The SdJ nominees for 2019 were announced last month and were full of entrants of interest to co-op fans. The traditional SdJ award, which runs pretty light nowadays, nominated Just One (a true co-op, sort of) and Werewords (a hidden traitor game). Then the heftier Kennerspiel award nominated Detective (another true co-op). It was a…
Category: Co-op Case Studies
Case Study: Police Precinct
One of the interesting results of the success of Pandemic (2008) was that a subset of co-op games came out that used Pandemic’s design as a starting place. Some were very obviously influenced, such as Richard Launius’ Defenders of the Realm (2010), but others went further afield, but still maintained a similar foundation of modern…
Case Study: Betrayal Legacy
Betrayal Legacy was the next major co-op released after we finalized the text on Meeples Together. (It actually came out in early November 2018, toward the end of our Kickstarter.) However, we’re continuing to play and analyze new co-op games, so we’re pleased to offer this case study of one of our genre’s newest games….
Case Study: Star Trek — Five-Year Mission
The cooperative universe of the Star Trek Federation is fertile ground for co-op game design. David E. Whitcher’s Star Trek: Five-Year Mission is thus the second Star Trek co-op of the ’10s, and a very different beast from Reiner Knizia’s Star Trek: Expeditions. Star Trek: Five-Year Mission by David E. Whitcher Publisher: Mayfair Games (2015)…
Case Study: Star Trek — Expeditions
Reiner Knizia is best known in the co-op field for Lord of the Rings (2000), the game that kicked off the co-op revolution of the ’00s and ’10s. However, he also produced a second co-op game a decade later, Star Trek: Expeditions. (As with the Lord of the Rings case study, we at one time…
Case Study: 12 Realms
We played both well-known and less-known co-ops while preparing Meeples Together: they were both sources of inspiration. 12 Realms, which Shannon received as a review copy, was thus the game that introduced us to icon-cost tasks, though we didn’t nail them down as a design pattern until we played a few other games two years later!…
Case Study: Pathfinder ACG
Our preorder page for Meeples Together will be available in the next few days, in case you missed the Kickstarter. We’ll send out an announcement when that occurs. In the mean time, here’s our newest case study, looking at one of the most popular games on the modern market. Pathfinder Adventure Card Game by Mike…
Case Study: Sub Terra
Our Kickstarter for Meeples Together ends this week, but we’ll be continuing to publish new case studies supplementing the book in the weeks and months to come. (We’ve got more than 50 additional case studies drafted, plus another handful planned.) Today’s talks about Sub Terra, one of the big co-op Kickstarters in recent years, and…
Case Study: Thunderbirds
Meeples Together is continuing to crowdfund on Kickstarter. It’s already blown through its first stretch goal, which adds a case study for Matt Leacock’s Forbidden Island to the book. We hope we’ll also be able to talk about his Forbidden Desert too, as our fourth stretch goal. We wanted to add those two extra case…
Case Study: Lord of the Rings
Meeples Together (which is now being funded on Kickstarter) breaks down the design of cooperative games primarily through the analysis and dissection of existing releases. These discussions form the core of the book, but specific games are also highlighted in individual case studies. Meeples Together contains 14 of these case studies, one per chapter, plus a…