Carcassonne Day Report
What a great day with Amanda, , Mara, and my brother Andy! We started with a five player game of Carcassonne, including the expansions The River, Inns & Cathedrals, Traders & Builders, and Abbey & Mayor. It was my first time using Abbey & Mayor, and I loved it as much as I thought I would. Mara loaned it to me!
Then we played Kingsburg. Next sewed pants for the marionette, while the rest of us worked on the hat and made some excellent plans for other costumes and props for "The Trouble With Deathtraps".
As people called it a night, we played games which support fewer players, like San Juan, and the new addition to the Penguicon gaming library: Pandemic.
Pandemic is a truly fantastic cooperative game of the sort where either everyone wins or everyone loses. It is an order of magnitude simpler than other cooperative games like Battlestar Galactica, Arkham Horror, or Shadows Over Camelot, which I think is a good thing. Although we lost and everyone in the world died of plague, we were tantalizingly close to winning, and are ready to take on Pandemic again soon.
Here is a video of a talk at Google about the process of designing and playtesting Pandemic, and what games can teach us about cooperation and engagement. Good stuff.
Comments
crywolf on Sep. 20, 2009 5:21 AM
You should check out a game called Red November. It consists of 3-6 gnomes trying to survive an hour on a gnomish submarine, as things go disastrously wrong. It's not an all-or-none game, but it is very cooperative. And hilarious.
Leave a Comment