Co-op Case Studies: The Witches

This article originally appeared in the Meeples Together blog.

Our Meeples Together model for cooperative games broadly divides their design up into three major parts: cooperative elements, challenge elements and (sometimes) adventure-game elements. These mechanical elements can also be used in other sorts of games. In particular, challenge systems can appear in fully competitive games, making them more unpredictable and also creating the possibility of survival-focused gameplay, where all of the players can lose to the game system.

This month, at Meeples Together, we’ll be exploring two challenge systems that Martin Wallace designed to add survival concerns to otherwise competitive games: The Witches (2013) and AuZtralia (2018). (The second will be along in two weeks.)


The Witches by Martin Wallace

Publisher: Mayfair Games (2013)
Cooperative Style: Survival-Focused Cooperation
Play Style: Adventure Game, Card Management

Overview

In The Witches, players take on the roles of trainee witches, who are sent to the country of Lancre to solve problems.  Whoever solves the most and most difficult problems wins — but if too many crises stack up, or if too many elves appear, then everyone can lose. Continue reading

New to Me: Fall 2013

Though my new gaming was light in fall (primarily because my gaming was light in fall, due to the holidays), I’ve opted to publish my short list of new-to-me games while they’re all still fresh. (And it looks like I still managed almost a dozen new games.) As always this is an assessment of how much I like the games, rather than whether they’re great or not. I tend to prefer light-to-medium euros that don’t make me work too hard.


The Great

Caverna: The Cave FarmersCaverna: The Cave Farmers (2013). I thought Agricola (2007) was great the first time I played it, because it combined worker placement with scarcity and it also supported deep and thoughtful gameplay. It’s too long for me to play very often, but it’s still a great game that I love when I play. Caverna is essentially more of the same, but with fantasy theming, with some simplified game elements, with reduced randomness, and with an interesting new expeditions systems. Overall, it’s a great variant, that’s just (barely) far enough from the original that you might want to own both.

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