[Tulpa]

Oh hey this thread.

I've been playing Space Alert recently. It came out in 2009, Space Alert is basically the board game equivalent of FTL. Randomly generated missions, desperately trying to survive and overcome the threats coming at you. Single, poorly assembled space ship vs. the universe. Co-op game where you all try to decide your turns in real time while a computer announces threats, communications break down, and every imaginable disaster happens at once. After the real time phase ends (whether or not you were able to place all your actions in the turn order), the resolution phase kicks in and you get to see how it all went horribly wrong. On occasions, I've ended up continually blind firing the port laser cannon despite running out of fuel 4 turns beforehand, another player has forgotten to reactivate the robots after dealing with an internal security threat and just wandered around doing nothing for the next few turns, lights going out because someone forgot to wiggle the mouse on the main computer and the screensaver came up, etc.

It's amazing. An entire game is played in about 40 minutes: 12 minutes real time panic attack and the rest laughing at all of our horrible mistakes.

Coup is a masterpiece. A super quick to play game of deception, sudden reversals and intrigue. Each game lasts from 5-20 minutes and every turn has at least one interesting decision to make. Features player elimination (the game ends when only one player is left) but this isn't really a negative when the game plays so quickly. Highly competitive, very lightly random and heavily skews towards tactical play.
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[Tulpa]

Hanabi is one of the best coop games out right now. It avoids one of the major problems of the genre (expert players telling everyone what to do) by constraining what kind and how much info can be exchanged between players.

Mascarade is a fun and light hidden role backstabbing game that feels like a more random, chaotic take on something like coup.
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[Tulpa]

[Tulpa]

lol I ended up buying tragedy looper and it looks right up my alley. The criticisms online mostly come from a place of board-gamer stubbornness: There's only 10 scenarios in the base game and once they're beaten you'll have to make or get more because they're generally non-repeatable. Even though the game provides exacting tools and instructions for how to make additional scenarios. Given that I have an RPG background, this is a non-issue for me.

EDIT: I ran Tragedy Looper tonight. You can tell a co-op game is going to be a continuing source of fun in the future when the protagonists only barely managed to survive the tutorial script (there's no random element in this game, it's all deduction and mind games). Can't wait to throw an actual challenge at them.
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