Casual Friday - 10 Greatest Cooperative Games of All Time

0:00 john you know the hard thing about cooperative games is that there's so many good ones this is a problem when you're trying to make a top list i'm gonna have to disagree and say the problem with cooperative games is that everybody else is worse at them than me and i want to take their turns for them inherently yeah well i i guess and they don't want to listen to me expound on why we should have looked at all the different angles right well you know we're coming here to have our like absolutely irrefutable definitive totally objective scientifically researched top ten with our respective fives of cooperative games we ran it through the machine exactly the lights lit up and the ticker tape came out and it's got the answers and it counts even when there are cooperative games that we've never played before they don't count the machine factored it in exactly so with cooperative games i was actually thinking about this when i was building the list is unlike the area control list that we did area control to me has it's a more defined mechanic and i can think of like implementations of area control in different categories of things i want to capture but with cooperative games there are so many different types of cooperative games out there that like even nailing it down to like my five favorite was very difficult especially when you're trying to get into like do i want to have five representations

1:32 of different types i like and the best of those or do i want to have the five that i most often want to play so once again we're into this kind of squishy territory and you are you are if nothing if not a squishy person yeah i'm the squishiest which is which is why you like co-op so much and arguably i may be less qualified because i do tend to like the competitive at your throat kind of games um but there so there is something to be said for if it's a cooperative game i like it's it's gonna be competitive i'm gonna have to feel like i'm competing with the game right um but but what you said about the the as far as the category if someone were to make sort of a biological like genus species of board game kind of thing i think i think the the um area control is a trait of board games whereas cooperative is like a whole species you know it's because it's either cooperative or competitive and then competitive can break down further into who's competing against what teams whatever but cooperative is like well that's its whole i mean that's a huge body of what it could be mechanically so we're going to have to have like a whole like scientific classification set for that we're going to just do the little exactly uh kings play chess on fine grains okay so bring up my biology textbook from college or something okay so let's actually talk about like what counts and what doesn't count here i don't think we need like a specific definition of a cooperative game that's more universally understood but as far as for our list

3:02 like what is cooperative versus like a game that may have cooperative elements that we're not including we have decided to keep it i mean if this is even still narrow i mean it's still such a broad field but we're talking pure cooperative we're not talking uh one versus many where you know or any sort of team game where you cooperate with players but not all players and we're not talking about semi-cooperative where at the end of the day maybe you you don't want some overarching goal to succeed like dead of winner you want the colony to survive but then you win individually no this is pure cooperative where everybody wins or loses together uh the the only one that i ended up like breaking away even though it's uh you win together or you lose together is the the purely narrative like mystery adventure type of thing those are i guess honorable mentions for cooperative games ish in so far as their game so uh you know uh the sherlock holmes consulting detective i know you're a huge fan of for me tale of ward and the the emerald flame by post curious are excellent games but those weren't really in the spirit of this list right so this is something that has a mechanical presence on a board or on a whatever playing surface on the table right pieces exactly so with all that said where are we starting with year five so so i did i took the same kind of especially with a broad topic like this i took the same kind of approach um as i did with area control and said you know what i'm not going to pick the ones that are maybe my five favorite

4:34 i'm going to pick my favorite from within sort of the main groups of cooperatives so is that a notebook this isn't my notebook oh man because you can't prepare that there were so many honorable mentions in this one because surprisingly i think i have found that to me cooperative 10 years ago honestly it was still a newer thing i mean yeah yeah totally someone do a history report on board game when was the first cooperative gaming the first one i played was forbidden island yeah that was you and i broke that one out well this is actually something i'm pretty qualified to answer i don't think that i have the definitive answer of what is the full progenitor of all cooperative games the card game war war is not cooperative absolutely because we are both working together to make sure we don't have any fun 100 i was thinking about that since like minute one roll back and you can see when i thought of it like i was like i'm gonna say something later it's gonna sing interestingly i i i've had interviews uh here i'm going to do some name drops uh with reinhard kenitzia bruno catala and matt licock uh and both uh bruno catala who was co-designer on shadows over camelot uh one of the first like traitor mechanisms semi-co-ops traitor uh and also uh matt licock who of course is the designer on pandemic both of them directly sighted the lord of the rings game by reinhard kenitzia as the first cooperative game that they'd played and as far as i know that's the first like major fully cooperative game in the hobby game

6:06 space wow and that is a good one to be the first i mean if we're gonna super nerd here a lord of the rings game a fellowship i mean that's the perfect starter for co-op for me it was lee cox forbidden island yep they have evolved a lot in the last five years or so totally i feel like 10 years ago it was pandemic and forbidden island and those kinds of things and those are still good but there's a lot of quarterbacking which is what i was getting at you know if i feel like you know maybe the skill levels aren't even there's going to be a lot of pushy players saying no you should do this why are you doing that and you either have to house rule around that or you know it's just not as enjoyable for everybody so for me in that in that genre flashpoint fire rescue it is very pandemicky action selection but the theme is is probably one of the best like what is more cooperative than a group of guys or or women running into a building to save people from a fire uh what about saving the world from a global pandemic uh yeah but it's so abstract you're just removing cubes i don't know that a global pandemic is a very abstract less abstract right now i can definitely see how maybe that that is more relevant um but i just felt like it was a very tangible theme the threat was real you know you're going in and you're risking your pieces and you're risking the board itself from from collapsing um the asymmetric powers felt a little more asymmetric than maybe pandemic i mean it's still of that sort of older club of games that some of my other ones will will vastly elaborate on um but of that older genre of action selection i think flashpoint

7:38 the number five pick that i have is a more recent game which i was surprised by how many more recent games were on this list uh and that is journeys in middle earth the lord of the rings game that uh just came out last year now this is kind of like fantasy flights evolution of uh some of their adventure game type of stuff so it's kind of in the vein of the eldritch horrors of the world uh or the the arkham horrors uh that type of thing they had macro levels how you described it macro level adventure exactly so it's not a dungeon crawl by any means uh but you do have characters that are moving about regions on the board and doing adventuresome stuff now this one is uh fully dependent on an app so that's going to be a turn off for a lot of people but i really enjoyed it i'm a huge lord of the rings fan and so the theme was a big part of it to me uh i overall liked the the writing i wasn't too hyper critical of this isn't the professor's writing it's not up to snuff um and i thought that the uh system for the the powers and the the cards that you play being both the text and the symbols for success or partial success or failure uh was just a really cool system i i had a ton of fun with it i played through both of the campaigns that were available at the time and now there's another campaign which i'm looking forward to checking out i like it when i play you know for some

9:08 reason that one did just didn't grab me quite as strongly as they did for you and i think that's maybe because i'm the macro level i always think of like this is what indiana jones is doing when it zooms out to the map as it's moving across right those are fun but maybe not as engaging to me as one of the ones on my list which could arguably be considered the progenitor of journeys too uh which is descent road to legend um and i think i gotta call out fantasy flight for adapting its games and it's it's business model for um i'm a big fan honestly of how they how they will have an idea for an existing game they will implement it with that game and then you can see that the games and i don't know maybe which chicken egg comes first here but then their their games later on down the line will fully integrate that system from day one so you know implementing apps and games you know things like mansions and madness security right you know when they rolled that out for dissent it breathed new life into a game that one versus many was not i mean i loved it before but one versus money is a hard sell for some people fully co-op though that game shines and i cannot wait for the sneakily released third edition yeah yeah news yeah where's the rest of my news i'm dying for it um but but i fully expect that they will go full co-op app driven because that's where their games in that genre have been moving but i like that zoomed in um individual heroes on a board individual powers logistics moving around the board kind of thing but still very much a co-op experience so that we all share in the thrill of of the adventure and no one goes home feeling like either

10:40 you know they were the dm or they had fun and ruined for other people's day right right right and i'm starting to see that we're we're having quite a few potential entries that are going to be campaign related on this list uh we'll we'll see how it all bears out here but my number four uh favorite cooperative game was pandemic legacy and this is interesting legacy season one and i said it was uh one of my favorites because it's an experience that even though i played through it twice so i i have had the ability to replay it i i won't be able to recapture the first time in playing that you know even though pandemic legacy isn't the first legacy game it's the the thing that proved that legacy is best suited to a cooperative game and it's an interesting point yeah every time that i've played a legacy game that's been competitive since then it always presents problems for runaway leaders not just within the context of a single game but for a whole campaign that you're playing which could be a really bad time for someone who's like i know at this point that it is very unlikely for me to win that is that is actually a very interesting point i wouldn't have thought of that on the surface but i would agree wholeheartedly that it it legacy should be cooperative unless you can come up with a clever balancing it's like the skirmish game comment you know that we ran into one of

12:11 our earlier reviews um was that uh how do you balance rewarding one player for winning that doesn't just make them win more exactly it's the game that made legacy come to life and i think has still been the most accessible and easily recommendable uh legacy game that i've played um and so i gotta put it on the list i've no direct lead in from that so you know something that's not legacy what is it magic maze okay so so so let's let's uh we've done campaign and we've talked about the action selection let's talk about something that is uh very offbeat compared to the you know the lord of the rings game and the and the the early forbidden island and pandemic games you know systematic count the turns math it out hard and watch as the game just destroys every plan you had because exactly you double epidemics or whatever live action games can be hard to do competitively but can be amazing cooperatively because if you goof a rule it's much easier to forgive because no one's beating someone because they oops i dropped a thing and i picked it up real quick totally totally so there's a couple call outs i gotta say if you've if you've ever played uh project elite escape cursed the temple the x-com game um those are all live-action cooperative experiences um and what i love about that is it takes simple decisions that in a game where you were taking your time might not be that rich and it puts pressure on you to make them quickly and well absolutely um but what's cool about what

13:43 sets magic maze to me apart from those other ones is the novelty of something we actually did uh when we got too good at forbidden island like a decade ago and we didn't have another cooperative is we started playing that game silently with a third pawn we'd play with two players and we'd have a third pawn and we would silently play it and alternate who controlled the third pawn so we had to guess when the other person was moving towards one end of the island or another we didn't anticipate well what strategy do they think they're doing because i need to further that and magic mace takes that to the nth degree you've got four pieces and you don't control any of them directly you get to move one direction or two directions or two directions and a search so it's it's very much non-verbal it's very much anticipating what other people's strategies to accomplish a goal are right while happening live action so the amount of times we have to be like you know and my kid loves that game you know it's it's simple enough but rich enough that anybody can enjoy it and you'll be shouting at the person who is slamming on the table they're desperately slamming on the table trying to get your attention for something with that like red indicator pawn like you need to see something but they can't tell you what so all they do is make a ton of noise and you got to tell them knock it off i get it you want something i don't know what it is well speaking of non-verbal uh to bring it to my number three here is the grizzled and this is a game that i fell in love with uh because i'm tappy and squishy and we've discussed that on the show uh innumerable times at this point for

15:15 the limited run of episodes that we have but i i'm a total sap and that this is a game that uh is focused uh on world war one and the thematic thrust of the game is not that you're going to be combating all of the enemies in world war one it's about a group of friends that have signed up together and they are just trying to see each other through to the end of the war and so it's about uh dealing with trauma and uh having to deal with all of the different challenges and more and supporting your friends throughout it and on top of that it's an extremely difficult small box game in which you have these these horrible cards in your hand that are like abstract representations of mustard gas the everything awful game or for such a simple game drives home the mechanic or the uh the theme really well i mean absolutely it feels desolate right and so you're just taking turns playing these cards from your hand and you're just hoping please let the the next player be able to do something about this and it's just a great balancing act the the artwork by tinyu who is a fantastic uh artist which if you look into all the like charlie hebdo shootings and everything like that's a tragic story in and of itself but uh this is a glorious game uh it's very small plays really easily

16:45 the expansion takes it from being good to being excellent uh giving you these missions that leader is going to have to make hard decisions and kind of take responsibility for the group of you know i know what the alternative is so we're going to this bad mission here um i i really fell in love with that game and is one of my favorite cooperative games one of my favorite thematic games i wasn't in you know i played it with you and i wasn't inspired to add it to my collection maybe just because i didn't have that much room for more compe or more cooperative games at the time but i gotta say like it does a good job of delivering a lot on its premise and just feeling like you know it's a hard game too right and and and yet there's some hard games that i hold a grudge against and i will mention that uh a dishonorable mention is for me like ghost stories yeah um punishing i had i i disliked it so and i know people like that one or some people do who just have self-loathing and like abuse themselves but it was so punishing and and randomly so that a dice roll would make me lose the game and yet you know this game could be just as punishing in some ways and yet you feel like you go through it together um you have moments where you take responsibility or or you feel bad bowing out of a round because their your friends are shouldering the burden and it does so much with so little mechanically to deliver this feeling of we're in it together that i forgive it being hard because if we die and we or we lose the game you know we went through something together on that one i kind of feel like man we just

18:16 that happened and we all just kind of look around going like oh god yeah i watch a care bear movie i need to feel good about myself or something like that was dark yeah yeah exactly yeah so where is that bringing us to on your number two um i think we're back to um just sort of non-traditional for me which is um non-traditional in the sense that it's not pure mechanics and pure like number crunching to see who can math it out the hardest and solve this puzzle that is a co-op game it's uh it's mysterium which okay okay you know i don't think it's seen and there's probably you know i want to say that on the on the edge of my awareness i think there's been one or two games that have kind of tickled some of these themes of uh or some of these mechanics of like doing a cooperative with alternative communication so so what i liked about that game is that it put something that you said that really encapsulated how i felt about it was that someone steal it is that um it is it is a co-op where it's asymmetric in that one player is playing an entirely different role than the rest of the team right everybody else is working together doing the same job and they all have the same mechanical objective and and you're sitting over here going you know i'm here to lead you to something and it some of my favorite team games are also non-verbal communication because i can just get i mean magic maze was is good for that um but this is more uh connotation if you if you ever loved you know art or writing and just when

19:47 you say a word when you show a picture what does it make people think of that's this in a box is you know if i show people this this mouse with a sword and some floating keys with wings like what is that going to make him think of and how can i get it to mean typewriter like yeah well it's that that interpretive element that if you have that sympatico with uh your friends where you're able to give them something and they actually pick up on it it feels so incredibly good uh to to give some sort of abstract imagery and watch them puzzle out and you know figure out what that belongs to likewise it's excruciating when you give them something and they totally pick the like most non-obvious element of it it's like well there are seven rings in this curtain rod and there are seven pens on the table here so clearly they mean this and they're totally avoiding the giant rabbit that's on there and the like fur coat that's on a person and you're like how are you missing this how have you zeroed in then the agony of being forced to hand people garbage cards that mean nothing right and i would say that the mechanic of how you get your hand could be adjusted a little bit and i do you know it does suffer from repeat plays in that like if you get this card and it is so cleanly identifies with this one thing right well if you draw it again in a future game and that one thing is something you need to identify it becomes an easy here you go but then like i said just just get more cards freshen it up make sure

21:17 you play with a mixed pool and and maybe isolate certain groups of cards or whatever you got to do it has a lot of legs to it trade out your group yeah definitely mix it up and switch roles but it's not going to be for everybody because not everybody can think abstractly or associatively can make associations well it was definitely on my short list i i didn't end up picking it but it was one that i had strong consideration for i just want to interrupt what you were saying to go back to my honorable mentions because i have a whole piece of paper here for that and just say hanabi if you like mysterio if you like the nonverbal communication collectively deducing things it's a little more mathy it's a little more pure deduction but it's kind of in the same vein and i i almost went with that but i like the more interpretive version of the guesswork as opposed to you know counting cards so totally there you go now what were you going on about that we had to cut just to get to oh okay so now we are getting to the number two game on my list which is gloomhaven jaws of the lion specifically joshua why do i want a smaller box i bought gloomhaven because it is more box than any man could could need exactly that box is almost big enough that you could sleep in it as like a backup bed you know when the in-laws are in town but this game i think is the gloomhaven that should have been the first gloomhaven to come out now you know how that actually works out you know gloomhaven was a massive success and it had a lot of mainstream

22:49 uh breakthrough appeals surprising amount of breakthrough into the mainstream into like video game groups and you know like all sorts of media and that kind of stuff really latched on to gloomhaven but like i think it's a more polished experience uh that there's a lot of smart things that happen in it that take care of a lot of the the biggest criticisms for gloomhaven so the box itself has a smaller amount of missions um it's slightly more linear than gloomhaven like you're not going to be in an open world where you can just chase down whatever rabbit hole you want to go down it's more so following an overall path but it is going to have branching aspects and some side missions that come up you have a map that's already set up in a book that is accompanied by the auxiliary scenario but you know it goes off to the side which can give a different dimension than just having an open spiral bound notebook and that's your map that you're playing on you don't have to deal with tiles so you're telling me that i don't need a clever system where i buy an entire file folder hanging deal exactly and sort my hundred decent tiles five at a time so when it tells me to get tile 63 i can go five ten fifteen twenty five thirty yeah okay so i don't do that exactly so how do you how do you play a game that only takes five minutes to set up instead of thirty minutes well you play it by having a lot you play more of it yeah exactly you get it to the table

24:19 more often and the people who are like i don't want to play a two and a half hour board game are suddenly going to be able to play this and get it done in an hour and a half maybe two hours for a longer mission and i i think it has the best elements of gloomhaven the system uh for playing cards is still there the top card bottom card i i did like the action selection and the the combat system was probably my favorite part about it right the four characters are extremely interesting and i think every bit if not uh even more uh mechanically and thematically interesting than the starting characters in bass gloomhaven um they're at least on par with the best of those characters and to have a wide range of abilities and by no means am i saying that like gloomhaven itself isn't a fantastic game it is but i've gone back and played gloomhaven since playing jaws of the lion and i keep on going like ah man that's right i have to deal with all this that's a lot to take out of the box and even for me which i really enjoyed gloomhaven and almost made my list if descent hadn't beat it out a little bit right so like what i want out of the future and what i'm kind of hoping from frosthaven is that it's some compromise between the two it's the accessibility of uh gloomhaven jaws of the lion which is just such a great package a potent gaming package that you could recommend to someone you could get it to them as a gift or something for christmas and be like yo check this out and

25:49 then if you like this then feel free to get all of this and now you've had this brilliant tutorial you already have these characters that you can export out of the game you now have characters you can import into josiah lion and you have a much better handle on it than the incredibly intimidating experience of just approaching gloomhaven and being like i'm in over my head it's less than half the cost right so you have an entry level exactly purchased too that you don't have to drop 100 bucks for to know if you're gonna get into this yeah i'd like to see if some of the improvements made it into frosthaven so i i guess we're at the point where uh now before we get to our number ones as has become traditional we have some twitter hot takes all right so uh fans of the cardboard herald people who had nothing better to do on that particular saturday exactly exactly had some opinions here richard malena weber who is a game designer and fellow podcaster panda lakes 2 and spirit island are way way up on my list i've got to say that i've always had a great time with legendary building your arsenal as superhero abilities take down my favorite villains is a ton of fun so we are a covered pandemic legacy i have a feeling that maybe this is hinting on something further on on the list but what about legendary i know you have that game i had that game um you know and maybe it's changed enough in the year so that game has been doing a lot for years now right you got aliens oh my god firefly i want to say he did a couple but i'm assuming he mentioned superheroes so i'm assuming he

27:21 means the main line of marvel properties um which i i started with when it first came out and i bought every expansion pretty much religiously up through when they did villains um and i just got to say you know unless they've done something and that was back when i was hot for deck builders too right and deck builders were still they were the new hotness and there was like five or ten coming out a year and this one was one of the better ones and it had a lot of things i liked it was a cooperative it was confused about whether it was cooperative or semi-cooperative i choose to think it was just fully cooperative it was a marvel game that had x-men in it which you don't see as much right now right right and we'll get to that i think um but but my thing about it is is it still a deck builder it was limited by the fact that it was still this novel mechanic that at the end of the day is kind of a little bit tired now i think it's it's just it's hashing rehashing this engine building deck thinning mechanic now bobby pesto uh who not only posts all of their wonderful pizza uh things on twitter which you should check out at bobby pesto i feel like i'm on the take from bobby pesto now i've said it so many times his name has lost all meaning pizza related mobster though yeah uh the girlfriend and i love spirit island and pandemic excited to try flash pi point flash pint flash pint is a very different thing maybe you could get it along with one of bobby pesto's delicious pizzas uh flashpoint soon and always looking for more and then we have uh todd calc has chronicles of crime and then

28:51 ds said fuji which i thought were all worthy additions here we did decide that the super computer though since i haven't played those the super computer rolled them out right oh yeah okay i guess so returning uh tweeter matt hollowell says while i generally prefer competitive games i have a special place in my heart for the mind a simple card game that allows players to both experience and perform a magic trick together nothing quite like it what's your take on the mind that is a hot topic for me because i have had that debate i don't even believe it's a game i think it's a shared uno experience it's not there's it's a push your luck but there's other people sitting there mechanic i just i don't know it's like the game of 99 did the same thing basically it was just this is more people and i just i'm not seeing it i'm sorry i pick kanabi any day of the week if you want a game where it's like oh god i gotta lay the right card and hope that my friends have you know uh done their right cards correctly in the right order and oh i blew it for everyone if you want that experience just play hanabi because you can actually deduce what's happening you're not just guessing the best part about hanabi as compared to the mind is that hanabi you're playing with your hand facing outside so that means you can see the cringy reactions your friends are having as you go to play the card that will ruin the game for them whereas the mind they have no idea you're about to screw it up for them well saint gaming fell over viewers i have uh spared island another spirit island pick on here and eldritch holds like one of us is gonna have to pick spirit exactly a great emergent

30:22 narrative with so much of variability from game to game and it feels different every time we play that's eldritch horror and you know that was on my short list like that's a game that i love i played a lot of and i ended up listing journeys of middle earth kind of in lieu of it there's no way it beats journeys honestly journeys is a smoother i mean eldritch horror can abuse you bad and it's long right right that said i own a lot of it yeah and i owned arkham horror of the previous edition i don't own third but i i did own arkham and then i traded up for eldritch and i was like i can't keep up with all the the trading so i'm keeping eldridge but i mean god how cool was that mechanic and i don't see too many like this but i love it when i do how cool is it getting dealt a card that has a basic effect on the front like i'm poisoned or i'm whatever and then flipping it over to find out you know it could be one of ten different things and the the nuance of like yeah i mean i've made a deal with the devil here and i get to find out what i actually owe when i flip this card over hopefully never but at some point in the future that was one of the coolest thematic uh mechanics i've i've ever played with in a game like that yeah absolutely brilliant and one of the best parts about it and one of the things that could be expanded upon like you know you could just do more and more debt cards that are just different effects to add these little modular narrative pieces that are going to integrate into an overall theme and i i think that's the best thing that you can say about it in the end is that win or lose you're going to have this great story well uh the the last uh response we had here is mark the thoughtful gamer another review channel i'll put uh links to

31:52 all these uh people that i'm mentioning in the uh video description uh like many other people where i asked what is your favorite singular favorite co-op game he couldn't resist and listed several so we have many of my favorites are co-op glue maven spirit island mage knight and space alert are genuine masterpieces i also love forbidden desert the crew robinson crusoe and shipwreck or canna and sprawl opera lis are so fantastic there are there are a lot of games in there and i think that's kind of bringing it back to the beginning where like we were talking about the broad category it is a broad category and a lot of people are really passionate about it because cooperative games are a great way of mitigating the aspect that newer gamers people who haven't played these games before might feel like if i play a game and i lose i look stupid and i don't want that and cooperative games empower us to say hey we're in this together it's okay you know i'm not working against you it's not my immense amount of experience in playing these type of games that's going to be working against you we're working together i'm allowed to help you and it's not just me kind of handicapping myself this is me helping us reach some sort of victory so we're on a team yeah i mean absolutely just you know you know that i can still tell you're stupid but i forgive you because i can tell you what to do on your turn and it's helping me so well with that

33:22 said what is the number one game that you're going to tell me i'm stupid at honestly you're probably tired of hearing me talk about this i think you just made me play it like two weeks ago and now i own everything and i'm sitting there like refreshing fantasy flight's uh website every day going like give me more uh marvel champions it's so good it is it is so good there are so many things it probably doesn't do as well as other games um you know i've heard other reviews say that maybe it's not as thematic you know it doesn't tell us rich of a story say like even arkham horror why do i like it better than that well it's a little more consistent sometimes in arkham but it does what i was talking about it evolved it's um what i've talked about for the last two weeks now it evolved fantasy flight's model of lcg and said you know i i know that this is one of like 100 games on your shelf but please you know don't build a deck just take it out of the box and play it right and that will get it played i mean i must have played it 15 times that is probably more than i play most of the games in my collection in a year and i've played that much in two or three weeks now um so i like that you can adjust and you can tweak and you can deck build if you want to modify a little here and there but it feels pretty playable uh just right out of the box including the supplemental uh materials i gotta give a nod to and and and i think it owes some of this somebody out there is like didn't i design this game already and call it sentinels of the something verse yeah that's right other than some of the specific mechanics it's basically the

34:52 spiritual implementation of sentinels it's i'm going to pick a hero the hero has a custom deck to a point and that's unique to that hero and i'm going to fight a villain and that villain is automatedly going to screw with us and um and it took all of that and it just boiled it down to the best parts of that and every time i play one of the new sets you know the wrecking crew there's four villains sentinels did that too and none of it did sentinels do quite as well and it's playing with action figures i mean i i know both of us are big marvel comics guys we were into them when we were kids and you know whether it's the the cartoons or whatever like this is a way of you know living your childhood except even cooler because you get to actually see what they're they're doing through the cards and you know like oh wasn't it so cool and black panther did this awesome thing or you know when you know miss marvel came in and just wrecked face against this villain and it it's so accessible i i think that it scales incredibly well for like solo like if anyone was like i don't like solo games because i don't like all the management associated with it i would say well this is one you might like because it scales perfectly well for solo games yeah you might not have the team aspect but i i think this is a great entry point for that the cards just being able to mash together out of the box like i'm going to take my leadership cards and i'm going to take this hero and mash them together that's what i liked about sorcerer and smash up and some of those other types of games is there's an appeal there and i always want it to be an even better game

36:24 and this is a better game in a lot of ways is that i like just taking another box and saying i don't have to pick and choose instead of i can just go boom i want claw you know whoever claws okay here's my one complaint better villain who are these villains in the first box i get rhino great the entry-level choice because if if you're a beginner superhero and can't beat rhino right then you're not trying but who the heck is claw with the sound gun i'm a nerd and i don't know that one right ultron could have been a better pick like i think there there's first picks that you go to before ultron and yeah thematic i mean even just the powers of like thor's alter ego can like snap his hand out and boom his hammer's back right and it's a simple mechanic and it's not game break or anything but it's just cool to be like okay you know i'm gonna go and do my action for the turn got my hammer back well i think that a lot of the reasons why i love marvel champions are a lot of the reasons why i love my number one and marvel champions was seriously a contender on my list and i think that my number one was a contender on yours i think we just let each other have the other number one because it helped us get a sixth game the computer demanded a 10. it demanded 10 and so that way there could not be overlap um and with marvel champions you know like uh it's hard for me to let go of the lord of the rings lcg and say like marvel champions is definitively better but it's more accessible i'm going to get it to the table way more often same with arkham i love that game it is hugely thematic and i probably would play it over eldritch horror

37:55 but the deck building aspect unless i'm going to build the decks to set them aside for my players to join me i my wife will play marvel champions several times a week and she i'm not going to get her to sit down and build a deck for her investigator so my number one like i was saying it shares a lot of those elements and that's spirit island i think i i have said throughout various videos on this channel and various podcasts just all sorts of avenues that the thing that spirit island does for me is it has this thematic resonance throughout all the mechanics of it like it does such a great job at conveying what's thematically happening through very simple mechanical elements you know pushing something here or pulling things from there uh it does enough in the representations in specifically how those things are manipulated or the artwork that's presented or the elements that are generated or the elements that you consume in order to do it to give a very distinct picture of what this is supposed to represent this stampeding wildlife or this raging fire or this ominous shadow that's casting over the island and it has these incredible asymmetric powers that give just this this variety to the game that i love i want to dive in and see how i want to play each of the spirits and the very different strategies i can have and how they pair together like that is

39:25 a huge part of the fun to get me is you know like what spirit are you playing and my spirit feels completely different to that how are we going to unify in order to kick all these invaders off the island right like how are we how is the ocean going to pair with the the the beast guy you know what are you going to do while i'm over here just attacking the shoreline you're going to have to adapt your whole play style to accommodate the fact that your partner really can't do much inland right so it's it's a different game based on who you play with not just who you're playing right uh and like marvel champions i think that it's a great solo game because it scales you can play it one uh spirit or you could play it multiple spirits multi-handed i don't like doing that uh because i don't like it's a lot of management that is a huge amount of management uh but it's still a way you can test and play around with the spirits and see their full capabilities on their own i like that there's different avenues for victory conditions either through draining uh the the fear to the point where terror makes the the the invaders run away where you can completely destroy them at different levels like you could have devastating output at the beginning or you can kind of get them a little scared and then just devastate them a little bit less than you needed to i feel just a little devastated exactly um and the the things i like about board games having big sprawling board games with lots of pieces and components everywhere and like cards to interact with and

40:56 systems it has all that but overall the structure is kind of this like clockworkian structure that that's fairly predictable and i i i love that it's elegantly implemented to be this playground of devastation well and let's okay so so we didn't waste nearly as much time debating what the category meant because it's pretty straightforward so let's waste a little time here and saying a couple of things that i actually like about spirit island that maybe for people who don't like co-ops as much because you may be more a competitive player i like spirit iron because i get to wreck people because i'm destroying the armies of my enemies and we're collectively doing it i like being the hungry ocean i like seeing the board start to fill up with all these invaders and just being like nope nope nope um the wildfire you know obviously i like the destructive ones because i'm all about let's let's definitely no no such thing as a little devastation right no such thing as a little fear we're shock and awe here spirit style so that to me is something that makes it almost an aggressive co-op game where i can still feel like i'm beating someone because again i think i said at the beginning is i want to feel like i'm competing against the game champions does it with a you know i'm competing against a villain uh spirit island i've got this invading army and even though i'm not actually manning an army i'm still you know defending my territory um so a lot of my favorite co-op games really do still give me a competitive feeling when i hear the term strategy game i think of a very particular thing and it is competitive

42:27 spirit island is one of the few cooperative games that kind of delivers on the the same i guess way of thinking i've got i haven't built up too is co-op games don't often have legendary came up as you know okay so a deck builder's got some build up because you actually are purchasing um and so there's escalation to it but um and some of those adventure games you know you pick up gear and stuff but this has a nice strategic build up of you know i'm investing in these things i'm building up my and each one builds up differently but that as you get to that late game and you were just devastating whole regions we're going to go back and see whether we said bobby pesto or devastation or throughout the entirety of this but i think that is a great way of ending it this has been 10 irrefutable concrete the greatest cooperative games of all time this cannot change even future cooperative games to come out cannot challenge any of the ones on this list i chiseled mine in stone exactly but then also i as we were talking remember that i like pathfinder the adventure card game so there's actually 11 i'm sorry okay well we'll add that to the stone tablet when moses comes down like someone else's handwriting i was like wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute you you chiseled this after well as always i'm sure that there are plenty of people out there who think that we're absolutely right and one of the great people who may disagree so let us know if that's the case and let us know what topic you want us to cover next in this long-winded

43:58 uh extremely equivocating uh list of games uh for casual friday so once again thanks for coming on the show john thanks for having me you