I would be curious about your favorite coop games. I often find them a big lacking, often being a bit unbalanced. An example is Battle for Hogwarts, where one game can be a walk in the park and another absolutely impossible and rarely is there a balanced match.

  •  tetha   ( @tetha@lemmy.ml ) English
    4•1 year ago

    IMO, no.

    Assuming one bloke knows the rules, the game flows fairly smoothly. In the pre-haunt phase, you:

    • Generally move through an unknown door to a new room
    • Draw a room card on the right floor, repeat as necessary
    • Draw an event card based on your room card and execute the event card.
    • Roll if haunt happens.

    Once the group knows these base rules, the pre-haunt game goes very quickly, because you mostly move 2-3 squares (depending on your move points), draw a room, place a room, draw a card, resolve the card and pass on. If the group knows the game, this goes very quickly.

    Once the haunt triggers, you have a builtin bio-break. Both the survivors and the evil guy have a bunch of new rules to read and understand. For my main crew, this usually takes 5 - 10 minutes to read and discuss strategies, and we usually combine this with bio-breaks, drink refills, snacks and such.

    Comparing this with games like Arkam Horror, Eldritch Horror, or even worse, actual P&P games like DND, It is very smoooth and low-rule-lawyers to play.

      •  EvilEwok   ( @EvilEwok@lemmy.world ) English
        3•1 year ago

        I’ve played a lot of Betrayal. I play tested it at AvalonCon back while I was in high school.

        It’s very random, and has the potential for some really great games and some real duds. I know in the later editions there have been efforts made to tighten up the scenario balance, do maybe things are better. But From my experience, maybe 1 in 3 games has been ‘good’, 1 just meh, and the last a steamroller for one side. So many of the scenarios depend on thr size of the house, with too large or too small of a house making it unbalanced. Or specific items being useless or over powered. And many of the scenarios have pretty loose rules.

        As long as you understand that, it’s a fairly light game that can have a decently large group working together.

        I’ve enjoyed my copy, but there was a stretch where it was OOP and going for big money. It wasn’t worth that, but for a regular in-print price, it’s fine.