16 at the UNO Park Community Center for an evening of all co-op games

IN: Steve & Sandy, Sean & Wendy, Ethan & Amy, Tony & Rachel, Tim, Chris, Rob, Julie, Reimi, Nicole, Sean K, Landon

Tranquility 2x (led by K-ban)  2020 card game where the goal is for the team to complete the grid before any player runs out of available actions. Cards must be placed so that the grid ascends in numerical order from bottom left to top right. All the players win if they manage to complete the grid and have placed a Start and Finish card. All players lose if a single player can no longer play or discard any cards legally following the rules. The players may not, however, communicate. Our quartet won once and lost once against the game.

The Crew: the Quest for Planet Nine (led by Ethan) 2019  co-operative trick-taking game where the players set out as astronauts on an uncertain space adventure. The eventful journey through space extends over 50 exciting missions. But this game can only be defeated by meeting common individual tasks of each player. In order to meet the varied challenges communication is essential in the team. But this is more difficult than expected in space. With each mission the game becomes more difficult. After each mission the game can be paused and continued later. During each mission it is not the number of tricks but the right tricks at the right time that count. The team completes a mission only if every single player is successful in fulfilling their tasks.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/284083/the-crew-the-quest-for-planet-nine

Sky Team (led by Tim) 2023 2-player game in which players are a pilot and co-pilot at the controls of an airliner. Your goal is to work together as a team to land your airplane in different airports around the world. To land your plane, players need to silently assign their dice to the correct spaces in your cockpit to balance the axis of the plane, control its speed, deploy the flaps, extend the landing gear, contact the control tower to clear your path, and even have a little coffee to improve your concentration enough to change the value of your dice. If the aircraft tilts too much and stalls, overshoots the airport, or collides with another aircraft, you lose the game…and your pilot’s license…and probably your life. Tim and Chris successfully landed their plane in Montreal. 

Cahoots 2x (led by Sandy) 2018 game where cards are played to one of four piles by matching color or number. Players work together as a team to complete a series of goals — without communicating what’s in their hands. One win and one loss for our intrepid trio.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/246761/cahoots

Daybreak (lead by Sean) 2023 Kennerspiel winner is a co-op game about climate action. Each player controls a world power, deploying policies and technologies to both dismantle the engine of global heating and to build resilient societies that protect people from life-threatening crises.If the global temperature gets too high, or if too many people from any world power are in crisis, everyone loses. But if players work together to draw down global emissions to net-zero, they all win! Our intrepid trio failed miserably as the game beat us up mercilessly and the planet suffered.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/334986/daybreak

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle (led by Chris) 2016  cooperative deck-building game where it’s up to four students to ensure the safety of the school by defeating villains and consolidating their defenses.Players take on the role of a Hogwarts student: Harry, Ron, Hermione or Neville, each with their own personal deck of cards that’s used to acquire resources. By gaining influence, players add more cards to their deck in the form of iconic characters, spells, and magical items. Other cards allow them to regain health or fight against villains, keeping them from gaining power. The villains set back players with their attacks and Dark Arts. Only by working together will players be able to defeat all of the villains, securing the castle from the forces of evil.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/199042/harry-potter-hogwarts-battle

Wilmot’s Warehouse (led by Sandy) 2024 storytelling game where players work cooperatively to organize the warehouse, using memory, imagination, and silly stories the group makes up. Players draw product tiles from the stack, discuss what they look like, and place them somewhere they’ll remember. After each tile is placed, it is flipped over and can’t be looked at again until the end of the game. As a result, the team has to remember where previous tiles were placed as the group decides where to place new ones. At the end of the game, in a five-minute rush, the team has to match all 35 face-down tiles with customer cards. Consult the team’s performance review to see how well you did! Our intrepid quartet was 35 for 35 in 1 minute 47 seconds – not near our group record of 55 seconds but a good time anyhow.

Ghost Stories 2x (led by Amy)  The players protect the village from incarnations of the lord of hell – Wu-Feng – and his legions of ghosts before they haunt a town and recover the ashes that will allow him to return to life. Each Player represents a Taoist monk working together with the others to fight off waves of ghosts. To exorcise a ghost, the Taoist rolls three Tao dice with different colors: red, blue, green, yellow, black, and white. If the result of the roll matches the color(s) of the ghost or incarnation of Wu-Feng, the exorcism succeeds. To win, the players must defeat the incarnation of Wu-Feng, a boss who arrives at the end of the game.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37046/ghost-stories

60 Second City (led by Ethan) 2021 2-player co-op. Over 5 one-minute rounds, players frantically place domino shaped pieces onto a square grid in an effort to clear an assortment of goal cards. Both players draw tiles & quickly place them on the game board at the same time. Players work together to complete building goals while protecting their city from space-blocking pollution. 

Letter Jam (led by Sandy) 2019 cooperative word game where players assist each other in composing meaningful words from letters around the table. The trick is holding the letter card so that it’s only visible to other players and not to you. At the start of the game, each player receives a set of face-down letter cards that can be arranged to form an existing word. The setup can be prepared by using a special card scanning app, or by players selecting words for each other. Each player then puts their first card in their stand facing the other players without looking at it, and the game begins. The game is played in turns. Each turn, players simultaneously search other players’ letters to see what words they can spell out (telling the others the length of the word they can make up). The player who offers the longest word can then be chosen as the clue giver. The clue giver spells out their clue by putting numbered tokens in front of the other players. Number one goes to the player whose letter comes first in the clue, number two to the second letter etc. They can always use a wild card which can be any letter, but they cannot tell others which letter it represents. Each player with a numbered token (or tokens) in front of them then tries to figure out what their letter is. If they do, they place the card face down before revealing the next letter. At the end of the game, players can then rearrange the cards to try to form an existing word. All players then reveal their cards to see if they were successful or not. The more players who have an existing word in front of them, the bigger their collective success.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/275467/letter-jam

Hanabi Deluxe (led by Ethan) Multi-player 2013 German Game of the Year winner that utilizes chunky tiles rather than the original playing cards. In Japanese Hanabi means fireworks and players are cooperatively trying to play tiles to a central fireworks display in ascending order. A player can see every other player’s tiles except their own and therefore clues must be given about the numbers or the colors of their tiles. Players must act as a team to avoid errors and to finish the fireworks display before they run out of cards. Groups tend to develop their own rules/suggestions for giving clues to increase their scores.

The Gang (led by Julie/Sandy) 2024 co-operative version of Texas Hold’em where players bet on how good they think their hand of cards will be relative to the other players, then try to make their predictions a reality. Early in a round, without talking to each other, each player chooses a chip indicating how good they think their hand is. Then they begin dealing cards into the middle of the table and have a chance to reassess their hands as more cards are revealed. At the end of the round, players see whether they correctly evaluated their hand. If all players did, you get to open one of the bank vaults! If not, you trip the alarm! If you manage to open three vaults before you trip the alarm three times, your gang wins! Our quartet opened all 3 vaults for the win.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/411567/the-gang

Steve