning too, mostly for the Captain, whose job it is to try and co-ordinate everything as well as operating the tractor beam and potentially the damage control depending on number of players, and the Chief Engineer, who first has to work out which subsystems are going to need power next round and then play dominoes to actually route it to them, but overall the game is fairly light. You are working against the clock not only in the literal sense of most actions being timed, but also by virtue of the existence of the Nemesis, an alien dreadnought which your weapons can only slow down, not actually harm - your only way to survive is to accomplish the mission and jump out. That extra bit of (simulated) shared danger really helps the atmosphere of working together as a team, and when we just managed to patch our breached core up with seconds to go before the ship exploded, enabling us to hit the jump drive before the Nemesis could fire again, we actually cheered. It was pretty awesome, and it's definitely on my "play as often as possible" list for now.
Joining it there is X-Com: The Board Game, which, despite being a much deeper strategic game, does share some of the same essence as Space Cadets. Namely, the literal and figurative race against time. The strength of the board game's alien invasion ramps up over time, eventually reaching an intensity well beyond X-Com's ability to conduct defensive operations. X-Com must win, by completing it's "final mission" before it loses, either through a direct assault in its base or through failing to control panic in the global population. But your actions are themselves timed; you've generally got about thirty seconds to perform any given activity (though the game does provide you with an amount of "pause time" to think with - on "easy" difficulty that's unlimited. The game accomplishes this by being essentially run using a smartphone app (it runs on desktop computers as well) which plays the side of the aliens and prompts the players for their actions (and counts down the timer) each round. The timer - and the fact that the app has a few nice atmosphere-setting things like an alert klaxon when UFOs are detected - do a good job of keeping you slightly off-balance and making it a challenge of planning under pressure.
The strategy in X-Com is mostly a question of resource allocation on a variety of scales. There's four different roles (though they can be combined, so the game runs with any number between 1 and 4 players), and nobody ever has quite enough resources to do a thorough job. The Commander controls X-Com's budget and its fleet of interceptors, and has to get the other players to co-operate with the former (every deployment costs one credit, you have somewhere in the region of 12 for most turns) and manage global panic with the latter (UFOs cause panic, interceptors shoot down UFOs). The Squad Leader has to actually win the game - sending troops out on missions and completing them is how you get the final mission unlocked, which you then complete in order to claim victory - while not losing it by leaving the base unguarded. Meanwhile the Chief Scientist is trying to research tech that actually makes victory possible to achieve, and again, since the Commander won't be able to provide enough resources to research all of it, they've got to figure out where it'll make the most difference. The fourth role is the Central Officer, who's responsible for X-Com's satellite network and can pull a variety of useful tricks with it to aid X-Com's forces elsewhere, but their primary role is as app-master, relaying information to the other players and being in charge of time as the commander is in charge of money. It's all pretty good fun. So far I've played the game 3-player and 1-player, and enjoyed both of them (the fewer players you have, the more time you spend reacting to everything the app throws at you, and the less time you have to think and plan, so you play worse. The app gives you more money to compensate, though I still failed horribly at my first attempt). It takes around 90 minutes to 2 hours to run through.
The copy of Space Cadets I've played is alextfish's, and that of X-Com is mine. Both are played at Games Evening from time to time, and if anybody who is likely to actually read this wants to come over to mine some other time and fight off an alien invasion of the earth, that sounds like a fun way to spend a few hours to me. (I imagine you probably have various ways of getting in touch about that).
The first of them is Space Cadets, which might be considered a "party game" inasmuch as it largely consists of a series of dissimiliar minigames, and the strategic planning involved is not (for most people) particularly heavy. The basic idea is that you're the crew of a starship which has been tasked with a mission, and you've got to go about fulfilling it while protecting your ship from the general hazards of space, which naturally enough includes hostile aliens. The crew fills in the normal set of roles you'd expect on a ship - captain, helm, engineering, damage control, weapons, sensors and so on, and each of them plays a different minigame. In the game I played I was the weapons officer, meaning I was making patterns out of Blokus pieces (Tetris pieces, if you don't know what Blokus is, except made up of 1-5 squares rather than just 4) to arm torpedoes and then playing shove ha'penny to fire them. I turned out to be something of a crack shot at this, at least in alextfish's estimation based on previous games. Both of these acivities - and almost everything that everyone else does, from the helm officer playing RoboRally to the shields officer trying to match poker hands are run to a fairly sharp time limit. This means that things do inevitably go wrong, leading to the shields officer gesturing rudely at the helm when they merrily plot the ship's course so as to face the opposite way around to the way they said they were aiming for, meaning that now the bit that is pointing at the aliens is unshielded...at which point you all get to play the core breach minigame, wherein you have to find matching sets of cards and pass the deck to the next person, while still doing your actual job, inside the standard time limit - or the ship explodes. It's pretty tense. There's some strategic planning too, mostly for the Captain, whose job it is to try and co-ordinate everything as well as operating the tractor beam and potentially the damage control depending on number of players, and the Chief Engineer, who first has to work out which subsystems are going to need power next round and then play dominoes to actually route it to them, but overall the game is fairly light. You are working against the clock not only in the literal sense of most actions being timed, but also by virtue of the existence of the Nemesis, an alien dreadnought which your weapons can only slow down, not actually harm - your only way to survive is to accomplish the mission and jump out. That extra bit of (simulated) shared danger really helps the atmosphere of working together as a team, and when we just managed to patch our breached core up with seconds to go before the ship exploded, enabling us to hit the jump drive before the Nemesis could fire again, we actually cheered. It was pretty awesome, and it's definitely on my "play as often as possible" list for now.
Joining it there is X-Com: The Board Game, which, despite being a much deeper strategic game, does share some of the same essence as Space Cadets. Namely, the literal and figurative race against time. The strength of the board game's alien invasion ramps up over time, eventually reaching an intensity well beyond X-Com's ability to conduct defensive operations. X-Com must win, by completing it's "final mission" before it loses, either through a direct assault in its base or through failing to control panic in the global population. But your actions are themselves timed; you've generally got about thirty seconds to perform any given activity (though the game does provide you with an amount of "pause time" to think with - on "easy" difficulty that's unlimited. The game accomplishes this by being essentially run using a smartphone app (it runs on desktop computers as well) which plays the side of the aliens and prompts the players for their actions (and counts down the timer) each round. The timer - and the fact that the app has a few nice atmosphere-setting things like an alert klaxon when UFOs are detected - do a good job of keeping you slightly off-balance and making it a challenge of planning under pressure.
The strategy in X-Com is mostly a question of resource allocation on a variety of scales. There's four different roles (though they can be combined, so the game runs with any number between 1 and 4 players), and nobody ever has quite enough resources to do a thorough job. The Commander controls X-Com's budget and its fleet of interceptors, and has to get the other players to co-operate with the former (every deployment costs one credit, you have somewhere in the region of 12 for most turns) and manage global panic with the latter (UFOs cause panic, interceptors shoot down UFOs). The Squad Leader has to actually win the game - sending troops out on missions and completing them is how you get the final mission unlocked, which you then complete in order to claim victory - while not losing it by leaving the base unguarded. Meanwhile the Chief Scientist is trying to research tech that actually makes victory possible to achieve, and again, since the Commander won't be able to provide enough resources to research all of it, they've got to figure out where it'll make the most difference. The fourth role is the Central Officer, who's responsible for X-Com's satellite network and can pull a variety of useful tricks with it to aid X-Com's forces elsewhere, but their primary role is as app-master, relaying information to the other players and being in charge of time as the commander is in charge of money. It's all pretty good fun. So far I've played the game 3-player and 1-player, and enjoyed both of them (the fewer players you have, the more time you spend reacting to everything the app throws at you, and the less time you have to think and plan, so you play worse. The app gives you more money to compensate, though I still failed horribly at my first attempt). It takes around 90 minutes to 2 hours to run through.
The copy of Space Cadets I've played is alextfish's, and that of X-Com is mine. Both are played at Games Evening from time to time, and if anybody who is likely to actually read this wants to come over to mine some other time and fight off an alien invasion of the earth, that sounds like a fun way to spend a few hours to me. (I imagine you probably have various ways of getting in touch about that).