You’ll never perfectly solve the “no pissing people off” issue because in competitive games you necessarily have people benefit at the expense of others and in cooperative games you’ll fall into the trap of backseat-driver players telling you what to do on your turn.
That being said, here are some of my favorites I’d like to suggest:
Cooperative:
Time Stories (kinda like a time-travel themed mystery-solving role-playing game where the pre-built deck is your DM. 1-4 players. You can buy more decks, each with a different setting and story.).
Pandemic (Stop COVID a deadly disease from killing off the planet. Work together to limit the spread and find the cure before it’s too late) (1-4 players)
Competitive:
The Settlers of Catan (claim resources and land strategically to build the most prosperous kingdom) (2-4 players but there are expansions and spinoffs so this could be like 1-6 players)
7 Wonders (draft cards to build the most prosperous kingdom) (3-8 players IIRC)
In-Between:
Betrayal in the House on the Hill (explore a haunted house until you find a dark secret that turns one of you into a villain the rest have to fight) (3-6 players)
Downside is Catan is fucking boring. It’s one of those games where most of the time you’re stuck waiting for your next turn. 5-6 player add on just makes the game infinitely worse. Out of the expansions, Seafarers is nice since it gives you more to do, tho the standalone Starfarers is my go to pick if I gotta play Catan since it sorta has the best parts of all expansions plus random encounters and a more even start. I also like that in the 5-6 player mode 2 players take their turns simultaneously. Tho Catan still isn’t my go-to of board games.
Newer cooperative games mostly avoid the quarterbacking issue by having secret info, or just making it complicated enough that it’s impractical for 1 person to track everything.
The problem with monopoly is that it fits your description…BUT!!! nobody actually plays it the right way. House rules are so ingrained into monopoly culture, that I’ve incorporated my own house rule. Anyone who puts money under free parking gets stabbed with a knife. When they tell me that’s not in the rules, I tell them to show me where money under free parking is in the rules. There’s so many of these house rules that people legitimately think are in the rulebook. They aren’t. So if you want to put money under free parking, I want to stab your hand with a knife. House rules and all.
One time I was playing monopoly with my mom. She had 53 dollars, and landed on boardwalk. It was unowned. I yhen said "I bid $54. She said “you can’t do that…”. I showed her in the rule book where I could, and she got angry at me.
So, the problem with monopoly is that most people assume they know how to play, and also assume they know the best stratagies. They don’t.
The best stratagy is actually to buy 1 of each property that can have houses built on them. Prioritizing the low cost properties first. Make THEM buy 2 of each, thinking they’ll get the monopoly, thinking they’ll get a trade. Then drain them further with the railroads and utilities. Eventually they’ll run out of money. Just NEVER trade them a property that would allow a path to them getting a monopoly.
Of coarse, all of that is easier said than done. That’s what makes it a game. But it all falls apart if people aren’t playing the same game.
the strategy is to buy everything you can ASAP but focus on monopolizing and developing the orange and red properties. they are statistically much higher to land on than other properties because people get sent to jail so often. When exiting jail rolling 6, 8, or 9 is very likely to hit orange first and then maybe red on the next roll.
tldr; punish the poor fuckers getting out of jail. yay capitalism!
I really don’t like Monopoly. It’s very widespread in the US, I’d guess one of the top three games, but it has a lot of technical failings as a board game.
I think that it’s actually a really good example of why popular American board games are not that fantastic. Europe has a stronger board game tradition, stuff like Settlers of Catan. I really didn’t appreciate how bad things were until I spent a while poking at European games.
Monopoly has a hard-to-predict game time. One thing that a lot of European games that I’ve looked at do is to have a fairly-predictable amount of time a game will last. That makes it much easier to plan fitting a game into a schedule.
Monopoly eliminates some players from the game early. They then have nothing to do while the rest of the players continue to play.
Monopoly tends to wind up in a situation where a losing player will know well in advance that they’re going to lose. Yeah, they can concede, but it’s not a lot of fun to play the thing out.
There’s a limited amount by way of strategy and it’s not very sophisticated. There aren’t a lot of variable paths that one weighs against each other. When it’s not your turn, there’s not much you can be planning or doing, just watching the person whose turn it is play. This gets more annoying the more players are in the game.
It has a high RNG dependence.
Most of the actual tasks you spend time doing aren’t very interesting. Linley Henzell, who wrote the roguelike Crawl, has a famous quote, something like “everything you do in a game should be an interesting decision, and if it isn’t interesting, it should be removed from the game”. I think that that is a very true element of game design. The banker counting out money to players or players paying rent or whatever is just drudge work – they aren’t making interesting decisions.
The game was originally designed by a Georgist as an educational game to argue for a land value tax. It wasn’t principally to entertain.
I really wish that a new, better game would replace Monopoly in the US as the big non-ancient (checkers, chess) board game.
My favourite board game without a doubt is diplomacy, but those games go for like 6+ hours and requires 7 people. Also everybody will be yelling at everybody at some point, so yeah probably not a good pick lol
That being said, my favourite game to bring out for people not too into board games is wingspan. Fairly simple board game with enough depth to it. Also it has cute drawings of birds
My favourite board game without a doubt is diplomacy but those games go for like 6+ hours and requires 7 people. Also everybody will be yelling at everybody at some point, so yeah probably not a good pick lol
Yeah. Diplomacy is fantastic…and we can strongly recommend that OP avoid it, anyway. Lol.
Dead of Winter - The co-op variant of the game, without a traitor. Zombie apocalypse game.
Meeple Party - A co-op game about throwing a party and making sure personality types don’t clash. Perhaps on the nose for your group, but I still recommend it.
Mental Blocks - Once again, play the variant without a traitor. This is a game about solving a 3D puzzle from different perspectives with limited abilities to communicate or touch certain blocks.
Spirit island is my favorite game to play with a group. It has you trying to protect an island from colonists who damage the island with their expansions. Each player has different abilities that force you all the work together & requires a lot of teamwork to win especially some of the higher difficulties.
Here’s some great cooperative games that either have big groups working together OR have the whole groups:
Escape from the Dark Castle - a fun little dungeon crawler where you flip cards and roll against dangers as you try to overcome obstacles. Completely cooperative but mechanically simple.
Wavelength - the base way to play is technically a ‘competitive’ in that there are teams and points but it’s relatively chill and I’ve often played this at parties with large groups cooperatively cause it just makes for a great conversation starter.
Phantom Ink - two teams but the mechanics are very fun and the game overall has a great tone.
Ravine - cooperative game where you try to survive after a plane crash.
I would also maybe recommend looking into some light roleplaying games like The Zone or Fiasco. These are almost always gm-less or easy to run and focused on building a fun narrative together.
Check out !boardgames in case you’re not aware. Lots of discussion happening there.
Regarding your question, it’s hard to say since you don’t mention any mechanics, or complexity level, that you prefer. Based on the couple of examples you provide, you seem to like cooperative card games. If so, you should check out ‘The Crew’. It’s the most popular of that genre in my game club.
Yeah. It’s super easy to house-rule Carcassonne as a pure co-op game. Remove the farmers (to keep your sanity, because co-op is actually much harder), keep the rules about Castle and road occupation (where a tie gets scored for each tied player), and play to maximize the combined players score. None of the strategy is lost and trying to carefully double occupy everything is sometimes a nail biting challenge.
There’s actually a specifically cooperative expansion for Carcassonne, called Mists Over Carcassonne. It adds an element of managing a ghost population while trying to cooperatively reach a target score based on certain scenarios.
I really like Mysterium. It’s kinda cooperative, but players also work independently. The premise is that one player is a ghost, and the rest of the players are psychic detectives who have their own vision of how the murder happened. The ghost gives out clues using surreal, dream-like cards for the psychics to figure out their personal guess on what the weapon, location and murderer was. At the end the ghost gives clues to which psychic was right.
I personally like it because it isn’t just logic and strategic thinking, you have to use your creative/artistic part of your brain as well, if not moreso.
I’m sorry, but if you have this problem, it’s entirely caused by who your players are as people, not by the games itself. Even cooperative games leave people that get pissed, pissed at each other. For example, if one person wants to do something that another person finds suboptimal, and then the cooperative game is lost some time later.
I love Deep Rock Galactic, Terra Mystica, Mysterium.
Podpisuję się rękami i nogami! Radar to jest coś, co za granicą pozwoliło mi w prosty sposób znaleźć wzorowe towarzystwo i ludzi z podobnymi wartościami. Pamiętam, że mówiłem wtedy nowopoznanemu koledze, że kurde, w Niderlandach to tyle dobrych grup i wydarzeń jest a u nas w Polsce to w ogóle nic i nikogo takiego nie ma. Powiedział mi, że to nieprawda, że w Polsce też jest dużo anarchistów i grup tego typu, tylko, że wszyscy są na Facebooku, a że ja nie mam to nie mam do nich dostępu.
Nie róbmy tak, nie ograniczajmy dostępu do idei anarchistycznych i wolnościowych osobom antykapitalistycznym. Używajmy Radara :)
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