#Cooperative Games

[ribbon-c]

Toxic Invaders Floppies 💾✨

It's now been two years since @sarahbduck and I completed our first game, Toxic Invaders. It's a co-op bullet hell made with the Pico-8!

To celebrate our first big project together, I made these physical copies of the game shortly after the release. The coloured ones are a very limited set while the monochrome have had over 60 made.

Each floppy has multiple builds of the game, the soundtrack, and a tiny HTML page. It was a challenge to fit it all on a 1.44MB disk, but Sarah did some cool compression on nearly all of the files.

[thryth-gaming]

Sentinels of the Multiverse Definitive Edition: Spite

Okay…. so post-game report.

Spite in the prior edition is a fight I tend not to like running because it tends to be a long, drawn out slog. So I've held off on trying him in the new edition even though they've worked hard to clean up a lot of decks.

This was the team I took on this fight:

And I some what unwisely took them to Rook City

Anyway… this time, the game took me four rounds… but admittedly… I got lucky.

Spite got one round of damage off (because villains always take first turn) and then he was unable to deal damage for the next two rounds because Alpha kept him Hamstrung (darn pesky reporters turning out to be werewolves) and peeked at his plans (cards).

Expat went right into dealing the hurt out by power of gun (dang French-Canadian gun-enthusiasts)

Wraith used the clues Alpha dug up to cancel some of his plans and started digging into her utility belt right away for some throwing razors and targetting computers. (dang billionaire vigilantes)

Setback's bad luck kept feeding Expat ammo and guns, getting attention directed at him, and upseting some of Spite's ongoing set-up (dang supportive boyfriends who are probability vortices)

And that left Mr. Fixer to get all zen and martial arts up with his Hoist Chain. (dang old man martial artists mechanics)

Rook City tried a couple of smear campaigns, but we kept that under control, though Fixer had bop a racketeer upside the head just before we got the serial killer under control by power of werewolf, gun, throwing knives, luck, and martial arts.

Okay basic notes here.

The three biggest changes to Spite:

His enhancement drugs are no longer indestructible.

Bystanders are no longer sent to a safe haven.

His flip-side is no longer a permanent change.

So, let's talk about Bystanders first.

There are three varieties as shown above, two copies of each. Now, when they take damage, you can redirect that damage to a hero. But, as long as they remain in play, they also give the heroes a benefit. This can be healing, peeking ahead at a deck, or drawing a card.

Spite's end phase has him dealing damage to the Lowest HP target, meaning the Lost Child is generally going to be the one in the most danger at any given time. But this did immediately put me in a nervous mind because I foresaw soaking up a lot of damage to keep the bystanders protected.

The drugs now being destructible less extreme but significant. Spite's drug cards being indestructible was one of the most fun draining aspects of the old villain deck, along with how incredibly difficult it is to protect Bystanders from being turned into a bloody smear.

Now, it's still harrowing (well, my initial reaction was this, but you'll see why this particular game I didn't have much issue later) because you're draining your life to keep Bystanders alive when Spite is capable of dishing out a large amount of damage. But it feels a bit more like you being in a bad spot and having to make choices rather than just having the rug constantly pulled from under you.

But the drugs often just make it next to impossible to do anything... at all. You feel constantly paralyzed and unable to do anything about them.

The next thing is Spite's flip-side:

In the prior edition, once Spite flipped, that was it. He stopped playing cards. instead just dealing damage when he would otherwise do so. And there was no way to flip him back.

Now, he does increased damage, but there is a built in countdown based on how many tokens he built up on his other form. The minimum is 3 tokens, which is when he flips, but it's possible for him to play a card that adds tokens to him. In my game, he had 8 tokens when he flipped.

This has both gameplay and thematic benefits in that there is now a strategy to the idea of whether or not you want to keep Spite here or push him quicker back to his Slasher side and this also represents his body burning through the effects of his enhancement drugs.

Also note that the drugs themselves cause him to burn through his tokens faster, which feeds in again to the question of whether you want a brief bit of pain that you think you can weather or else a prolonged, but less dangerous period due to the choice of leaving the drugs in play or destroying them right away.

Now, let's move on to the team I chose.

In first position, I chose werewolf reporter Tabitha Taft, aka Alpha. I chose the reporter variant of the character specifically for her power. The base version of Alpha is more what you'd expect from a werewolf: dealing damage and getting more wolfy. (see below)

Instead, I wanted the ability to look at Spite's deck and see what he was going to do, and maybe determine some ordering. I didn't end up using this power for that as much as I wanted, either because of opportunity (you need to bury an Aspect to do it) or need, but I did still find it useful.

This was also a BIG risk, because when I chose this character, I did not understand how Bystanders worked... namely that they are now targets with low HP. And given how Tabitha's Aspects work, it was possible that she'd end up targeting the Bystanders herself and doing more damage to my team.

As you can see, as soon as Alpha has 3 Aspects in play, she starts targeting the lowest HP character on the field. Fortunately, by the time this happened, Spite was on 1 HP and thus WAS the target.

As it turns out, I drew Full Moon first round. As a Suddenly! card that immediately played whether I wanted it to or not. This brought Lupine Senses out giving her another tool to watch Spite's deck and control it. One that didn't require me to use either a power or card play.

So, Tabitha was doing the job I took her for, which was spying out Spite's plans so I could cut them off. However, it turns out the thing that really turned my luck in this game was the two copies of Hamstring I drew in her starting hand.

This allowed me to RUIN Spite for two whole rounds during which time I was able to set up and dealing damage.

He could not deal damage, so he could not even threaten Bystanders, much less damage my team.

This brings us to the next member of the team.

Expat is one of the decks that has seen a lot of redesign. In the prior edition, she is still one of my favorite characters, but her deck is a bit sluggish and prone to stalling. Not so much anymore. I've played her deck a couple of times now and she moves quite well. She also now has a lot of team-lead support card shenanigans going on.

Granted, I didn't use her for support in this game. I used her for gun, mostly shotgun, as it came into her hand by the end of the first round (more on that later). But I also used a bit of Assault Rifle since it now gives the ability to give someone else a card draw.

By the end of the game I did have all her guns in play. (Setback's doing) I didn't use Pride and Prejudice (if I had a global damage bonus to all heroes I would have as that global would have applied twice then) because in the situation it was doing the same as the shotgun. I didn't use the Modified SMG because it would have targeted the Bystanders and that was counter productive. I DID use the Assault Rifle because of the "up to 3 targets" language meaning I didn't have to chose more and it gave an ally a card draw.

I kept her in Ammo pretty constantly. This was both due to her own cards and (yes) Setback. (Supportive boyfriend is supportive)

She did the vast majority of my damage (as a note, I did early on forget base Spite had damage reduction, so at some point I healed him for 10 due to some of my people using irreducible damage.)

This brings us to the next team member.

I went with Detective Wraith. Basic Wraith would still be very useful for protecting Bystanders from plinking damage, but I specifically had a plan for using Alpha to look at Spite's upcoming card and then use Wraith to remove cards I didn't like.

As it turns out, once Lupine Senses came out, Alpha was able to handle both sides of that plan without even using her Power, but it was nice to have the option. Wraith has also gotten an update, but her function in this game played within the lines of her past edition's playstyle. Or rather, one of her playstyles.

Wraith is character who can serve many roles. In this case, I used her for a mix of deck control (she did get used that in the first round) and damage dealing since both her Razor Ordanance and Targeting Computer hit the game early.

Though I did benefit from three changed cards:

Utility Belt - has been improved from just granting an extra Power use to also giving a power to deck-dive or extra card play.

Grappling Hook - has been shifted from it's second half being "may draw a card" to "may draw 1 card or play 1 card". Some might note the first half now reads as "Destroy Environment or Ongoing" but Environment cards now have ongoing as a tag so it can still be used to remove troublesome environment cards, more on that later.

Smoke bombs - changed from a redirect damage to just blanket causing Heroes to take less damage while also improving Wraith's damage... but it now only lasts a single round.

Still, like Expat, she was mostly on dealing lots of damage since she got her big weapon and targeting computer out.

And that comes to the next character, Expat's beau, the golden retriever dude of this set:

Setback is a bit of an airhead with massively good intentions and a loveable personality. He has some moderately superhuman physicality, but his only innate power is the absurd effect he has on probability. His luck is never mild, it is either extremely bad or extremely good. And this is how he got his enhanced physique actually:

Loses job and has to pick up a janitor job in the meantime.

The janitor job is with an evil corp fronting for evil scientist person who sticks him in an experiment that has killed everyone so far.

He actually survives and gets properly enhanced.

Anyway, I'm going a bit into his premise and story because the game does his absurd luck very well. First note that his basic power is just play a card off the top of his deck... blind.

Allow me to show you the first card I played as a result of that.

And I absolutely pushed all three of those card plays resulting in this:

Among several other cards. And yes... I was absolutely using that to feed Expat ALL the guns and ammo. Flavor win go!

So the way his cards work is he has Unlucky and Lucky cards. The Unlucky cards have a downside and a good side. Mostly the downside keeps happening while the good side is only immediately useful. But then you can play a Lucky card which gives a benefit and then allows you to destroy up to 3 Unlucky cards for increased benefit.

I had some decent damage dealing in there, but honestly, I was mostly going with blind card plays. I even played Push Your Luck on its own deliberately once. So I didn't particularly have a plan for him. He was just feeding other people card plays and soaking up damage for them.

It was really useful and let me set up Expat very quickly as well as get things moving for other characters pretty fast.

And that brings us to the last member of this team.

Mr Fixer is another very powerful character from the original edition who can be hard to set up and can also stall or feel meh if your luck is bad. He's now been given some easier ways to search through his deck for Styles and Tools.

Depending on which Styles and Tools you set him up with, he can serve a number of roles. In my case, I was using the Hoist Chain and Alternating Tiger Claw. The Tiger Claw was just the first style I drew and never had another turn up. But the Hoist Chain was a deliberate choice and Harmony was something that Setback called up via his absurd luck.

Where as the first two rounds were about Alpha shutting Spite down entirely, round three was about Wraith and Mr. Fixer keeping his damage reduced to pretty much zero. In his last turn he got two attacks in applying a total of -2 to Spite's damage, with Wraith's smoke adding another -1 dealt to heroes for a total of -3.

He did this by a combination of his base power and the Charge one shot card.

And that's the villain and all the heroes so let's move on to the environment.

Rook City from the first edition has something of a reputation of being one of the harshest environment decks. It the past it only had two allies for the heroes and all the rest of the deck was varying degrees of nasty.

The deck now has three allies for the heroes (one of whom used to be a bystander in Spite's deck). In my game four cards came up.

Tony Taurus showed up first and helped me get rid of one of Spite's ongoings. I unfortunately lost access to him due to Setback's card plays destroying an environment card when he was the only target. Anti-Hero Sentiment then showed up after him but I was able to remove it early. Media Pressure was revealed and discarded via Lost Child's bystander benefit so never entered play and Ambitious Racketeer ended up getting backhanded by Mister Fixer when he showed up right at the end.

I've looked through Rook City's other cards a bit and yeah, it has a very bleak outlook in a lot of cases.

Overall.

Spite is no longer a slog, plays well, works thematically and gameplay.

Rook City is mostly the same with the Smear effects being a new wrinkle I only saw a hint of here.

Expat, Mister Fixer, and Setback's redesigns work very well.

Reporter Alpha digs through her deck so fast and I just got lucky with her. So extremely lucky.

Wraith still plays much the same though with some of her weaker cards tightened up.

[whimseysthrone]

Immersion & Worldbuilding in Co-op Video Games

Void Crew, Deep Rock Galactic, and Helldivers 2: three co-op games, three “shooters” (kind of, more on that later), and three games that build on their own self-contained fiction. I’ve played all three. I’ve enjoyed all three. So why do I only admire two of them? Continue reading Immersion & Worldbuilding in Co-op Video Games

[hazzieandnord]

Checking out the new character, Fire Queen, in the bullet heaven game, Nightfeed by WRF Studios.

[grantlyon]

I'm a competitive person, but it's nice to leave that competitiveness behind and work together sometimes! This was a great year for cooperative games.

[neon-and-dust]

A game of Lexicon with my partner

My gf and I started playing a roleplaying/writing game called Lexicon (here's the wikipedia page). It goes like this: going down the alphabet each player takes the role of an academic and writes an encyclopedia style entry about a made up topic, it can be stuff like a fictional country, a war, art movements, magic, animals, anything that could go in an encyclopedia. All of these entries are part of the same world.

We did a slightly modified version, as Lexicon is a game for groups in forums and we played just in two via email. We wanted to post some of our entries, I'll start with the first written by me (pardon my mistakes, I'm not a native speaker and I'm also illiterate):

___________________________________

Ambivalentia

Ambivalentia is a country, or maybe a dukedom, or a polis, it hasn't been decided yet, inhabited by the most indecisive and indifferent people of history: the Ambivalentians. Located in a flat, dull land (much like its inhabitants), neighbouring the countries of Insufferenburg, Boriopolis and Belgium.

It's unknown what caused all the people of this country to become so indifferent and neutral about everything in their life, but everybody who has ever visited can confirm: it is impossible to organize anything with a group of Ambivalentians.

It's rare that an Ambivalentian visits other countries/dukedoms/polis (it is rarely worth the effort for them), so what follows are the observation of famous adventurer-explorer Baron Gentleman (1), who resided in the city of Indifferentia, capital of Ambivalentia, and had this to say:

"During my long sojourn in the passable city of Indifferentia, I have learned one thing: I fucking hate this place am afraid I do not quite fit in. The people here are an indecisive lot; I have tried numerous time to organise any kind of going out, asking everybody where they would like to go, and offering several excellent options if I might say so myself [Baron Gentleman goes on a long diatribe about his dedication to finding only the best places, the best experiences and the best men and women. Most of this content is inappropriate to this Encyclopedia]. But no matter how many wonderful ideas I had, nobody was ever interested! They would always say "It makes no difference to me what we do" "Anything is fine with me" "I have no preference". Enough to drive the most stubborn man mad!

I gave up after failing to organize my birthday party and just stayed home to drink the Ambivelentian wine, which is infuriatingly neither good nor bad."

One historical curiosity about Ambivalentia is that nobody was ever successful in dominating the place. The Ambivalentians saw the worst of the tyrants and the most benevolent of kings take power, and to all they would reply the same way: a shrug and half assed complacency. Every ruler would eventually go mad about how little their inhabitants cared about them, often ordering village burning and pillagings. Those pillages have never caused great damage, as the soldiers are not very enthusiastic about anything, not even plundering. The number of rulers throwing themself off the palace increases every year, and nobody has ever made the effort of building a net to catch them as they fall or something.

The national animal is the Jofonco(2), known for being completely unknown, as the Ambivalentian never bothered to draw it and put it on a flag or anything.

Citations

1. Baron Gentleman: Recount of the extraordinary adventures of Baron Gentleman, as written, edited and published by Baron Gentleman.

2. Jofonco: Speculations, hypotheses and complete fabrications about Jofonco, the unseen Ambivalentian animal.

Written by: Cornelius Smartbuttocks

___________________________

Thanks for reading! The thing I love most about this game is how we kept building on top of each other's entries, which is a surprisingly good way to worldbuild together. I think this could work well for cooperative worldbuilding in a ttrpg and the like.

Maybe I'll post more entries later, we've already reached the W in our game so there's a lot of stories. Let me know what you think!

P.S.: small clarification, the citations at the end are topics that the other player is encouraged to write about in their entry for that letter. So my gf for her entry wrote about Baron Gentleman

[realwomenofgaming]

Dorfromantik Board Game Review

Hulyen reviews the award winning, cooperative board game.

Hi all! My name’s Hulyen and I’m going to be doing some board game reviews for Real Women of Gaming. I love board gaming, video gaming and cats (and am excited to have the chance to review some here!) The first board game that I’ll be reviewing is the Spiel des Jahres 2023 winner Dorfromantik from Pegasus Spiele based on the video game from Toukana Interactive! Dorfromantik is a cooperative…

[ryunneldred]

Arbiter | Halo 2: Anniversary Pt. 4

[thinkithinktoomuch]

So I need to come up with an exit project for my Masters degree (mathematics) and earlier this week I was thinking “oh it might be cool to do something along the lines of ‘Tumblr Polls as Cooperative Games’” BUT THEN everyone went and failed the cake one and now Vanilla Extract is a tumblr thing and the goal is no longer cooperation, but chaos.

Anyways, thank you tumblr for being you.

[tweedsmuir-library]

Board Game Spotlight

Here are a few of the titles in the games collection at your School Library. We have some classic favourites as well as some newer games that you may not have heard of. Come on in to give them a try. November is International Games Month @ Your Library

[mx-lamour]

When I'm scheduling D&D sessions with the group...

Them: *literally anything comes up*

Me: Your priorities are wrong, but ok

[verdanturfwind]

I went to a baseball game and this popped up on the screen and I burst out laughing

[hazzieandnord]

Episode 3 of the first chapter in our first playthrough of FTKII.

[389]

Twin Peaks Video Game

[silentwisher-feed]

Designing the Depths: Imagining a Dungeon Master Mode for Deep Rock Galactic

Deep Rock Galactic (DRG) offers an exhilarating blend of teamwork and survival in an alien-infested, mineral-rich universe. Yet, as we previously discussed, there’s a tantalizing possibility that could ramp up the excitement even more: a Dungeon Master mode. Today, we want to dive deeper into the mechanics of how this feature could be implemented, and why it would be a worthwhile addition to the…

[stonedcoast]

Turpee Slurpee by Grass Roots

Apologies for the late post this week. I was working on a Ramblings post that turned into something bigger than expected, so I polished a review I had waiting in the wings for now. It's brief, but I hope you enjoy it all the same.

Indica Dominant HybridHigh THC (26% – 30%)Flower Turpee Slurpee is a high THC indica hybrid, crossing GMO and Orange Zkittlez, and it lives up to its pedigree. The muted green nugs are dense, almost hard to pull apart. The aroma – certainly fragrant even before breaking into the buds – bursts forth from the inside, sweet and sour with a soft diesel halo. The smoke is rich, earthy and oily,…