No games that lead to players being pissed at other players, even outside of the confines of the game. I’ve had that happen with, for example, Secret Hitler, so no Secret Hitler.
The Mind seems to do that. Hanabi does it to an extent.
Check out [email protected] 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.
Looks fun, just ordered the game now! 😊
The Crew is solid.
The Gang too, which is sorta similar. I’ll bring a bag of board games and only end up playing The Gang all night if it comes out too early.
Carcassonne.
I find it quite fun to play semi-collaboratively too.
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.
Oh, I’m going to have to pick up a copy of Mists over Carcassonne. Thank you!
Ok, if you are against hard feelings, cross off anything that is directly competitive, that would be any game where players directly and willfully interact with each other in a way where one gains while another loses as part of the core gameplay. To varying degrees things like blood rage, root, monopoly/solarquest, everdell, 7 wonders, clank, carcassonne, ticket to ride, dominion, etc.
If your group must have competition, you’ll need to stick to independent competitive games, this is anything where players are primarily taking actions in their own space and are progressing largely independent from each other. Example recommendations include things like Quacks of Quedlinburg, Shifting Stones, most roll and writes (welcome to series, cartographer with a minor exception), cascadia, verdant, etc
If you can do without competing with each other, cooperative games are definitely the way to go to minimize hard feelings (it’d only come up then if someone thought another player did something suboptimal causing a loss). The variety here is actually pretty large: simple trick taking games like The Crew series Information sharing games, like Mysterium “Combat” games of all complexities (generally ascending: Lord of the rings storybook, marvel united, D&D board games, Heroquest, Stuffed fables, Atlantis Rising, legends of andor, horrified, Arkham horror, marvel champions, mansions of madness 2nd edition, spirit island, Gloomhaven) Mystery/puzzle games (Adventure Games series, Exit The Game series, Animals of Baker Street)
I’d also like to call out 2 other games specifically: Stella, while it is a 1 winner competitive game where your score depends largely on other players, the push your luck and prisoner’s dilemma aspect of how you earn points I think largely removes the feel bad aspect of competition. Kitchen Rush: pure cooperative, but it’s also a real-time game where everyone is taking simultaneous actions to run a restaurant in 4 real time minutes stretches.
I love spirit Island sooo much. I’ve played the game regularly for over 2 years now I’m I’m still not tired of it. I did get myself the expansion and it’s worth every penny.
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.
Stardew Valley the board game.
Tsuro is a very quick, Zen game. It’s tile placement and stone movement.
Obviously if you don’t like S.H., you probably won’t like The Resistance or Avalon. But from the same publisher, there’s Coup (a game of creative lying), and Grifters (an engine-builder made up of resource collection with a crime theme). I like them both and they’re very quick.
I don’t think Fluxx could lead to long term frustration, because it’s just so wild.
Catan is a classic and it’s never caused tempers in my group.
One I haven’t seen mentioned is Puerto Rico. One thing I like is there is essentially no random chance to this game; everything that happens is a result of choices you or your opponents make.
Honestly, it depends
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.
Cottage Garden is very satisfying. You Tetris together garden pieces to fill plots and you can cover a single spot with a sleeping kitty. There’s scoring and competition, but it’s not antagonistic in any way.
I’m also a big fan of cooperative games in general.
We love Wingspan. Meadow is pleasant.
Just One was a great game for 4 people. Three people have to get the fourth person to guess a particular word. They each write down a one-word hint. If any two (or more) players write the same word hint, they don’t get to show that word to the guesser. It’s a lot of fun when you see the different ways people interpret words to come up with hints and how two (or more) words can work together to make you think of the answer.
Just One can also do a lot more than 4 players. If you add additional writing surfaces and erasable markers (or pencils or whatever) it’s pretty much unlimited.
Edit: It has enough for 7 players in the box (at least my copy does)
I don’t hear about this one often but it is always the first game I bust out for newbies.
Camel Up!
Players place bets on little camels that run around the track. The turns move quickly, people love gambling, and you some strategy will help you win, but it’s random enough that everybody has a chance at coming out ahead.
Someone might get the bet you had your eye on, but there’s no direct “attacks” on other players.
Betrayal at the House on the Hill has about 50 different scenarios so almost every playthrough is different. But it’s best to have at least 4 players to be more fun
Nemesis and Dead Cells are the board games doing that for me right now. Nemesis is semi cooperative, but there are full co-op objectives if you don’t wanna play versus. Dead Cells is completely co-op. Both have resulted in good stories and experiences that stay with you after the game is done in my friend group.
Zombie Kidz is quick, cooperative, and has plenty of achievements (with a sticker book to record them) as well as unlockables through gameplay. You get to use teamwork and planning, and turns occur in quick succession.
I think it might tick every box you mentioned.
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.
We have a rule at my house: Never Monopoly.
It really is the worst.
The strategy is to avoid Monopoly. It’s not like the game gets any funner if you’re playing by the rules.
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.
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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.
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Monopoly eliminates some players from the game early. They then have nothing to do while the rest of the players continue to play.
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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.
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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.
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It has a high RNG dependence.
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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.
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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!
tldr; punish the poor fuckers getting out of jail. yay capitalism!
Wow. I never caught this. Considering the game’s origin as an anti-capitalist teaching aid, I wonder if it’s intentional.
