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…
Team Study: The Resistance
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…
Team Study: Saboteur
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…
Apocrypha II: Degrees of Cooperation
We continue to play co-ops, and we continue to learn new things about cooperative games as we do. Thus, this is our second article to focus exclusively on new concepts that integrate with those found in Meeples Together, based on games that we played after we locked the content of the book in July 2018….
Case Study: Dead Men Tell No Tales
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…
The 2019 Top Co-op List
In Meeples Together, we included a number of “top” co-op lists (all in Appendix V: pp. 334-364). Those lists were put together in summer 2018 from our play records and from top lists at BGG. One year later, here’s an update to those lists; it was put together in fall 2019, and released today, just…
Case Study: Sprawlopolis
This week’s case study is about what may be the most minimalist co-op that I’ve met: 18 cards, and less than 15 minutes play. Nonetheless, it’s an enjoyable and intriguing game. Sprawlopolis by Steven Aramini, Danny Devine, and Paul Kulka Publisher: Button Shy (2018) Cooperative Style: True Co-op Play Style: Card Management, Tile Laying Overview…
Lost Study: World of Warcraft MMORPG
In the early drafts of Meeples Together, our topics were more far-ranging and so we included case studies of things like American Football and the Dungeons & Dragons game, which were cut as we tightened up the book. Here’s another of those “lost” case studies, on the World of Warcraft MMORPG. Though it’s somewhat distant…
Case Study: Descent — Journeys in the Dark 1e
The overlord category of co-ops gets a decent amount of attention in Meeples Together, but we probably could have written a whole chapter on how overlords interact with the challenge machinery of a co-op game. Instead, we offer up this case study, our first to discuss an overlord game. It describes one of the foundational…
Team Study: Blood Bound
We’re coming up on the night of masks and false faces, so it seems appropriate that we’re talking about another hidden teams game (and one that feels like a natural successor to Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space, which we discussed two weeks ago). As it happens, we’ve played a number of hidden team…