Category: Syndicated

Good entry coop games I have and play with my wife and visitors: **Forbidden Desert** and **Elder Signs**. Forbidden Desert is quite simple, but still lots of fun, plays fast and can be taught while playing the first game with really only minor intro needed pre-game. But can feel a bit too easy after a few plays, although then you can easily raise the level. Since after each player the wind has its actions, quarterbacking will just paint a big fat “dumb idiot” sign on your head after a few bad decisions, so you soonish stop with suggestions 😉 Elder Sign is mostly a dice chucker with cthulhu theme. There are card to manipulate your dice and chances and lots of events that go for your throat. Due to the dice, quarterbacking doesn’t really make much sense. After a while you will want to get the first expansion, because it really raises the level a little and gives more dice, which is always great in dice chuckers – actually you could grab the expansion right away even, because it doesn’t really makes the game more complete. If you want a more deep coop experience and are looking for something mire brain-burning, **Legends of Amdor** is really great. You could run into quarterbacking issues there, though, since all information is open and the random elements – mostly in event cards and battles – are post-decision. But they are deep and hard decisions, so usually one player alone won’t really be able to go as deep as needed, so it evens out. At least in my group, where I am usually the alpha player, because I often know the games better. Another brain burner from the deck building camp would be **Shadowrun: Crossfire** which counters quarterbacking by denying players to directly name the cards they have, so if you play by the rules, coop talk is restricted to asking about wether someone can take out an obstacle or help with something, but since other player cards are not known, you can’t dictate their plays. And last but not least, **Sentinels of the multiverse** could work if you keep player hands hidden from each other, as only the powers available are open information and so quarterbacking is limited. And playing a superhero can be tons of fun.

Well, to be fair, you have rest actions to get rid of cards and prepare actions to keep cards for next turn, so it is hard to imagine of turns where you can’t do any of those four actions you can choose from 😉 – people seem to see those two as “minor” or even “inferior” actions, though, so they feel less satisfying to take. To me, Thunderstone Advance is just “Dominion with theme and semi-coop feel”. The amount of rules Thunderstone adds over Dominion is minimal, but noticeable, so yes, Dominion is more streamlined game play. My main criticism of Thunderstone Advance is that the game can drag on a bit and it sometimes feels like it overstays its table time.

My group and me really like **Legends of Andor** for our semi-regular meets. It always tells a great story, we have tons of discussions during the game and I don’t think anyone ever was bored during play, even my wife stays engaged, even though it is q…

Well, elder sign minus the dice manipulation … which is hard for me to imagine it as more than a pure luck based game, while elder sign at least gives you some tactics via all those manipulations.

Well, in the paper Version I love Ambuscade. Because he is so easy that I only need to bring two heroes …

I second Tiny Epic Kingdoms, tons of game in a small and sturdy box. I think many smaller deck builders fit the bill, my favorite for small and fun currently is Valley of the Kings. Glory to Rome is another small box game. Only recently got it, still h…

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cdpred.witcher.abg

For me that is **Wiz War**. Wildly slapping your friends around with a large trout or whatever is at hand, doing all those crazy spells and having hilarious fun while completely getting rules wrong because you can’t remember if it was 3 or 4 damage for…

I really like it – the spacial element of building your station is just great, and I like the art style and the game play. The different races add nice asymmetry to the game and both the original and the fan-created two-player modes are useable. Sadly …

My group loves to play Legends of Andor and I can give that game several thumbs up, but there is a caveat: Legends of Andor is not Eldritch Horror. It is a game that tells a story (several actually), but the game play itself is much much tighter than with Eldritch Horror or Arkham horror or other games like that. It is much more a time-allocation-optimization game than a story experience game. Sure, the story carries the game, but what you actually do is minutely planning every single step in the group to optimize the hours you have in a day to maximize results. It is the most euro of any “explore the realm and survive quests” game that I know. With regards to replayability: Legends of Andor comes with 5 legends, the first two legends should be seen as tutorial legends – especially the first one, that really nicely introduces you to the basic game elements, the second one giving you the allmost full toolset. The third legend is a very variable legend that you can see as the actual game – you can play it many times due to the different combinations of heroes (at least with three players – there are four heroes in the box, so you have combinations and selections to try out, but if you add in the additional heroes expansion, it really opens up) and due to the random setup of Legend 3 where you get different character specific side quests and different end bosses. Legends 4 and 5 are for people who know the game and want something different – Legend 4 is the only one where you explore the caves (second side of the board), but has a more strict structure, so it’s replayability is a bit limited after you successfully finished it, Legend 5 again has a variable setup that helps with replayability and is a classic fight-the-end-boss kind of quest. It is damn hard, because you get two contradicting goals you have to reach. Every legend boils down to find an optimized way to run through different actions over a limited number of days to solve a very puzzly problem. It’s not a beers-and-pretzel story telling game. It is a brain burner. But for us a very fun one.

Yes, going solo at it with Marcus Fenix gives you quite a chance to finish it (Marcus gets one more card and so has one more life points). And it is quite smoothly working solo, too – you do lose out on the coop aspect, so follow is translated to just …

still unplayed, but **Arctic Scavengers** – aside from being some dystopian deck builder where you resolve conflicts over contested ressources with snipers and saboteurs among other things, which already paints a dire mood – comes with a mini expansion…

Many of my games, at least the ones that get played. But from them all, probably **Waggle Dance** sits at the top, because my wife enjoys it a lot – she even wants to play the long version – and there is a lot in that game for me, too. Just about a yea…

**One Zero One** git its first play – fun little card game for two programmers who still remember BASIC 😉 – doubt it will see a lot of pöay, though, because I can’t see my wife enjoying it and she is my usual two-player-game-opponent. And at the pub, while the guys would enjoy it, we are usually 3-4 players if we want to play something, so not a great option, too. As to looking forward to: probably my copy of the german version of **Galaxy Defender**.

Yeah, add to that the idea really is dumb. You need two anyway if you have any kind of lifegain, since you can go oder 40 easily. So why not just use two d10 right away? Goes to 99 and doesn’t knock over easily like this one (or like d20 do). So 20 bucks for some impractical “solution” is a joke. A bad one.

I can second Waggle Dance, friendly art, funny bee scenes and the game itself us a great gateway euro.

by TheGargoyle
Missing mentions of my favorite current travel gme: Valley of the Kings. Plays 2-4 and is tons of fun with just 2. And is a really light package with just 104 cards.

by TheGargoyle
Laner wrote:I realized that my wife likes playing games, but not learning them. So my pile of new games is bringing us both down. Therefore we are visiting old titles that she already knows.I’m in the same boat. So – according to the …

Yep, but it could USA some Mord posts, a bit silent over there.

try to hunt down **Waggle Dance** if you are up to some cute and friendly themed worker bee placement. It has one of the most non-offensive and welcoming theme – a beehive – and is colored accordingly. And a ton of fun to play with two, but scales up to four easily. Play time goes atound an hour for two, turns are wuick since yoz alternately place worker bees and the got through a evaluatiõn round and on to the next placement already. No complicated book keeping or win evaluation like some other worker placement games. And rules are easy enough to bring muggles on board and still has enough depth to go into deep-think if you feel like it.

don’t yet have it, but it is on my wish list for quute some time to fill the “heavy euro” gap in ny collection: **Fields of Arle**. That game is a beast. But a lovely one, from the looks. Watch rahdos runthrough of it.

I think there are just not enough resource generation engines of the needed reliability for 3 sphere decks. I always start three sphere, but notice that without something reliable like steward of Gondor, they don’t work that well. Sometimes you can get…

Golden Egg Games, because they fail at anything related to communication so hard that they would actually have to talk to be on “fail” level … – I went with Athlas, not on KS but on Spieleschmiede, because they gave guarantees, but still, project communucaton is horrible. We still don’t know if we get the german stuff in one batch as claimed by someone from Spieleschmiede or in two batches as claimed by Elad on the KS, and questions go unanswered. Really not instilling confidence and next time I would put my money on someone else. Especially aggravating that they presented the ready game (and sold them) at Essen and up to now no backer received even the base game. They are still inside the time frame of Spieleschmiede, since they gave delivery date in January, so I guess at least the base game will come to me that way February latest, since it us produced and shipped in Germany, but the lack of useful updates is just crazy.

well, GD has a much chearier theme and it is new, so should have support for some time to come, and since it is nit license based, it diesn’t have that kind of doom hanging over it. So might be a better choice, the english version us out fir a while al…

Münster

Rahdo likened it to the King of XXX games, just a bit more meat to the bones. It is why I have it starred on KS to think about a bit, but probably I will skip it, because a dice chucker IMO doesn’t need 100 minis to work and so even though the game sur…

Germany, NRW.

I’d be devastated, because I probably won’t get **Gears of War** again in the German version. I would definitely plunk down the money for **LOTR LCG** and would try to hunt down **Waggle Dance** (my wife’s current favourite). Actually I probably would …

If you like coop and wand ameritrashy at its best, see if you can still hunt down a copy of **Gears of War** while there still is a chance. It has one of the best AI mechanics for the monsters and plays 1-4 without problems, and due to the command deck…

I have Robinson Crusoe on order, hoping to get soonish, especially now that the expansion is out in german, too. For science!