Monopoly: Socialism is an edition that the players can cooperate each other to rebuild the community. This game can be played with 2-4 players. Socialism is about cooperation. As fellow citizens and community organizers, we pledge to: Move around the board and revitalize our town by contributing to one another’s projects. Unless we can steal projects to get ahead! Maintain our vital Community Fund. Unless depleting it helps us win! Always act in the best interest of the group. Unless it’s more f
Carcassonne is a classic and I think is essentially a perfect game at what it does, doesn’t have a monopoly feel to me though. Still hell yes.
Settlers Of Catan is a weird one for me, it brought me into modern board gaming years ago but I think it suffers from some flaws, the biggest one being that a newer player can quite visibly doom themselves from the very start of the game with poor placement of their beginning cities. There isn’t player elimination but it essentially feels like there is, and it is too long of a game for that feeling in my opinion. Ticket To Ride injects a huge amount of tension and players can doom themselves with bad choices (or be cut off by other players) but the game is far better paced for that kind of interaction, and the winning player usually closes out the game fairly fast once it becomes obvious who is going to win.
I guess my biggest problem with Monopoly is that the whole point of it is to fuck everyone else over in sort of sadistic ways. Most competitive board games (let alone cooperative ones) don’t have that. So after growing up playing Monopoly, Carcassonne and Catan were live huge breaths of fresh air for me.
That was what the original game Monopoly was stolen from was intended for. Monopoly’s lesson is “make as much money as possible, buy as much shit as possible, fuck everyone else over and you win.”
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.
Cooperative board games are so much more fun to me. Have you ever played Scotland Yard? All but one of the players work together to catch the one player playing the criminal in a chase over a map of London. It’s one of my all-time favorite game and it’s all about strategy and coordination.
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.
Re Catan and Carcassone, my opinion is flipped. Yeah, a new Catan player can screw themselves early, but that’s where having a good group comes in. The first game (or few games) should be helping the newbie understand the rules and strategies. More fun for everyone that way.
I’ve been playing Carcassone off and on for 15-20 years, and it still feels like the winner is largely determined by who got lucky with their first few farmers. It’s also entirely possible that I’m not a good enough player to really get what’s going on - it’s one of those games that I’ll play if that’s what everyone else wants to do, but never one that I’d suggest. It just never clicked with me.
I don’t loveee carcassone, I agree I especially find it frustrating that you don’t know if there are even any more of the tiles you need left in the pool so it feels extra chaotic.
Still, it is a game people tend to like and damn it is so much better than old board games I will happily play it over and over again…. but yeah I’d rather play Concordia, Agricola or Dominion tho…
There’s a new game out from one of the creators of Pandemic, called Daybreak. It is a cooperative game in which you and up to three others all play countries and work together to combat climate change. You don’t have to completely reverse the elevated temperature that occurs throughout the game, only to reach Drawdown in which you reverse the flow of carbon emissions, thereby starting the process of reducing the effects of increased climate.
I haven’t had a chance yet to play it with others, but I am excited to. The artwork is beautiful and is contributed by artists across the globe. None of the materials are plastic; cardboard boxes, cards on cardstock, wooden tokens, containers made from wood pulp…there wasn’t even plastic wrap around the box, just paper stickers.
My favorite part, though, is the QR codes. Each of the project and crisis cards (of which there are 230) has a QR code that links to an individual page on the game’s website that gives an overview of the concept that card, why it is a problem, and what can be done to fix it. There are also links to articles and studies for more details, and there are links to groups one can join to become an advocate for/against causes related to that concept.
I would recommend Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne too.
Carcassonne is a classic and I think is essentially a perfect game at what it does, doesn’t have a monopoly feel to me though. Still hell yes.
Settlers Of Catan is a weird one for me, it brought me into modern board gaming years ago but I think it suffers from some flaws, the biggest one being that a newer player can quite visibly doom themselves from the very start of the game with poor placement of their beginning cities. There isn’t player elimination but it essentially feels like there is, and it is too long of a game for that feeling in my opinion. Ticket To Ride injects a huge amount of tension and players can doom themselves with bad choices (or be cut off by other players) but the game is far better paced for that kind of interaction, and the winning player usually closes out the game fairly fast once it becomes obvious who is going to win.
I guess my biggest problem with Monopoly is that the whole point of it is to fuck everyone else over in sort of sadistic ways. Most competitive board games (let alone cooperative ones) don’t have that. So after growing up playing Monopoly, Carcassonne and Catan were live huge breaths of fresh air for me.
It was literally designed to teach the lesson that monopolies are bad, so that’s 100% “working as intended.”
That was what the original game Monopoly was stolen from was intended for. Monopoly’s lesson is “make as much money as possible, buy as much shit as possible, fuck everyone else over and you win.”
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.
Cooperative board games are so much more fun to me. Have you ever played Scotland Yard? All but one of the players work together to catch the one player playing the criminal in a chase over a map of London. It’s one of my all-time favorite game and it’s all about strategy and coordination.
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.
Absolutely, I wholeheartedly agree!
Re Catan and Carcassone, my opinion is flipped. Yeah, a new Catan player can screw themselves early, but that’s where having a good group comes in. The first game (or few games) should be helping the newbie understand the rules and strategies. More fun for everyone that way.
I’ve been playing Carcassone off and on for 15-20 years, and it still feels like the winner is largely determined by who got lucky with their first few farmers. It’s also entirely possible that I’m not a good enough player to really get what’s going on - it’s one of those games that I’ll play if that’s what everyone else wants to do, but never one that I’d suggest. It just never clicked with me.
I don’t loveee carcassone, I agree I especially find it frustrating that you don’t know if there are even any more of the tiles you need left in the pool so it feels extra chaotic.
Still, it is a game people tend to like and damn it is so much better than old board games I will happily play it over and over again…. but yeah I’d rather play Concordia, Agricola or Dominion tho…
There’s a new game out from one of the creators of Pandemic, called Daybreak. It is a cooperative game in which you and up to three others all play countries and work together to combat climate change. You don’t have to completely reverse the elevated temperature that occurs throughout the game, only to reach Drawdown in which you reverse the flow of carbon emissions, thereby starting the process of reducing the effects of increased climate.
I haven’t had a chance yet to play it with others, but I am excited to. The artwork is beautiful and is contributed by artists across the globe. None of the materials are plastic; cardboard boxes, cards on cardstock, wooden tokens, containers made from wood pulp…there wasn’t even plastic wrap around the box, just paper stickers.
My favorite part, though, is the QR codes. Each of the project and crisis cards (of which there are 230) has a QR code that links to an individual page on the game’s website that gives an overview of the concept that card, why it is a problem, and what can be done to fix it. There are also links to articles and studies for more details, and there are links to groups one can join to become an advocate for/against causes related to that concept.
That sounds amazing!