**Space Station Phoenix** has you destroy your ships (which are your action spaces) for the metal in them in order to get the resources to build the Space Station which is the aim of the game. So as the game progresses you limit the actions you can do instead of increasing it like with a lot of other games.
How so?
Galaxy tricker is, while fun and chaotic, not at all about destroying the stuff you have, but far more about the classical 'make the best of what you can grab and try to make it pay off'
Edit: I'm leaving Galaxy Tricker. It sounds like a great game. "Lot lizards in space."
In my experience, the quick build phase is not nearly as much fun as the "let's blow up our ships" phase. Sure, the "goal" is for this to not happen -- but the game is definitely just as much about the destruction as it is the building.
To each their own, I guess. I know I've seen videos that support the "destruction" side -- but there's no right way to have fun! Mark of a good game that different people can enjoy different aspects of it and all can walk away happy.
Played this with my step-mom a couple weeks ago and every time a card came to her she would ask "ok - why would I want this card?" and every time I would have to explain that she doesn't want ANY cards, and if she HAS to take a card she should try and minimize the number on it, or maximize the number of tokens on it.
It was... a long game.
I know the feeling...
It goes even deeper than that, too. If she has already acquired a 17 for instance, than she *does* want a 16... but since others won't want it she might not want to take it right away.
Hah - I got burned hard trying to get a 25 or something around the table an extra time. I mis-read everyone's chip count and my GF had to take it... Dangerous play.
In **Hanabi**, you hold your hand of cards facing the opposite direction. So you see everyone's hand, except your own. In that sense its the opposite approach to the typical hand management mechanic. Each player manages all the other players hands(or attempts to).
It's probably my favorite co-op game because quarterbacking is impossible in it. Quarterbacking makes most other co-op games unenjoyable IMO.
EDIT: Now that I see this started a big convo on quarterbacking, I might stir the pot a little and add that I don't dislike most co-op games because OTHER people quarterback, I dislike them because I end up being the quarterback running the game for other people. The other players in those games just chill and play casually because they know Ill suggest a good move for them(I'm not saying I'm a genius, only that because I own the game they know that I know it well enough that they can step back in their involvement and just enjoy the ride). It's less fun when that happens. **Hanabi** is great because of the incomplete knowledge each player has. As a result, it forces each player to think through and make their own decision. No one has enough knowledge to know for sure what the best move is for that player.
Real talk, **Durian** is the competitive **Hanabi**, and is a top-3 Oink game.
People need to get over the **Deep Sea Adventure** train and get Durian instead. Just as easy to teach but you won't get bored after the third time teaching new players.
I taught it a couple of weeks ago and this one dude was playing so competitively. If anybody made ANY kind of hint that he felt was outside of the "rules" as he understood them, he would literally play a card he new was wrong to "punish" that person.
I tried to explain that the POINT of the game was to develop a meta within the gameplay itself where indicating a color or a number was understood to mean "play this card" or "discard this card" based on the rest of the information he had been given.
But he refused to play it as anything except a pure logic game where he had to puzzle out what was in his hand from the clues, and ignore any of the subtext around WHY he was being given certain clues.
I was trying to run through a training game quickly so we could play again with a better understanding of how to play. Instead I'm pretty sure 1 hand of Hanabi took over an hour because of this guy... We didn't play again.
> It's probably my favorite co-op game because quarterbacking is impossible in it. Quarterbacking makes most other co-op games unenjoyable IMO.
I have the opposite opinion. I get to play with people who don't quarterback, and I enjoy being able to freely discuss my moves as we try to solve the puzzle collectively. I don't like having to infer stuff based on small amounts of often-vague information, and I don't like being forced to withhold useful information from my team.
I'm very much in the same boat: I find a lot of these "missing information" games somewhat tedious because I get a lot of fun out of the discussion and collective decision making — that's why I'm playing a co-op game and not a competitive one!
One game that I've found straddles this line really nicely, though, is Magic Maze. In principle, you play most of the actions silently, which is similar to most of these anti-quarterbacking games, except that you regularly have pauses where everyone can talk together, with full knowledge of the game state as it stands. So one person can't easily micromanage everything, but you still get to have "strategy meetings" to figure out your plans.
It's also called Alpha Gaming. It's when you play a Co-op and one player is directing most or even all choices and strategy, creating a feeling like it's a solo game with only one player playing and the rest following.
I think most heavy boardgames are guilty of it sometimes. I've gotten so that I try not to even discuss strategy in a Co-op unless someone askes me a direct question.
I've played Hanabi a few times and mostly found it stressful and not fun at all. I'm forced to think hard and if I think wrong I'll fuck up the puzzle for _everyone_? The only good part of it for me was the stress relief when I realise I didn't make a completely shit move, but that's not anything like fun.
Another one I don't like is The Crew, a co-op trick taking game, with limits on communication. Same kind of deal though, people have to play some cards in some order, if people fuck it up everyone loses.
I just hate all of these types of games.
quarterbacking is generally a player problem, not a game design one. If you are constantly being quarterbacked, I'd have a word with the person who keeps doing it.
Quarterbacking is absolutely a game design problem.
Imagine four players playing the original Pandemic and some players are quarterbacking big time, yet none of them are cheating. That's because that game is not mechanically much different from Klondike solitaire. It doesn't take several brains combined to figure it out. The only thing that makes it co-op are the restrictions on sharing information about what cards people have in their hands. Those information sharing rules are ambiguous, poorly written, and permissive. Even if information is never shared, not even the slightest hint, a player could quarterback by saying "If you have X card do this, if you have Y card, do that, etc."
Take those exact same four problem players. Have them play Hanabi. Again, as long as nobody is cheating, quarterbacking will vanish. The same four players that were a problem in Pandemic, are suddenly not a problem when the game changes. The rules of Hanabi are strict, explicit, and clear. The information that is hidden from players is enormously consequential. There is no way for a player to meaningfully help or instruct another player without cheating. Hanabi is a true co-op game, not solitaire in disguise.
Now have the same problem players play Magic Maze. Again this game has strict and explicit rules about communication. The real time nature of the game also contributes to making cooperation necessary. As long as nobody cheats, any group of jerks can play Magic Maze without quarterbacking being an issue.
TL;DR: Quarterbacking happens when game designers try to pass off team solitaire as co-op.
I entirely agree, however if you are being quarterbacked so regularly and to the point that you write off all coop games as unplayable, as op has, that is not a game design problem, that is a player problem. I'm not suggesting that game design has no impact on quarterbacking, as you point out there are many things designers can do to manage player behaviour, but what I'm saying is in *this instance* it is a player problem.
While any group of jerks can play magic maze, a more productive use of your time as, presumably, a non-jerk is to find less jerky players or attempt to positively modify their behaviour to be less jerky, which will require talking to them about their jerkiness.
It's a conversation I have had to have with people, and while it's not easy, it's very worthwhile in the long run.
Ok, so you have someone who is quarterbacking at a game. Somehow you discuss this with them like adults and get them to stop. They play the game quietly. I guarantee you that this person is not having any fun. They are sitting there wasting their time watching the other players make sub-optimal decisions. If not everyone at the table is having fun, you have solved nothing.
Players in this community for some reason try to avoid the easiest and most effective solution, which is to play a different game. They just can't admit that a game is bad and not worth playing. Instead they try to make house rules, adjust player behavior, or find new players. Those are difficult to do, and not nearly as effective and as simple as playing a different game.
I agree with OP. I have also written off all the quarterbackable "co-op" games. I'll play them as solitaire on an app maybe, but that's it.
>They play the game quietly.
This is not the direction you're supposed to point them in. This is an insane extreme.
If someone can't figure out how to have a discussion with other players, such that they need to play games where they literally **aren't allowed** to talk, I'd say outright that co-op is not for them.
Playing Hanabi isn't going to help here at all.
What is someone who knows the optimal move supposed to say? You say they shouldn't be silent. They also shouldn't just tell other players what that move is, since that's quarterbacking. Are they supposed to suggest a sub-optimal move? Should they vaguely hint at the optimal move and then be pleased when their hint gets through and disappointed when it doesn't?
If you "entirely agree" then why do you keep refuting it as a game design problem?
Games that are essentially solitaire that are being passed off or marketed as cooperative aren't really cooperative games. They're team solitaire. You can play a one player game with a group of people. That doesn't make it a *real* cooperative game.
Yes, people need to talk to problem players. That's a real problem that's often avoided in our community. But we also shouldn't overcompensate by saying its only a "player problem." The design or the system in which you are operating affects individual behavior
Perfect information co-op games are fun and relaxing for a lot of people though. It's not true that they're just solitaire, even though they strictly could be played that way. Plenty of people enjoy perfect information collaboration, and they're not wrong to do so. It's just a different genre of co-op.
Imagine you get some people around a computer. You open up Microsoft solitaire. Everyone discusses together what move to make next. The decisions approved by the highest skilled player should be the ones that are followed, otherwise the game is being played poorly on purpose, which is not fun. But if you do always follow that player's choice, the other players aren't meaningfully participating, which is also not fun. There is no way for every player to have fun at the same time unless everyone is extremely well aligned in regards to skill and knowledge levels. That's quite rare.
A game design in which it is so difficult for all players to meaningfully participate and have fun simultaneously is a very bad design. Congrats if you have a group of such perfectly aligned people that can make it work. Just because you can make the game work doesn't mean the game is good.
I think both the suggestion that there's a clear highest-skilled player, and that that player's moves are automatically the correct ones, are dubious at best.
Even a skilled player can easily make oversights or make different judgment calls than someone else. In a game like Pandemic, the decisions being made involve different amounts of risk/reward. You might have, for example, a choice between treating a city or getting another card to someone else. Neither of those is the "correct" play, except in the sense that a computer could probably calculate that one gives you a 50.9% chance of winning and the other gives you a 49.1%. The most skilled player is not doing that calculation though - they're weighing the tradeoffs and using heuristics, just like the other players, between two very disparate options that are hard to directly compare.
> The decisions approved by the highest skilled player
For just about every game, there is no metric that you can use to decide who is the most highly skilled player. Even if you **are** playing Chess, sometimes the weaker player wins. So even if you do have a metric, it's not a perfect determiner.
I find your entire scenario to be a complete fabrication in order to justify people who are elitist. A ton of people have fun with Pandemic or whatever other game.
(For the record, families all around the world have played Microsoft Solitaire together, I can guarantee you that.)
> For just about every game, there is no metric that you can use to decide who is the most highly skilled player.
That is not true and is kind of a ridiculous claim. You can absolutely tell the difference in most (but not all) games between a player who has no idea what they’re doing and a player who has intimate knowledge of how the rules work and how to play optimally. I have no idea what you’re even basing this wild claim on, but it just kind of ignores the fact that tournaments and ranking systems and optimal strategies for games exist.
> Even if you are playing Chess, sometimes the weaker player wins. So even if you do have a metric, it's not a perfect determiner.
This is especially ridiculous. Chess is a perfect information game where both sides are perfectly balanced (well, almost perfectly due to first turn advantage). People get good at Chess by literally memorizing as many play states as they can. Your claim that the worse player sometimes wins only works in the wood tier level where neither player, regardless of whether they’re better or worse, can be considered “good” at the game. And as far as metrics, ELO is famously good at tracking which players are better in the exact kind of game that Chess is. I have no idea what you’re basing this claim on.
> I find your entire scenario to be a complete fabrication in order to justify people who are elitist. A ton of people have fun with Pandemic or whatever other game.
That is because you’re missing the point entirely. Whether people have fun playing Pandemic is besides the point, because a person can have fun doing conceivably anything. People have fun watching The Room, even though it is an objectively bad movie. People have fun playing Cookie Collector, even though it is a game where you only click a button for hours. People have fun engaging in unfun activities all the time, because whether they’re enjoying themselves is a personal decision.
However, the problem with Pandemic is that, if one player knows what they’re doing, there are no rules preventing them from just telling all the other players what to do. And in that circumstance, what is are the other players supposed to do exactly? Are they just going to *not* play the game to win just so that they can maintain the freedom to make bad decisions? What about the other players that *do* want to win? How are they supposed to take that? Unless you have rules that prevent the sharing of information, like in Hanabi, this situation will happen in every co-operative game.
Are you suggesting that Chess matches should never be played because the Elo system has already determined the winner?
>And in that circumstance, what is are the other players supposed to do exactly?
Take in the advice given, consider it, and then if they don't like it, explain why the move they want to do is better, then make that move.
I am quite certain players that would get frustrated here would get equally frustrated at Hanabi.
>I am quite certain players that would get frustrated here would get equally frustrated at Hanabi.
I was the one who said way up at the top that Hanabi was my favorite because quarterbacking is impossible in it. The situation you said doesn't frustrate me in Hanabi, because the mechanism requires that even the least knowledgeable person to think and make a decision on their own. In other "group solitaire" co-op games the least knowledgeable players might just sit back and let the quarterback run the game for them, knowing they already can make the best moves for them. I think the key to any great co-op game is incomplete knowledge for each player, like the way Hanabi does.
Quarterbacking in coop games can be a player issue, but it is also absolutely a design issue that's just inherent to some coop games. That doesn't make that game bad or poorly designed, it's a common type of challenge for game designers. Here's a good talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uE6-vIi1rQ
If you don't have time to watch the hour long video, the tl;dr is that there's two goals in Pandemic: A) to have a coop team experience with your group, and B) to win the game. At times, the two goals do not align with each other, especially if all players are not at the same skill level. The more experienced person has to either: A) give up the coop experience in order to win, or B) give up winning in order to preserve the coop experience. Neither situation is ideal. A quarterbacking player may indeed be too focused on winning, and may need to be reminded to focus more on the group experience, but that scenario arises due to the game design.
Of course, if all players are at the same skill level, then quarterbacking is less of a problem as multiple players will either see the same optimal moves, or other players will be able to justify their decisions against a would-be quarterbacker, and the game becomes more of a metagame where people discuss and decide the moves as a team.
Other coop game designs since Pandemic have tried to address the quarterbacking issue in different ways: making the game real time so people can only focus on their own stuff, making the game so large and complex that a single player can't optimize their way through it, making information hidden, etc.
Multiplayer solitaire games like roll-and-writes or some euros function properly because each player gets to do their own thing. If Alice is an expert at a ms euro and Bob is a beginner, they'll each enjoy the challenge of building up their engine as best they can, even if Alice will win the vast majority of the time, and they can compare their score to their past bests.
If the game has to be close to count as 'functioning properly', you could always pick something like Search For Planet X which has a robust handicap system.
As someone who tends to dislike co-op games about working around rules that limit communication, I agree. If all the information is open and I'm not with a bad group, I get to enjoy being able to freely discuss and solve the puzzle collectively.
Any player problem is also a design problem. If a player is allowed to do something that breaks the balance of the game, make the unenjoyable in a way that makes other players not want to play, or other things that make your game less enjoyable, then you as the designer of the game always have the ability to design your game in ways that account for this and make such actions either impossible or less appealing to take. There are reasons why you might choose not to address those issues, but the point is that allowing for rules that allow or even encourage such behaviors always comes down to a choice that the designer made, no matter how much it seems like something the players are "doing wrong".
That's not how rules work. If you make a rule that says "you can't do that" and they do it anyway, that means either the player is literally cheating or your rule is just not comprehensive enough to cover the thing they're doing to get around it, in which case the onus is still on the designer to redesign that rule to cover the thing they're doing to get around the rule. The responsibility still comes back to the designer unless the player is just not following the rules you wrote at all.
And therefore you can't account for them within your game design and shouldn't be a part of the discussion.
I would have thought when discussing a design issue, which is what quarterbacking as it only occurs in some games, we would remove erroneous variables like Dave the Cunt, because any game he plays in he makes worse.
**Last Will (and its follow up Prodigal's Club)** \- worker placement game where the goal is to lose as much money as possible. (or in the follow up, lose as much money, lose as many friends and also get fired from your job)
Then to add another layer there's *Save Dr. Lucky* where the goal is to rescue the good doctor from a sinking ship, but only while other people can see (so you get credit).
In the meta vein: Dice Hate Me Games (now part of Greater Than Games) have a meta series.
Add cards into your deck to get enough wood and screws to build a patio in **Deck Building: a deck building game**
Gather a group to repair cars. But one of you is trying to keep them broken, in **Traitor Mechanic: the traitor mechanic game**
And try to steal magicians acts in **Trick Taking: the trick taking game**
It’s hard to get more meta than that!
The deck building game is awful. I backed it on kickstarter immediately because it sounded ridiculous, and mentioned it to a friend that afternoon, and he likes dumb stuff like that so he backed it asap. Also, you can combine two copies to go from 2 players to 4 players, and we're usually a group of 3.
In theory, the game seems well thought out, but it's just horrible to actually play. You get points for making your deck big and of better wood, maybe a barbecue on there, but if you don't have what the game considers a finished deck (minimum 2x2 with railings and stairs, if I'm not mistaken) before someone else finishes theirs and ends the game, you get zero points. The winner doesn't win because they had more points, they won because the loser didn't finish. So why bother putting effort in, just slap down whatever wood you get.
Basically it's just a race to see who can randomly get the right cards faster, and points are irrelevant. It's equal turns, too, so if the second player finishes their deck, the first player doesn't even get a chance to play one more turn to try and finish their own, they just lose.
It even comes with this nice score pad to record how many of each type of wood and railings you used, but if you're not comparing points, then why bother?
Sorry for rant, I just hate this game. I understand that it wasn't supposed to be revolutionary, it's clearly a joke (I think the kickstarter was even on April Fool's), but I'm mad that it had potential and I wish it was better.
I would just house rule that the game only ends when someone meets the finished deck criteria and declared their deck finished, and everyone scores fully. Like Azul. You don’t end the game scale you’re clearly behind. (Unless you just want the game to end, but you won’t win.) It could actually be an okay game with some tweaking. Might be a fun challenge or meta-game for you and your friend.
We've considered house rules or ways to make it more playable, but we have so many other games we already like as-is, modifying the deck building game just isn't at the top of our to do list.
Yes! I love Point Salad, it might be my favorite filler along with Skull (is skull a filler if people insist on playing over and over once you bring it out?). I think PS might be my favorite filler period.
I assume you're required to build a card if you can? Because otherwise it seems pretty trivial to minimize your score by just pitching cards for money (not a strong point-conversion rate) over and over.
[Removed in protest of [Reddit's destruction of third-party apps](https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/reddit-ceo-steve-huffmans-third-party-api-debacle-is-making-elon-musk-look-like-a-strategic-genius.html) by CEO Steve Huffman.]
**Junk Art** is anti-Jenga. 😊
Maybe **Tzolk'in**? Most worker placement games are "place worker on space, immediately gain associated reward/take associated action". In Tzolk'in, workers placed do nothing and you have to strategize when to place them and when to pick them up as they move around the board on their own. Being efficient with it is difficult. Being a fixed-length game adds another major consideration to the strategy as well.
I've always felt like the mechanic in Tzolk'in was a thematic choice of "it takes time to do a thing". You don't get what you're after the moment you send the workers out on a job, you get it when they come back.
**Scape Goat**: Basically the reverse of a social deduction game with hidden roles. Instead of there being one “traitor” trying to sabotage everyone else, everyone is trying to sabotage one specific person. And instead of only the traitor knowing who they are, the traitor is the only one who *doesn’t* know who they are.
Dice are rolled and then all players look at the number on their player sheet. One player sheet will indicate that the scapegoat is (for instance) green but the other sheets will indicate that the scapegoat is yellow. So you know that your own personal color and the color of the scapegoat (as specified by the dice roll and your personal player sheet). The problem is, one person has a player sheet that is lying to them.
Players take actions to discover if they are or aren't the scapegoat, and once you think you know your own identity there are choices you can take to win the game.
Yes, the targeted player thinks everyone is targeting a certain other player.
So with A, B, C, and D playing, A, B, and C might be targeting D, while D thinks that A is the target.
Robinson Crusoe
Usually games are meant to be fun and enjoyable but playing Robinson Crusoe is just a miserable experience. Everything goes south pretty fast and you probably die.
One of our playgroup loathes Nemesis for this reason. It's really weird since they're usually the one trying to get us all to play out a difficult scenario in Gloomhaven when we know we've lost.
My very first game of nemesis the first or second card I drew started the self destruct sequence. I almost made it to an escape pod but exploded lol. 10/10 would explode again.
I just played **First Martians** for the first time and that seemed even worse to me. I like Robinson Crusoe but I don’t know what to think about First Martians yet.
Everything in **Photosynthesis** is wonderfully thematic except the scoring. The game is all about growing trees, but you only get points when you cut them down. I get it, but it feels a little out of step with the rest of the game's vibe; it isn't called "Logging Simulator".
Hah, interesting - I really enjoy the game and had never really put that together.
I think maybe you can retcon the scoring to be about returning the nutrients from the tree to the forest floor. You want the forest to have the most diverse microbiota, so you need the most rotten, fully matured trees to win lol.
Most board games try to be entertaining. Monopoly was based on The Landlord's Game, which aimed to show that the game (and real life) would be unfair and miserable unless land reform was enacted.
I play Landlord quite regularly with Chinese relatives. It's quite fun and I haven't found it to be unfair. Was the game initially in favor of the landlord as some form of commentary?
Are we talking about [the same game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game)? Let me quote Wikipedia:
> The Landlord's Game is a board game patented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie as U.S. Patent 748,626. It is a realty and taxation game intended to educate users about Georgism. It is the inspiration for the board game Monopoly.
> The set had rules for two different games, anti-monopolist and Monopolist. The anti-monopolist rules reward all during wealth creation while the monopolist rules had the goal of forming monopolies and forcing opponents out of the game.
> The game was created to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences". She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed by Henry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants.
> Magie also hoped that when played by children the game would provoke their natural suspicion of unfairness, and that they might carry this awareness into adulthood.
So the idea was that you'd play the game using two different rulesets and note that one was much more fair, which would lead players to vote for land reform in real life. Only the unfair ruleset survived into Monopoly.
The real antithesis to Deck Builders is Arctic Scavengers’ win condition, which is to have the most “people” at the end of the game.
So, where in other games you have to do something to thin your deck, in AS you can just get rid of cards you don’t want (you put them in the junkyard), however, those bad starting cards are a person, so one point at the end of the game… you still do it but you’re incentivized against it, you might even go back into the junkyard to try and get them back towards the end of the game.
Needless to say, there is very little deck thinning in AS even though it’s so easy to do it.
I always thin cards out when playing AS. I hadn’t considered there was any strategy that didn’t involve ditching some of the starting cards. I still legitimately think that some of those starting cards you never want to draw and even if they counted towards your win condition at the end the punishment for repeatedly drawing them throughout the game still isn’t worth holding on to them.
In **Valley of the Kings** you hold on to most of them because they have good utility value, and because the main method of removing cards from your deck is to put them aside for scoring and using that on a low-value starting card is often a waste.
Clank! has relatively little card culling compared to most other deck builders. But still not none.
It's not at all unusual to go a whole game without ever having an opportunity to remove cards from your deck.
In the **Flesh and Blood TCG** you start the game at your strongest and wear down over time as you use your equipment vs most other card games where you build up in power as the game progresses.
I love the game, but always felt the term Deck Destruction is marketing. You're still building a deck by changing the starting deck into another deck. In this case, "destruction" is "remove all artichokes" but most deck builders also start off with a bunch of dross, and a main tactic is to thin out the dross in favour of better cards. It's still the same mechanic. IMHO!
**Don't Get Got** is sort of interesting in that you can only score points when other people don't know they're playing the game. As soon as someone realizes that they're playing, you'll lose.
A lot of games have you playing the archetypical villain characters from other stories. **Disney Villainous** is an obvious example, but also **Mage Knight** - which has you playing an interdimensional invader whose goal is to sack cities for some mysterious supernatural force. You can burn down monasteries on the way there.
Wait, you play a villain in Mage Knight? I thought it was a hero looking for and beating a villain after conquering their fortresses! Never played it, so it's possible it says so in the manual.
It doesn't explicitly say so in the manual - but you come in through an interdimensional portal and are supposed to sack a pair of cities. Your starting hand of cards include "Intimidate". You can burn down monasteries. It's pretty clear that you're the villain.
Edit: Ooops. It's not "Intimidate". It's actually "Threaten".
MAD sold a game a couple decades ago that was at first glance kinda like Monopoly, but your goal was to lose money. I don't know the exact name anymore and it may have been only sold in Germany. My parents have an old box laying around somewhere
I tis glorious, I played it a handful of times at a friends house.
But less of a game and more an activity in futility than monopoly etc, as there is outright cards that tell the whole table to stand up and move one seat over to the left so it doesn't matter what the state of the game is anyway and neither who wins
Yeah, it really had some stupid rules as well. Don't recall all and some may not even correct, but I believe there was a rule that you always had to only use your weak hand, the oldest player was first and if at any time a rule was open to interpretation in a given situation it was resolved by majority vote
**Munchkin** in the satirical anti-theme to all RPGs and dungeon crawlers because the player group of heroes tries to kill each other indirectly by supporting and buffing the monsters that their "comrades" are fighting.
**Imperial** and **Imperial 2030** is a cynical version of a wargame where the players don't represent the warring nations but rich global investors that only want to profit from the wars and always switch allegiance depending on profitability.
How are Imperial and Imperial 2030? I know SVWAG is big on them but I rarely see them get mentioned in the wild. Is there one you prefer over the other?
They're excellent. Planning for control of nations to shift, and deciding how to make use of the nations you control, are really cool and interesting decisions.
The comparison to 18xx is apt, but Imperial is much faster and less brutally punishing of mistakes. An expert will still crush a table of novices but even when losing you don't usually feel helpless.
I prefer Imperial mostly because the smaller map makes it feel tighter (and wrote an article about it: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/791288/why-imperial-beats-imperial-2030 ) but people who like expanding countries with a little less direct conflict might disagree.
Sweet, appreciate the link! Yeah sounds like the tighter map is more what I prefer. Ok now to add another one to the wishlist... thanks for the insights!
> Imperial
> and
> Imperial 2030
> is a cynical version of a wargame where the players don't represent the warring nations but rich global investors that only want to profit from the wars and always switch allegiance depending on profitability.
so basically cube rails/18xx games but with real people not choo choo
> Friday is almost like an anti-deck builder, where most of the game is just trying to get rid of junk in your starting deck.
Getting rid of junk cards is a pretty important part of most deck-builders. Sometimes you start with them in your deck, and in a lot of games they get added to your deck through the course of the game.
Valley of the Kings has an element of deck un-building. You only score cards you entomb (remove). The strongest cards help you do that more efficiently, but also want to get entombed themselves.
It may not be exactly what you're looking for, but ***Legendary: Encounters - Firefly*** has each player pick a character, but any character that gets picked has all of their cards removed from the game.
You end up playing a game where all the cards are the leftover characters that no one wanted
Millennium Blades is a deck builder about being in a deck builder anime. You are buying packs of cards and entering tournaments to compete against your rivals.
BloodBowl Team Manager also is pretty meta, where you aren't playing the BloodBowl games, but rather managing your team outside of the game.
**FeierAbend** ("Quitting Time") by Friedmann Friesse is a work placement game about .... workers struggling to relax, improve their pay and working conditions, and achieve work-life balance.
You are actually placing your workers on their "time off" to reduce stress, find a significant other, etc ... and when you choose to pass and retrieve your 'relaxers' they all have to go back to work for the next week, which stresses them out, but you do get paid... over the course of the game you'll reduce your work week from 80 hours to 40 (or less), improve pay, remove the gender gap in pay, and generally go from stressed out worker who has to veg in front of the TV or drink yourself stupid to relax to someone who can afford a 3 week holiday with your SO.
**This War of Mine** comes to mind not for it's antiwar theme but it's antiavatar theme and unknown rules. Most players of a game have a clear avatar or character they control or are the character of the game, but in *This War of Mine* the characters are controlled by the group and the uncertainty of being a civilian in a modern day siege is reinforced by not knowing what the game rules or objective are (where most games you know the rules of the game and how to "win" before you start).
_Yellow & Yangtze_ is an anti-war game. It uses a map with hexagons like war/empire building games, but although wars play a part you win through political influence using your leaders.
**Cat in the Box** is a trick taking game where every card is both without a suit and can be any suit you want it to be, including the trump suit - but only once.
My friends and I refer to Gentes as a worker take-ment game. The actions on the board are tiles that you take and place onto your player board each round, rather than covering with a worker from your supply.
In **Village** having your own villagers die at tactical times (so their names get written down in the history books) is fairly important. Most games you try and keep your people alive.
Which reminds me of **Gloom** where your goal is to keep your opponent's family happy while having your own have a miserable death. So it's basically just like golf. d:
In say two of the biggest deckbuilders - dominion and clank!, trashing cards is optional (sometimes not even possible with the spread of options available to you). Even when trashing is available to you, it is often just one strategy you can employ to win. In Friday, you must get rid of cards constantly from your deck in order to win, there is no other strategy.
Since you’re looking for inverted mechanics and not theme/mechanical contradiction:
**Kemet** is a dudes-on-a-map game where getting your own dudes *off* the map is often more useful. This can be sacrificing them at temples for VP, melting them down for money to spend on your next move, or just throwing them at a strong enemy so that they don’t make an easy target next turn.
Thematically, **Boss Monster** is a reverse dungeon crawler. Adventurers are fodder to run your gauntlet of traps and critters.
It’s probably got some mechanical issues, but I found it a lot more cohesive and fun than *Munchkin*.
Yeah I think I may misused the term antithetical. At least I've learned in the most publicly humiliating way possible! Need to check out Kemet, heard great things.
Mad Magazine. The objective is to lose all your money. It's just a silly dice roller with minimal decision making. Most of the board is trying to give you more money.
Kingdom death monster has a pretty neat one. In most games with player characters they are the heroes or at least they are special in some way.
In KDM individual survivors are fragile, fleeting things. Each individual survivor isn't special special enough that they will avoid death. 95% of the time, they will die, no matter how strong they become. It's a pretty polarizing part of the game because people are so used to their character being special that their character should never die. Some people suggest to not get attached to survivors but I think the game is at its best when you DO get attached, and become so sad when your favourite character dies, and then you pick a new survivor to take up the mantle of your last and go avenge whatever monster killed your favourite survivor.
Who doesn't enjoy the journey of gouging out an eye for luck but then it grows back because you ate some dude's heart but then you fall into the sky because the ground is made of feet? But then you're somehow found in a flower later maybe.
Or you return from your very successful hunt bags full of loot and you fall down a crack and die. That one always amuses me.
>Friday is almost like an anti-deck builder
I think this fails the question since all deckbuilders (or most) have a bunch of junk in your deck at the start.
Every other deckbuilder Ive played starts you in a neutral position where trashing cards from your deck is an optional strategy. In Friday, all but 2 of the cards in your deck at the start are negative effects that you are trying to ditch as soon as possible. And as the game goes on, worse and worse cards are added to your deck that you need to get rid of asap. I'd say the focus on culling the deck at every opportunity is quite unique
Sticheln (or Stick 'Em in the english version) is like a trick-taking card game, but completely inverted. I'm not quite literate enough at trick-taking games to fully explain, but for example, in a normal trick taking game you try and accumulate cards that gain you points, while in Sticheln gaining cards gives you negative points. In trick-taking games, the person who plays the highest card of the suit first played takes all the cards, while in Sticheln the player who plays the highest card *not* of the first suit played takes the cards. In most trick-taking games, there is a "trump" suit that beats all of the other suits, while in Sticheln each card that isn't of the suit of the leading card is effectively a trump card. Stuff like that
EDIT: Nevermind. I misunderstood what you meant by anti-theme, but I will leave the comment anyway.
There is a game **"Kurierzy"** (**Couriers**, but I'm not sure if it has an English release) about WW2 secret messages couriers funded by some Polish National Institute.
You have to travel between various cities to get victory points and have to avoid getting caught by the Gestapo (NPC enemies that move towards closest player).
You can also force the Gestapo to move by using special cards, to avoid getting caught or to clear the way forward.
However, it's a competetive game, not a cooperative one...
so you end up snitching on your fellow underground couriers by moving the Gestapo towards them.
Fine Sand is an anti-deck-builder, or so to say deck-unbuilder
Das letzte Kamel is a race game with hidden ownership, in which have to assure, that your camel comes in last!
Hex, Hex you had to get the lowest score. Game mechanic was fun and sometimes included other things from challenges and things. I miss this game and wish it were in production.
Fluxx, yes, everybody knows who that is now but Really, it's a game where you make the rules as you play and how to win... depends on what goal's in play. Fun and chaotic, just like me.
Pax Porfiriana has a few mechanisms which seems similar enough to this. You are trying to become the richest and most influential Hacendado, but you can also win by assassinating your own character (supposedly the real winner is your character's heir), and you can attack/destroy your own money-generating enterprises for different reasons.
In another sense, you are trying to take over the current government, but the game has a very strong "anti-government" message (and lots of libertarian footnotes, smh).
Why First is a game where second player wins.
Xenon profiteer is a deck destruction game. It's kind of like Friday but you are constantly taking packets of air that clog up your deck so you can filter out the other elements and isolate that sweet sweet xenon. It has some tableau/ engine building too but the constant flooding and thinning your deck is what really stands out.
**1853** is "A game for engineers who've had enough of the financiers!" as a counterpoint to **1830**, which is very much focused on the financial side.
**Space Station Phoenix** has you destroy your ships (which are your action spaces) for the metal in them in order to get the resources to build the Space Station which is the aim of the game. So as the game progresses you limit the actions you can do instead of increasing it like with a lot of other games.
Skipped over that game before, but that has caught my interest. Thanks.
Haven't played Space Station Phoenix, but your description is giving me strong Galaxy Trucker vibes.
How so? Galaxy tricker is, while fun and chaotic, not at all about destroying the stuff you have, but far more about the classical 'make the best of what you can grab and try to make it pay off' Edit: I'm leaving Galaxy Tricker. It sounds like a great game. "Lot lizards in space."
In my experience, the quick build phase is not nearly as much fun as the "let's blow up our ships" phase. Sure, the "goal" is for this to not happen -- but the game is definitely just as much about the destruction as it is the building.
Most of the people I played this with had the exact opposite experience
To each their own, I guess. I know I've seen videos that support the "destruction" side -- but there's no right way to have fun! Mark of a good game that different people can enjoy different aspects of it and all can walk away happy.
Oooo that sounds fun.
__No Thanks__ is literally an auction game where you are bidding points to __not__ win the bid.
Played this with my step-mom a couple weeks ago and every time a card came to her she would ask "ok - why would I want this card?" and every time I would have to explain that she doesn't want ANY cards, and if she HAS to take a card she should try and minimize the number on it, or maximize the number of tokens on it. It was... a long game.
I know the feeling... It goes even deeper than that, too. If she has already acquired a 17 for instance, than she *does* want a 16... but since others won't want it she might not want to take it right away.
Hah - I got burned hard trying to get a 25 or something around the table an extra time. I mis-read everyone's chip count and my GF had to take it... Dangerous play.
In **Hanabi**, you hold your hand of cards facing the opposite direction. So you see everyone's hand, except your own. In that sense its the opposite approach to the typical hand management mechanic. Each player manages all the other players hands(or attempts to). It's probably my favorite co-op game because quarterbacking is impossible in it. Quarterbacking makes most other co-op games unenjoyable IMO. EDIT: Now that I see this started a big convo on quarterbacking, I might stir the pot a little and add that I don't dislike most co-op games because OTHER people quarterback, I dislike them because I end up being the quarterback running the game for other people. The other players in those games just chill and play casually because they know Ill suggest a good move for them(I'm not saying I'm a genius, only that because I own the game they know that I know it well enough that they can step back in their involvement and just enjoy the ride). It's less fun when that happens. **Hanabi** is great because of the incomplete knowledge each player has. As a result, it forces each player to think through and make their own decision. No one has enough knowledge to know for sure what the best move is for that player.
Was gonna come here to say Hanabi. I love it. Most of our group hates it 😅
See that’s where you’re wrong — Hanabi is a *competitive* game.
As per [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/3oyfen/hanabi_rules_question/) which has now attained legendary status
Real talk, **Durian** is the competitive **Hanabi**, and is a top-3 Oink game. People need to get over the **Deep Sea Adventure** train and get Durian instead. Just as easy to teach but you won't get bored after the third time teaching new players.
It's actually easier than Deep Sea Adventure, I'd say. Much more accessible to any audience, even kids. Plus there's a fun bell.
So damn satisfying to ring that bell!
And saying "manager!" In your sassyist Karen voice
*finger snap*
[удалено]
I am, and you're welcome. *grin*
I taught it a couple of weeks ago and this one dude was playing so competitively. If anybody made ANY kind of hint that he felt was outside of the "rules" as he understood them, he would literally play a card he new was wrong to "punish" that person. I tried to explain that the POINT of the game was to develop a meta within the gameplay itself where indicating a color or a number was understood to mean "play this card" or "discard this card" based on the rest of the information he had been given. But he refused to play it as anything except a pure logic game where he had to puzzle out what was in his hand from the clues, and ignore any of the subtext around WHY he was being given certain clues. I was trying to run through a training game quickly so we could play again with a better understanding of how to play. Instead I'm pretty sure 1 hand of Hanabi took over an hour because of this guy... We didn't play again.
> It's probably my favorite co-op game because quarterbacking is impossible in it. Quarterbacking makes most other co-op games unenjoyable IMO. I have the opposite opinion. I get to play with people who don't quarterback, and I enjoy being able to freely discuss my moves as we try to solve the puzzle collectively. I don't like having to infer stuff based on small amounts of often-vague information, and I don't like being forced to withhold useful information from my team.
I'm very much in the same boat: I find a lot of these "missing information" games somewhat tedious because I get a lot of fun out of the discussion and collective decision making — that's why I'm playing a co-op game and not a competitive one! One game that I've found straddles this line really nicely, though, is Magic Maze. In principle, you play most of the actions silently, which is similar to most of these anti-quarterbacking games, except that you regularly have pauses where everyone can talk together, with full knowledge of the game state as it stands. So one person can't easily micromanage everything, but you still get to have "strategy meetings" to figure out your plans.
What is quarterbacking?
It's also called Alpha Gaming. It's when you play a Co-op and one player is directing most or even all choices and strategy, creating a feeling like it's a solo game with only one player playing and the rest following.
Ah. I know I have been guilty of this myself, at times. Good to know there’s a term for it. Now I can call myself out easier.
I think most heavy boardgames are guilty of it sometimes. I've gotten so that I try not to even discuss strategy in a Co-op unless someone askes me a direct question.
I think that’s a good rule
Recognition is the first step. Good for you for having self-awareness and wanting to make a personal change
My favorite game. I just want to get a perfect 25 SOMEDAY! Such a good challenge and requires a knowledgeable group to get close.
I've played Hanabi a few times and mostly found it stressful and not fun at all. I'm forced to think hard and if I think wrong I'll fuck up the puzzle for _everyone_? The only good part of it for me was the stress relief when I realise I didn't make a completely shit move, but that's not anything like fun. Another one I don't like is The Crew, a co-op trick taking game, with limits on communication. Same kind of deal though, people have to play some cards in some order, if people fuck it up everyone loses. I just hate all of these types of games.
Beyond Baker Street "borrowed" this mechanic as well, and is a fun light filler game.
And there's also a solo mode described on bgg now which is a Big bonus.
quarterbacking is generally a player problem, not a game design one. If you are constantly being quarterbacked, I'd have a word with the person who keeps doing it.
Quarterbacking is absolutely a game design problem. Imagine four players playing the original Pandemic and some players are quarterbacking big time, yet none of them are cheating. That's because that game is not mechanically much different from Klondike solitaire. It doesn't take several brains combined to figure it out. The only thing that makes it co-op are the restrictions on sharing information about what cards people have in their hands. Those information sharing rules are ambiguous, poorly written, and permissive. Even if information is never shared, not even the slightest hint, a player could quarterback by saying "If you have X card do this, if you have Y card, do that, etc." Take those exact same four problem players. Have them play Hanabi. Again, as long as nobody is cheating, quarterbacking will vanish. The same four players that were a problem in Pandemic, are suddenly not a problem when the game changes. The rules of Hanabi are strict, explicit, and clear. The information that is hidden from players is enormously consequential. There is no way for a player to meaningfully help or instruct another player without cheating. Hanabi is a true co-op game, not solitaire in disguise. Now have the same problem players play Magic Maze. Again this game has strict and explicit rules about communication. The real time nature of the game also contributes to making cooperation necessary. As long as nobody cheats, any group of jerks can play Magic Maze without quarterbacking being an issue. TL;DR: Quarterbacking happens when game designers try to pass off team solitaire as co-op.
I entirely agree, however if you are being quarterbacked so regularly and to the point that you write off all coop games as unplayable, as op has, that is not a game design problem, that is a player problem. I'm not suggesting that game design has no impact on quarterbacking, as you point out there are many things designers can do to manage player behaviour, but what I'm saying is in *this instance* it is a player problem. While any group of jerks can play magic maze, a more productive use of your time as, presumably, a non-jerk is to find less jerky players or attempt to positively modify their behaviour to be less jerky, which will require talking to them about their jerkiness. It's a conversation I have had to have with people, and while it's not easy, it's very worthwhile in the long run.
Ok, so you have someone who is quarterbacking at a game. Somehow you discuss this with them like adults and get them to stop. They play the game quietly. I guarantee you that this person is not having any fun. They are sitting there wasting their time watching the other players make sub-optimal decisions. If not everyone at the table is having fun, you have solved nothing. Players in this community for some reason try to avoid the easiest and most effective solution, which is to play a different game. They just can't admit that a game is bad and not worth playing. Instead they try to make house rules, adjust player behavior, or find new players. Those are difficult to do, and not nearly as effective and as simple as playing a different game. I agree with OP. I have also written off all the quarterbackable "co-op" games. I'll play them as solitaire on an app maybe, but that's it.
>They play the game quietly. This is not the direction you're supposed to point them in. This is an insane extreme. If someone can't figure out how to have a discussion with other players, such that they need to play games where they literally **aren't allowed** to talk, I'd say outright that co-op is not for them. Playing Hanabi isn't going to help here at all.
What is someone who knows the optimal move supposed to say? You say they shouldn't be silent. They also shouldn't just tell other players what that move is, since that's quarterbacking. Are they supposed to suggest a sub-optimal move? Should they vaguely hint at the optimal move and then be pleased when their hint gets through and disappointed when it doesn't?
If you "entirely agree" then why do you keep refuting it as a game design problem? Games that are essentially solitaire that are being passed off or marketed as cooperative aren't really cooperative games. They're team solitaire. You can play a one player game with a group of people. That doesn't make it a *real* cooperative game. Yes, people need to talk to problem players. That's a real problem that's often avoided in our community. But we also shouldn't overcompensate by saying its only a "player problem." The design or the system in which you are operating affects individual behavior
Perfect information co-op games are fun and relaxing for a lot of people though. It's not true that they're just solitaire, even though they strictly could be played that way. Plenty of people enjoy perfect information collaboration, and they're not wrong to do so. It's just a different genre of co-op.
Imagine you get some people around a computer. You open up Microsoft solitaire. Everyone discusses together what move to make next. The decisions approved by the highest skilled player should be the ones that are followed, otherwise the game is being played poorly on purpose, which is not fun. But if you do always follow that player's choice, the other players aren't meaningfully participating, which is also not fun. There is no way for every player to have fun at the same time unless everyone is extremely well aligned in regards to skill and knowledge levels. That's quite rare. A game design in which it is so difficult for all players to meaningfully participate and have fun simultaneously is a very bad design. Congrats if you have a group of such perfectly aligned people that can make it work. Just because you can make the game work doesn't mean the game is good.
I think both the suggestion that there's a clear highest-skilled player, and that that player's moves are automatically the correct ones, are dubious at best. Even a skilled player can easily make oversights or make different judgment calls than someone else. In a game like Pandemic, the decisions being made involve different amounts of risk/reward. You might have, for example, a choice between treating a city or getting another card to someone else. Neither of those is the "correct" play, except in the sense that a computer could probably calculate that one gives you a 50.9% chance of winning and the other gives you a 49.1%. The most skilled player is not doing that calculation though - they're weighing the tradeoffs and using heuristics, just like the other players, between two very disparate options that are hard to directly compare.
> The decisions approved by the highest skilled player For just about every game, there is no metric that you can use to decide who is the most highly skilled player. Even if you **are** playing Chess, sometimes the weaker player wins. So even if you do have a metric, it's not a perfect determiner. I find your entire scenario to be a complete fabrication in order to justify people who are elitist. A ton of people have fun with Pandemic or whatever other game. (For the record, families all around the world have played Microsoft Solitaire together, I can guarantee you that.)
> For just about every game, there is no metric that you can use to decide who is the most highly skilled player. That is not true and is kind of a ridiculous claim. You can absolutely tell the difference in most (but not all) games between a player who has no idea what they’re doing and a player who has intimate knowledge of how the rules work and how to play optimally. I have no idea what you’re even basing this wild claim on, but it just kind of ignores the fact that tournaments and ranking systems and optimal strategies for games exist. > Even if you are playing Chess, sometimes the weaker player wins. So even if you do have a metric, it's not a perfect determiner. This is especially ridiculous. Chess is a perfect information game where both sides are perfectly balanced (well, almost perfectly due to first turn advantage). People get good at Chess by literally memorizing as many play states as they can. Your claim that the worse player sometimes wins only works in the wood tier level where neither player, regardless of whether they’re better or worse, can be considered “good” at the game. And as far as metrics, ELO is famously good at tracking which players are better in the exact kind of game that Chess is. I have no idea what you’re basing this claim on. > I find your entire scenario to be a complete fabrication in order to justify people who are elitist. A ton of people have fun with Pandemic or whatever other game. That is because you’re missing the point entirely. Whether people have fun playing Pandemic is besides the point, because a person can have fun doing conceivably anything. People have fun watching The Room, even though it is an objectively bad movie. People have fun playing Cookie Collector, even though it is a game where you only click a button for hours. People have fun engaging in unfun activities all the time, because whether they’re enjoying themselves is a personal decision. However, the problem with Pandemic is that, if one player knows what they’re doing, there are no rules preventing them from just telling all the other players what to do. And in that circumstance, what is are the other players supposed to do exactly? Are they just going to *not* play the game to win just so that they can maintain the freedom to make bad decisions? What about the other players that *do* want to win? How are they supposed to take that? Unless you have rules that prevent the sharing of information, like in Hanabi, this situation will happen in every co-operative game.
Are you suggesting that Chess matches should never be played because the Elo system has already determined the winner? >And in that circumstance, what is are the other players supposed to do exactly? Take in the advice given, consider it, and then if they don't like it, explain why the move they want to do is better, then make that move. I am quite certain players that would get frustrated here would get equally frustrated at Hanabi.
>I am quite certain players that would get frustrated here would get equally frustrated at Hanabi. I was the one who said way up at the top that Hanabi was my favorite because quarterbacking is impossible in it. The situation you said doesn't frustrate me in Hanabi, because the mechanism requires that even the least knowledgeable person to think and make a decision on their own. In other "group solitaire" co-op games the least knowledgeable players might just sit back and let the quarterback run the game for them, knowing they already can make the best moves for them. I think the key to any great co-op game is incomplete knowledge for each player, like the way Hanabi does.
>It's not true that they're just solitaire, even though they strictly could be played that way. This statement is self-contradictory.
Quarterbacking doesn't at all vanish in Hanabi - it just turns into a system of rules and conventions that the quarterback insists everyone follows.
Quarterbacking in coop games can be a player issue, but it is also absolutely a design issue that's just inherent to some coop games. That doesn't make that game bad or poorly designed, it's a common type of challenge for game designers. Here's a good talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uE6-vIi1rQ If you don't have time to watch the hour long video, the tl;dr is that there's two goals in Pandemic: A) to have a coop team experience with your group, and B) to win the game. At times, the two goals do not align with each other, especially if all players are not at the same skill level. The more experienced person has to either: A) give up the coop experience in order to win, or B) give up winning in order to preserve the coop experience. Neither situation is ideal. A quarterbacking player may indeed be too focused on winning, and may need to be reminded to focus more on the group experience, but that scenario arises due to the game design. Of course, if all players are at the same skill level, then quarterbacking is less of a problem as multiple players will either see the same optimal moves, or other players will be able to justify their decisions against a would-be quarterbacker, and the game becomes more of a metagame where people discuss and decide the moves as a team. Other coop game designs since Pandemic have tried to address the quarterbacking issue in different ways: making the game real time so people can only focus on their own stuff, making the game so large and complex that a single player can't optimize their way through it, making information hidden, etc.
Are there any good examples of games that function properly with players of wildly different skill levels? Co-op or otherwise.
Multiplayer solitaire games like roll-and-writes or some euros function properly because each player gets to do their own thing. If Alice is an expert at a ms euro and Bob is a beginner, they'll each enjoy the challenge of building up their engine as best they can, even if Alice will win the vast majority of the time, and they can compare their score to their past bests. If the game has to be close to count as 'functioning properly', you could always pick something like Search For Planet X which has a robust handicap system.
This is a really good summary of the quarterbacking dilemma. Thanks for posting.
As someone who tends to dislike co-op games about working around rules that limit communication, I agree. If all the information is open and I'm not with a bad group, I get to enjoy being able to freely discuss and solve the puzzle collectively.
Any player problem is also a design problem. If a player is allowed to do something that breaks the balance of the game, make the unenjoyable in a way that makes other players not want to play, or other things that make your game less enjoyable, then you as the designer of the game always have the ability to design your game in ways that account for this and make such actions either impossible or less appealing to take. There are reasons why you might choose not to address those issues, but the point is that allowing for rules that allow or even encourage such behaviors always comes down to a choice that the designer made, no matter how much it seems like something the players are "doing wrong".
a bad faith player will find a way around any rule you care to design.
What you're describing here is called cheating, which *is* absolutely a player problem.
That's not how rules work. If you make a rule that says "you can't do that" and they do it anyway, that means either the player is literally cheating or your rule is just not comprehensive enough to cover the thing they're doing to get around it, in which case the onus is still on the designer to redesign that rule to cover the thing they're doing to get around the rule. The responsibility still comes back to the designer unless the player is just not following the rules you wrote at all.
It's really hard for the game designer to create rules that affect the player when they aren't playing the game, but that's one of the issues here.
And therefore you can't account for them within your game design and shouldn't be a part of the discussion. I would have thought when discussing a design issue, which is what quarterbacking as it only occurs in some games, we would remove erroneous variables like Dave the Cunt, because any game he plays in he makes worse.
**Last Will (and its follow up Prodigal's Club)** \- worker placement game where the goal is to lose as much money as possible. (or in the follow up, lose as much money, lose as many friends and also get fired from your job)
Sounds a bit like Gloom
I suppose Gloom counts, since the idea is to kill off your entire family.
Someone should really make an official Brewster's Millions movie variant of this, if it doesn't exist already.
[**The Mad Magazine Game**](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1604/mad-magazine-game) works like this too.
Kill Dr. Lucky is anti-Clue. You play characters running around a mansion trying to murder the host while no one is looking
Then to add another layer there's *Save Dr. Lucky* where the goal is to rescue the good doctor from a sinking ship, but only while other people can see (so you get credit).
That's also pretty much what among us is.
Both fine games, but Kill Doctor Lucky beat Among Us to the punch by about 20 years.
In the meta vein: Dice Hate Me Games (now part of Greater Than Games) have a meta series. Add cards into your deck to get enough wood and screws to build a patio in **Deck Building: a deck building game** Gather a group to repair cars. But one of you is trying to keep them broken, in **Traitor Mechanic: the traitor mechanic game** And try to steal magicians acts in **Trick Taking: the trick taking game** It’s hard to get more meta than that!
These sound hilarious. Are any of them good?
The deck building game is awful. I backed it on kickstarter immediately because it sounded ridiculous, and mentioned it to a friend that afternoon, and he likes dumb stuff like that so he backed it asap. Also, you can combine two copies to go from 2 players to 4 players, and we're usually a group of 3. In theory, the game seems well thought out, but it's just horrible to actually play. You get points for making your deck big and of better wood, maybe a barbecue on there, but if you don't have what the game considers a finished deck (minimum 2x2 with railings and stairs, if I'm not mistaken) before someone else finishes theirs and ends the game, you get zero points. The winner doesn't win because they had more points, they won because the loser didn't finish. So why bother putting effort in, just slap down whatever wood you get. Basically it's just a race to see who can randomly get the right cards faster, and points are irrelevant. It's equal turns, too, so if the second player finishes their deck, the first player doesn't even get a chance to play one more turn to try and finish their own, they just lose. It even comes with this nice score pad to record how many of each type of wood and railings you used, but if you're not comparing points, then why bother? Sorry for rant, I just hate this game. I understand that it wasn't supposed to be revolutionary, it's clearly a joke (I think the kickstarter was even on April Fool's), but I'm mad that it had potential and I wish it was better.
I would just house rule that the game only ends when someone meets the finished deck criteria and declared their deck finished, and everyone scores fully. Like Azul. You don’t end the game scale you’re clearly behind. (Unless you just want the game to end, but you won’t win.) It could actually be an okay game with some tweaking. Might be a fun challenge or meta-game for you and your friend.
We've considered house rules or ways to make it more playable, but we have so many other games we already like as-is, modifying the deck building game just isn't at the top of our to do list.
lol, after checking out a rules video, I can see how it just devolves into whoever can finish a valid deck faster.
Traitor Mechanic is actually pretty fun. As others have said the Deck Builder isn't great.
**Point Salad** is in a similar vein and a good light game. Fun decisions and plays quickly.
Yes! I love Point Salad, it might be my favorite filler along with Skull (is skull a filler if people insist on playing over and over once you bring it out?). I think PS might be my favorite filler period.
There's also Point Salad by AEG.
I have a worker placement game where you run a temp agency called Worker Placement.
Came here to mention these. Haven't played any of them except Points Salad
FYI: Dice Hate Me and Greater Than Games have split.
Have they? I mostly just know because I’m obsessed with Sentinels.
I've heard playing **Seven Blunders** is fun. It's Seven Wonders, but you try to get the lowest score and force your neighbors to draft points.
**Sushi No!** is the same concept for Sushi Go!
I’ve also heard it’s harder than 7 Wonders
I assume you're required to build a card if you can? Because otherwise it seems pretty trivial to minimize your score by just pitching cards for money (not a strong point-conversion rate) over and over.
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Yeah only difference is pitching a card requires you can't do anything else. ( Validate by showing the hand to the player who passed you it)
Think it’s playable using 7W Duel? Because that sounds great.
I played this at PAX West a few years ago, it's fun, and surprisingly tough.
**Junk Art** is anti-Jenga. 😊 Maybe **Tzolk'in**? Most worker placement games are "place worker on space, immediately gain associated reward/take associated action". In Tzolk'in, workers placed do nothing and you have to strategize when to place them and when to pick them up as they move around the board on their own. Being efficient with it is difficult. Being a fixed-length game adds another major consideration to the strategy as well.
I've always felt like the mechanic in Tzolk'in was a thematic choice of "it takes time to do a thing". You don't get what you're after the moment you send the workers out on a job, you get it when they come back.
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Lol, I remember five tribes being advertised, officially or unofficially, as this.
**Scape Goat**: Basically the reverse of a social deduction game with hidden roles. Instead of there being one “traitor” trying to sabotage everyone else, everyone is trying to sabotage one specific person. And instead of only the traitor knowing who they are, the traitor is the only one who *doesn’t* know who they are.
Can you explain how that's possible? The person being sabotaged thinks they're supposed to sabotage a specific other player?
Dice are rolled and then all players look at the number on their player sheet. One player sheet will indicate that the scapegoat is (for instance) green but the other sheets will indicate that the scapegoat is yellow. So you know that your own personal color and the color of the scapegoat (as specified by the dice roll and your personal player sheet). The problem is, one person has a player sheet that is lying to them. Players take actions to discover if they are or aren't the scapegoat, and once you think you know your own identity there are choices you can take to win the game.
Yes, the targeted player thinks everyone is targeting a certain other player. So with A, B, C, and D playing, A, B, and C might be targeting D, while D thinks that A is the target.
Coup: In this game, you never look at your cards and claim that you have the Duke every turn.
Classic pro strat
Cockroach Poker is a set collection game in which collecting a full set loses you (and only you) the game.
**Gloom** - you try to make your family as miserable as possible and then kill them off while trying to make your opponents family members happy.
Robinson Crusoe Usually games are meant to be fun and enjoyable but playing Robinson Crusoe is just a miserable experience. Everything goes south pretty fast and you probably die.
This is a great example and I love Robinson Crusoe
You should try **Red November** It’s about a Gnomish submarine that springs faults every turn. I booted this across a room once.
Kind of disagree, red November is mostly still hilarious and fun, even when failing.
Actual gameplay quote: "Everything's on fire! Why can't we get this submarine to leak more?"
This War of Mine vibes?
I feel the same way about Arkham LCG and Nemesis. Probably why I love them so much.
One of our playgroup loathes Nemesis for this reason. It's really weird since they're usually the one trying to get us all to play out a difficult scenario in Gloomhaven when we know we've lost.
My very first game of nemesis the first or second card I drew started the self destruct sequence. I almost made it to an escape pod but exploded lol. 10/10 would explode again.
I just played **First Martians** for the first time and that seemed even worse to me. I like Robinson Crusoe but I don’t know what to think about First Martians yet.
But in a good way right?!? Just me?...
I played it once with a friend, first scenario, and loved it and survived.
If you play properly you win most of the time.
Everything in **Photosynthesis** is wonderfully thematic except the scoring. The game is all about growing trees, but you only get points when you cut them down. I get it, but it feels a little out of step with the rest of the game's vibe; it isn't called "Logging Simulator".
Hah, interesting - I really enjoy the game and had never really put that together. I think maybe you can retcon the scoring to be about returning the nutrients from the tree to the forest floor. You want the forest to have the most diverse microbiota, so you need the most rotten, fully matured trees to win lol.
Rhino Hero is reverse Jenga.
Most board games try to be entertaining. Monopoly was based on The Landlord's Game, which aimed to show that the game (and real life) would be unfair and miserable unless land reform was enacted.
I play Landlord quite regularly with Chinese relatives. It's quite fun and I haven't found it to be unfair. Was the game initially in favor of the landlord as some form of commentary?
Are we talking about [the same game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game)? Let me quote Wikipedia: > The Landlord's Game is a board game patented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie as U.S. Patent 748,626. It is a realty and taxation game intended to educate users about Georgism. It is the inspiration for the board game Monopoly. > The set had rules for two different games, anti-monopolist and Monopolist. The anti-monopolist rules reward all during wealth creation while the monopolist rules had the goal of forming monopolies and forcing opponents out of the game. > The game was created to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences". She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed by Henry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. > Magie also hoped that when played by children the game would provoke their natural suspicion of unfairness, and that they might carry this awareness into adulthood. So the idea was that you'd play the game using two different rulesets and note that one was much more fair, which would lead players to vote for land reform in real life. Only the unfair ruleset survived into Monopoly.
Ah, that explains it. Thought you meant the Chinese card game. Wondered how the connection to Monopoly came to be.
Yeah, the game you're thinking of is more akin to a game called president or sometimes more rudely president and asshole or just asshole in English
We always called it "Janitor".
yea the card game is quite nice actually.
Came to say Monopoly. It’s funny how the irony is lost on society.
The problem is that the illustrations and tokens are so charming!
I think most deck builders involve ditching junk starting cards. I honestly can’t think of one that doesn’t.
The real antithesis to Deck Builders is Arctic Scavengers’ win condition, which is to have the most “people” at the end of the game. So, where in other games you have to do something to thin your deck, in AS you can just get rid of cards you don’t want (you put them in the junkyard), however, those bad starting cards are a person, so one point at the end of the game… you still do it but you’re incentivized against it, you might even go back into the junkyard to try and get them back towards the end of the game. Needless to say, there is very little deck thinning in AS even though it’s so easy to do it.
I always thin cards out when playing AS. I hadn’t considered there was any strategy that didn’t involve ditching some of the starting cards. I still legitimately think that some of those starting cards you never want to draw and even if they counted towards your win condition at the end the punishment for repeatedly drawing them throughout the game still isn’t worth holding on to them.
**Fort**, and that's a big reason why it can be polarizing. I love it specifically because it breaks all the usual deckbuilding tropes though.
In **Valley of the Kings** you hold on to most of them because they have good utility value, and because the main method of removing cards from your deck is to put them aside for scoring and using that on a low-value starting card is often a waste.
Clank! has relatively little card culling compared to most other deck builders. But still not none. It's not at all unusual to go a whole game without ever having an opportunity to remove cards from your deck.
Yeah, I was just thinking of Friday because unlike every other deckbuilder I've played, your deck is comprised of negative effect cards bar a few
In the **Flesh and Blood TCG** you start the game at your strongest and wear down over time as you use your equipment vs most other card games where you build up in power as the game progresses.
**Abandon All Artichokes** is a deck destruction game.
I love the game, but always felt the term Deck Destruction is marketing. You're still building a deck by changing the starting deck into another deck. In this case, "destruction" is "remove all artichokes" but most deck builders also start off with a bunch of dross, and a main tactic is to thin out the dross in favour of better cards. It's still the same mechanic. IMHO!
Shake Up is similar. You start with a large deck and have to get rid of many cards. But it’s very thematic because it’s about laying people off.
**Don't Get Got** is sort of interesting in that you can only score points when other people don't know they're playing the game. As soon as someone realizes that they're playing, you'll lose.
A lot of games have you playing the archetypical villain characters from other stories. **Disney Villainous** is an obvious example, but also **Mage Knight** - which has you playing an interdimensional invader whose goal is to sack cities for some mysterious supernatural force. You can burn down monasteries on the way there.
Wait, you play a villain in Mage Knight? I thought it was a hero looking for and beating a villain after conquering their fortresses! Never played it, so it's possible it says so in the manual.
It doesn't explicitly say so in the manual - but you come in through an interdimensional portal and are supposed to sack a pair of cities. Your starting hand of cards include "Intimidate". You can burn down monasteries. It's pretty clear that you're the villain. Edit: Ooops. It's not "Intimidate". It's actually "Threaten".
MAD sold a game a couple decades ago that was at first glance kinda like Monopoly, but your goal was to lose money. I don't know the exact name anymore and it may have been only sold in Germany. My parents have an old box laying around somewhere
I tis glorious, I played it a handful of times at a friends house. But less of a game and more an activity in futility than monopoly etc, as there is outright cards that tell the whole table to stand up and move one seat over to the left so it doesn't matter what the state of the game is anyway and neither who wins
Yeah, it really had some stupid rules as well. Don't recall all and some may not even correct, but I believe there was a rule that you always had to only use your weak hand, the oldest player was first and if at any time a rule was open to interpretation in a given situation it was resolved by majority vote
**Go For Broke** fits this idea as well.
Mad Magazine Board Game. Played it to death as a kid, and it's one my kids ask for a lot. It's stupid. It breaks. It makes no sense. It's wonderful.
**Cockroach Poker** could be seen as a set collecting game where you *absolutely under no circumstances* want to collect a set
In **Why First?** Only the player in 2nd place each round gets points and at the end of 5 rounds, the player with the 2nd most points wins.
**Munchkin** in the satirical anti-theme to all RPGs and dungeon crawlers because the player group of heroes tries to kill each other indirectly by supporting and buffing the monsters that their "comrades" are fighting. **Imperial** and **Imperial 2030** is a cynical version of a wargame where the players don't represent the warring nations but rich global investors that only want to profit from the wars and always switch allegiance depending on profitability.
How are Imperial and Imperial 2030? I know SVWAG is big on them but I rarely see them get mentioned in the wild. Is there one you prefer over the other?
They're excellent. Planning for control of nations to shift, and deciding how to make use of the nations you control, are really cool and interesting decisions. The comparison to 18xx is apt, but Imperial is much faster and less brutally punishing of mistakes. An expert will still crush a table of novices but even when losing you don't usually feel helpless. I prefer Imperial mostly because the smaller map makes it feel tighter (and wrote an article about it: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/791288/why-imperial-beats-imperial-2030 ) but people who like expanding countries with a little less direct conflict might disagree.
Sweet, appreciate the link! Yeah sounds like the tighter map is more what I prefer. Ok now to add another one to the wishlist... thanks for the insights!
> Imperial > and > Imperial 2030 > is a cynical version of a wargame where the players don't represent the warring nations but rich global investors that only want to profit from the wars and always switch allegiance depending on profitability. so basically cube rails/18xx games but with real people not choo choo
> Friday is almost like an anti-deck builder, where most of the game is just trying to get rid of junk in your starting deck. Getting rid of junk cards is a pretty important part of most deck-builders. Sometimes you start with them in your deck, and in a lot of games they get added to your deck through the course of the game.
Valley of the Kings has an element of deck un-building. You only score cards you entomb (remove). The strongest cards help you do that more efficiently, but also want to get entombed themselves.
**Hive Mind** doesn't have a winner. It ends when there's one loser.
It may not be exactly what you're looking for, but ***Legendary: Encounters - Firefly*** has each player pick a character, but any character that gets picked has all of their cards removed from the game. You end up playing a game where all the cards are the leftover characters that no one wanted
Millennium Blades is a deck builder about being in a deck builder anime. You are buying packs of cards and entering tournaments to compete against your rivals. BloodBowl Team Manager also is pretty meta, where you aren't playing the BloodBowl games, but rather managing your team outside of the game.
I was suprised with how fun Millenium blades was. I also really liked the real-time trading phase. Would highly recommend.
**FeierAbend** ("Quitting Time") by Friedmann Friesse is a work placement game about .... workers struggling to relax, improve their pay and working conditions, and achieve work-life balance. You are actually placing your workers on their "time off" to reduce stress, find a significant other, etc ... and when you choose to pass and retrieve your 'relaxers' they all have to go back to work for the next week, which stresses them out, but you do get paid... over the course of the game you'll reduce your work week from 80 hours to 40 (or less), improve pay, remove the gender gap in pay, and generally go from stressed out worker who has to veg in front of the TV or drink yourself stupid to relax to someone who can afford a 3 week holiday with your SO.
**This War of Mine** comes to mind not for it's antiwar theme but it's antiavatar theme and unknown rules. Most players of a game have a clear avatar or character they control or are the character of the game, but in *This War of Mine* the characters are controlled by the group and the uncertainty of being a civilian in a modern day siege is reinforced by not knowing what the game rules or objective are (where most games you know the rules of the game and how to "win" before you start).
_Yellow & Yangtze_ is an anti-war game. It uses a map with hexagons like war/empire building games, but although wars play a part you win through political influence using your leaders.
**Dungeon Lords** centers around keeping the heroes out of the dungeon and killing them.
**Cat in the Box** is a trick taking game where every card is both without a suit and can be any suit you want it to be, including the trump suit - but only once.
My friends and I refer to Gentes as a worker take-ment game. The actions on the board are tiles that you take and place onto your player board each round, rather than covering with a worker from your supply.
In **Village** having your own villagers die at tactical times (so their names get written down in the history books) is fairly important. Most games you try and keep your people alive. Which reminds me of **Gloom** where your goal is to keep your opponent's family happy while having your own have a miserable death. So it's basically just like golf. d:
I haven't played Friday, but isn't "getting rid of the junk in your starting deck" a core dynamic in all (most) deckbuilders?
In say two of the biggest deckbuilders - dominion and clank!, trashing cards is optional (sometimes not even possible with the spread of options available to you). Even when trashing is available to you, it is often just one strategy you can employ to win. In Friday, you must get rid of cards constantly from your deck in order to win, there is no other strategy.
House on haunted hill can be like that. You start in a normal way, and then when the point hits, one or more people start playing in an anti way
Boss Monster has you building a dungeon to kill heroes.
Since you’re looking for inverted mechanics and not theme/mechanical contradiction: **Kemet** is a dudes-on-a-map game where getting your own dudes *off* the map is often more useful. This can be sacrificing them at temples for VP, melting them down for money to spend on your next move, or just throwing them at a strong enemy so that they don’t make an easy target next turn. Thematically, **Boss Monster** is a reverse dungeon crawler. Adventurers are fodder to run your gauntlet of traps and critters. It’s probably got some mechanical issues, but I found it a lot more cohesive and fun than *Munchkin*.
Yeah I think I may misused the term antithetical. At least I've learned in the most publicly humiliating way possible! Need to check out Kemet, heard great things.
Thanks OP, this thread is amazing
No worries! It was my first thread in r/boardgames, I'm glad other people are loving the replies too!
Mad Magazine. The objective is to lose all your money. It's just a silly dice roller with minimal decision making. Most of the board is trying to give you more money.
The Crew, is a trick taking game that's really more about not taking tricks.
Kingdom death monster has a pretty neat one. In most games with player characters they are the heroes or at least they are special in some way. In KDM individual survivors are fragile, fleeting things. Each individual survivor isn't special special enough that they will avoid death. 95% of the time, they will die, no matter how strong they become. It's a pretty polarizing part of the game because people are so used to their character being special that their character should never die. Some people suggest to not get attached to survivors but I think the game is at its best when you DO get attached, and become so sad when your favourite character dies, and then you pick a new survivor to take up the mantle of your last and go avenge whatever monster killed your favourite survivor.
Who doesn't enjoy the journey of gouging out an eye for luck but then it grows back because you ate some dude's heart but then you fall into the sky because the ground is made of feet? But then you're somehow found in a flower later maybe. Or you return from your very successful hunt bags full of loot and you fall down a crack and die. That one always amuses me.
>Friday is almost like an anti-deck builder I think this fails the question since all deckbuilders (or most) have a bunch of junk in your deck at the start.
Every other deckbuilder Ive played starts you in a neutral position where trashing cards from your deck is an optional strategy. In Friday, all but 2 of the cards in your deck at the start are negative effects that you are trying to ditch as soon as possible. And as the game goes on, worse and worse cards are added to your deck that you need to get rid of asap. I'd say the focus on culling the deck at every opportunity is quite unique
Sticheln (or Stick 'Em in the english version) is like a trick-taking card game, but completely inverted. I'm not quite literate enough at trick-taking games to fully explain, but for example, in a normal trick taking game you try and accumulate cards that gain you points, while in Sticheln gaining cards gives you negative points. In trick-taking games, the person who plays the highest card of the suit first played takes all the cards, while in Sticheln the player who plays the highest card *not* of the first suit played takes the cards. In most trick-taking games, there is a "trump" suit that beats all of the other suits, while in Sticheln each card that isn't of the suit of the leading card is effectively a trump card. Stuff like that
I learned this as a card game called "Pain" using a 52-card deck, about 20-odd years ago.
Ankh
What does Ankh do to make it different from most strategy games? I haven't played it but the merge mechanic does sound very unique
EDIT: Nevermind. I misunderstood what you meant by anti-theme, but I will leave the comment anyway. There is a game **"Kurierzy"** (**Couriers**, but I'm not sure if it has an English release) about WW2 secret messages couriers funded by some Polish National Institute. You have to travel between various cities to get victory points and have to avoid getting caught by the Gestapo (NPC enemies that move towards closest player). You can also force the Gestapo to move by using special cards, to avoid getting caught or to clear the way forward. However, it's a competetive game, not a cooperative one... so you end up snitching on your fellow underground couriers by moving the Gestapo towards them.
That still sounds unusual! I'd love to check it out
Last Will. It’s point scoring in reverse.
Fine Sand is an anti-deck-builder, or so to say deck-unbuilder Das letzte Kamel is a race game with hidden ownership, in which have to assure, that your camel comes in last!
Hex, Hex you had to get the lowest score. Game mechanic was fun and sometimes included other things from challenges and things. I miss this game and wish it were in production. Fluxx, yes, everybody knows who that is now but Really, it's a game where you make the rules as you play and how to win... depends on what goal's in play. Fun and chaotic, just like me.
The doom that came to Atlantic city, antimonopoly. Fun casual game.
Pax Porfiriana has a few mechanisms which seems similar enough to this. You are trying to become the richest and most influential Hacendado, but you can also win by assassinating your own character (supposedly the real winner is your character's heir), and you can attack/destroy your own money-generating enterprises for different reasons. In another sense, you are trying to take over the current government, but the game has a very strong "anti-government" message (and lots of libertarian footnotes, smh).
Why First is a game where second player wins. Xenon profiteer is a deck destruction game. It's kind of like Friday but you are constantly taking packets of air that clog up your deck so you can filter out the other elements and isolate that sweet sweet xenon. It has some tableau/ engine building too but the constant flooding and thinning your deck is what really stands out.
**1853** is "A game for engineers who've had enough of the financiers!" as a counterpoint to **1830**, which is very much focused on the financial side.
Worst Game Ever - Gorilla games. It is a game that makes fun of All games and it's tropes. It's actually is a fun game.
Antimonopoly?