I'm starting with my favorite Genre.
Co-op games.
So any people who play games love the adversarial nature of games, I know people who like the idea of pounding their friends to make their bread and if they can't do that in game then the game holds no appeal to them.
I however prefer the more co-operative approach to my games, much as i like things to be in life. Teaming up with my friends and family to defeat something that would hurt us or knock our homes down. Banding together in the face of adversity is a theme i love in pretty much all aspects of my life. enough about me as a person on to my favorite kind of game.
My journey towards gaming has been a life long one, and painfully sow but i eventually got there ad somehow managed to be/have a part of gaming history on my shelf.
In the year 2000 the worlds first non childrens Co-Op game hit the shelves in our stores.
'Lord oft he Rings' sits on our shelf and though we don't play it anymore, it is safe from the periodic culling of games we do because this game was the first of it's sort, ours is even from before 'Fantasy Flight' bought the rights to LoTRs and republished it.
In this game my co-players and i had to work together, sacrifice, and hold our breaths as the bad guy closed in on us and we tried to get that damned ring into the molten river it was destined for. I think, we managed to do it maybe once. It's tough, and that's amazing. I love having that piece of history on my shelf.
from that point this subcategory of games grew until it became a major part of the yearly releases, Dice Tower stated in their latest top 10 co-op (of which we have 6 on our shelf) video that in 2012 something like 20 co-op games were released.
The sub category of games is now big enough to have two of it's very own sub categories, full co-op and partial co-op.
Easily differentiated by the fact that in full co-op group, everyone worked together against the board such as in Arkham Horror, Lord of the Rings and Flashpoint, partial co-op is marked by the traitor mechanic that's found in 'Shadows over Camelot', 'Battlestar Gallactica', and 'Pandemic: On the Brink'.
personally i'm not a fan of the traitor mechanic, however it is something that can make these games much more palatable to those who enjoy a more adversarial environment in their games ad thus opens up this category of games to more potential players.
The biggest problem tat people seem to have with co-op games is that one person can play them (which i kinda love). I've heard things like
'It's solitaire with a group'
and
'If I can't win the game it's not really winning'
and
'it's not really a multi person game it's one person directing the troops'
In the light of my intro post to the series i'm going to said, that all of these are fair thoughts and ideas, if it's not your thing, that's fine. Co-op games can certainly suffer from a 'lead' personality and many followers and they shouldn't by any stretch of the imagination be played by everyone. I have people in my life that don't so much as play these games as follow a leader, sometimes that leader doesn't even mean to lead but when asked 'well what do you think' it's hard not to voice an opinion sometimes.
I however have only experienced this very rarely in the people who surround me, and as such i find playing these games rewarding and in some ways a good way of strengthening the bonds of friendship and family rather than undermining it as i feel some other 'games' do.
My personal issue with so-op games falls with the partial co-ops and the traitor feature. I have 2 adults in my house and therefore with this mechanic most games can't be done between 2 people there needs to be at least 3. For the most part we've found ways to ignore that mechanic thanks to boardgamegeek.com, and even with more players i'd just rather not have it in my games, given how much I prefer t work as a team i am not a huge fan of the suspicion and mistrust the traitor mechanic can cause.
Now I've not played all of those I've mentioned, most but not all, but I've played others and even own others not mentioned either here or in the Dice Tower top 10. There are many games i still want to try.
This is my favorite genre and without buying 'bad' games deliberately i'm kinda collecting games of this category. Which of course means I have a number of games in this category. I'm going to to a top three where i can for most of the categories, i don't have nearly enough experience to be able to do a top 10 or even a top 5 so i'm sticking to three, although in some categories i won't be able to even do that. But here's my co-op top 3.
3. Arkham Horror
2. Shadows Over Camelot
1. Pandemic
And here's why.
3. Arkham Horror - it's only this far down the list because i don't play it as often as i used to. But this IS my gateway game. I bought it on a whim and fell in love. This is the game that made me realize that games were so much MORE than what i grew up with, they were good, complex, and better still i didn't have to 'win' at the cost of everyone else in fact i needed my co-players to beat the game. It sits on my shelf a lot more than it used to now, partly because i have limited folk to play it with and partly because once a week if not more every week for at least 6 months without expansions to mix it up a bit had me run a little dry on it. But i still love it.
2. Shadows over Camelot - Due to the shelf price of this came i thought i'd never own it, i was lucky enough to get it cheap recently though and for the reason of it being new to me i'm quite enamored of it. Nice theme, it's a fun experience and i look forward to playing it with more people. Some complaints I've heard is that the puzzle or poker nature of some parts of it mean that it's less immersive or plain non thematic, but i enjoyed that too really. So far we have a 100% loss rate on this one and is the only one that has an optional 'traitor' element in it that we didn't play because there were only two of us.
1. Pandemic - this one still comes to the table with some frequency and i still love it. I'm ready for the expansion but i'll happily play it without it still and I enjoy it every time. We have about a 50/50 win/lose ratio on this one but i think it might be time to step up the difficulty on it too.
The only gripe i have about this game is a timing issue. We bought it and less than 6 months later there was a newer shinier version out and now ours is outdated and can't be expanded upon. Stubbornness has stopped me from trading up until recently now i'm just too keen on getting the expansion and i think the time nears when we might have to reinvest in this game.
If i were doing a top 4 then Descent 2.0 would have made the list also.
Theses are my top three out of the 8 or so that we own/have on our shelf
Castle Panic
Pandemic
Shadows Over Camelot
Arkham Horror
Lord of the Rings
Battlestar Gallactica
Ghost Stories
Descent 2.0: Journey's into the dark
Ones i'd love to try:
Flashpoint
Police Precinct
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective
Yggdrasil
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