Yeah and I believe the game designer Elizabeth Maggie Phillips had an alternate version of the rules that kids could play after they got the message how random and cruel the base rules of the Landlord’s Game was (which got stripped of its politics and became Monopoly).
You make a great point about Monopoly, it is a badly designed game in terms of creating all kinds of un-fun situations for players. The genre of “euro games”, Concordia being probably the clearest example, consciously focuses on making it so players aren’t directly ruining each other’s fun while still having player interaction.
Good board game design is very careful to make interaction not stray into territories where friendships can be broken, which I know people joke about friendship ending experiences with board games, but it does happen and what an awful thing for a $50 box of cardboard that took up hours of you and your friends time to do.
If you look at high player interaction games like Inis, Brian Boru, Keyflower, Babylonia, Scythe or Troyes to name a few, they are very carefully designed so that one player dominating and drawing the game out even though they are clearly going to win doesn’t make the game fun at the expense of losing players. There is a reason chess is such an old game and is so strategically elegant and yet most people don’t play it, it takes a certain kind of mindset to have fun losing at chess, you get absolutely dissected by the better player and as the game goes on the other player winning means you have less fun stuff you can do.
Well I have a deep love for Spirit Island and I enjoy playing The Crew every time I get it to the table (so does everyone else who plays usually). I love co-operative games!
My only thing with co-operative games is I already can’t stand the type of person who wants to control what everyone does in a situation (it’s called “quarterbacking” in board game terms) because they “know” the best strategy and it is very tricky to design board games so that it doesn’t immediately encourage this type of person to try to micromanage what everyone else does on their turn. It is even more insufferable when the person trying to micromanage everyone else’s turns and tell them what to do is right about it because what are they supposed to do just sit there and let the other player make a stupid move that loses everyone the game?
I think also co-operative games need to be tuned to be generally be hard as nails because otherwise the ending of a co-operative game can feel like the (fun) tension just goes out of the game at the end when it becomes apparent everybody won but the game isn’t over yet. This is way less a problem with non-co-operative board games because even when the end of the game isn’t super close everyone is still invested in what score they got/what place they will come in.
All those caveats aside, Spirit Island is my fav board game of all time full stop so yes I love co-operative board games! I have not gotten the pleasure of trying Scotland Yard though and you reminded me I need to try it.
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Absolutely, I wholeheartedly agree!
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Yeah and I believe the game designer Elizabeth Maggie Phillips had an alternate version of the rules that kids could play after they got the message how random and cruel the base rules of the Landlord’s Game was (which got stripped of its politics and became Monopoly).
You make a great point about Monopoly, it is a badly designed game in terms of creating all kinds of un-fun situations for players. The genre of “euro games”, Concordia being probably the clearest example, consciously focuses on making it so players aren’t directly ruining each other’s fun while still having player interaction.
Good board game design is very careful to make interaction not stray into territories where friendships can be broken, which I know people joke about friendship ending experiences with board games, but it does happen and what an awful thing for a $50 box of cardboard that took up hours of you and your friends time to do.
If you look at high player interaction games like Inis, Brian Boru, Keyflower, Babylonia, Scythe or Troyes to name a few, they are very carefully designed so that one player dominating and drawing the game out even though they are clearly going to win doesn’t make the game fun at the expense of losing players. There is a reason chess is such an old game and is so strategically elegant and yet most people don’t play it, it takes a certain kind of mindset to have fun losing at chess, you get absolutely dissected by the better player and as the game goes on the other player winning means you have less fun stuff you can do.
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Well I have a deep love for Spirit Island and I enjoy playing The Crew every time I get it to the table (so does everyone else who plays usually). I love co-operative games!
My only thing with co-operative games is I already can’t stand the type of person who wants to control what everyone does in a situation (it’s called “quarterbacking” in board game terms) because they “know” the best strategy and it is very tricky to design board games so that it doesn’t immediately encourage this type of person to try to micromanage what everyone else does on their turn. It is even more insufferable when the person trying to micromanage everyone else’s turns and tell them what to do is right about it because what are they supposed to do just sit there and let the other player make a stupid move that loses everyone the game?
I think also co-operative games need to be tuned to be generally be hard as nails because otherwise the ending of a co-operative game can feel like the (fun) tension just goes out of the game at the end when it becomes apparent everybody won but the game isn’t over yet. This is way less a problem with non-co-operative board games because even when the end of the game isn’t super close everyone is still invested in what score they got/what place they will come in.
All those caveats aside, Spirit Island is my fav board game of all time full stop so yes I love co-operative board games! I have not gotten the pleasure of trying Scotland Yard though and you reminded me I need to try it.