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…
Team Study: Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space
The hidden team games are an interesting adjacent space for co-op design, both for the cooperative mechanics of their team-based play and for the introduction of deduction, something that any traitors game could learn from. So over the rest of October we’ll be looking at a pair of hidden teams games. Escape from the Aliens…
Case Study: Forbidden Sky
Forbidden Sky was the game that we really wanted to include in Meeples Together, but it came out too late in the year for it to meet our schedule. So, consider this a true addendum to Chapter 4, where we offered case studies of Pandemic, Forbidden Island, and Forbidden Desert. Forbidden Sky by Matt Leacock…
Case Study: Pandemic — Reign of Cthulhu
By this point, there have been a shocking number of Pandemic games. Some slightly vary the original formula, while others move increasingly far away. We expect to look at most of them over time, because variations to an an existing system are one of the most intriguing ways to examine the evolution of a game…
Case Study: Onirim
We analyzed co-op games small and large while working on Meeples Together. Onirim was one of the smallest: a 78-card game for just two players in a teeny little card box. But size can be deceiving … Onirim by Shadi Torbey Publisher: Z-Man Games (2010, 2014) Cooperative Style: True Co-op Play Style: Card Management, Set…