I got older, my mom left for a 6 month hike (AT), bought more board games, learning how to cook

i got carcassonne for my birthday (haven't played it yet but heard it's great), and then i bought pandemic (REALLY fun. you work together to try to cure diseases in the world before too many people get infected).

my roommate got boss monster (also fun, you are a boss at the end of a video game dungeon and you build up your dungeon so that it kills more adventurers than the other players) and xenoshyft (it's a co-op, deck-building tower defense kinda game? it works sorta like dominion with the drawing and buying of cards, but then you use those cards to defend the base against a bunch of aliens. also would recommend!)

ahoda @ 21/3/2016 10:03

One day I'm crashing your house Brian on game night. :)

bring snacks!

we're starving non-artists

vladykins @ 21/3/2016 13:06

itsbrianyay @ 21/3/2016 8:37 i got carcassonne for my birthday (haven't played it yet but heard it's great), and then i bought pandemic (REALLY fun. you work together to try to cure diseases in the world before too many people get infected). my roommate got boss monster (also fun, you are a boss at the end of a video game dungeon and you build up your dungeon so that it kills more adventurers than the other players) and xenoshyft (it's a co-op, deck-building tower defense kinda game? it works sorta like dominion with the drawing and buying of cards, but then you use those cards to defend the base against a bunch of aliens. also would recommend!) Pandemic is great and can be a pain in the ass (especially if you add any of the modules). But I like the cooperative games more and more, especially when playing with the kids. It's why I'm considering picking up Zombicide even though it is similar to all the Zombies!!! stuff I have.

dunno how old your kids are but if you like cooperative games, give hanabi a shot. it's my absolute favorite co-op game of all time but it's a lot of logic and memory, so i wouldn't recommend it for young'uns.

Dadd @ 21/3/2016 14:43

I need to buy some of these. You guys ordering the online? I have 17yr old girl (she's into Sherlock Holmes, etc.), 16-yr old girl (she's agreeable, but would probably only play cause its family time), 13 yr old girl (see last girl), and a 11-yr old boy (he's into star wars, games, etc.) What would you recommend for a wide assortment of players? I like the idea of a coop game.

i bought pandemic from the toys r us in kingstowne actually, but it only plays up to 4 (there's probably an expansion to increase the max)

but i've bought most of mine online.

i played flash point once, and it was pretty fun. it's pretty similar to pandemic in a lot of ways (co-op, trying to accomplish goal before X happens, everyone has a role that helps them do certain tasks, you have a certain number of moves per turn, etc) and it was pretty challenging when we played. essentially you're firefighters trying to rescue people from a burning building before it collapses.

betrayal at the house on the hill is really fun too. you are people exploring a haunted house and you all start on the same team, but eventually the "haunt" will trigger and based on how it occurred, there are like a billion different scenarios for how the rest of the game works. USUALLY, one player turns evil somehow and has to kill the others or prevent them from escaping or whatever, and the remaining players will have to kill the traitor, escape, etc. it's really fun and has tons of replay value since there are so many scenarios

my roommate has panic station which is good. you're astronauts or something on an ship infested with parasitic aliens and your goal is to explore the ship, find the hive, and burn it down. but, someone has secretly been infected by the parasite and is trying to sabotage the rest of the team, either by infecting and converting, killing everyone, or just making sure it's impossible to burn down the hive. this game is fun but it's not super balanced, and it's hard to succeed as the traitor without being super obvious about being scum. also it takes a while to learn what all the items/rules are.

oh, mysterium is pretty fun, but kinda out of the box for me.

basically everyone plays a medium except one person, who plays a ghost that is trying to convey details of different murders (each medium gets one murder) - who did it, where, and with what. but the only thing the ghost has at its disposal is a handful of cards with drawings on them. it's hard to explain..

here's a video tutorial, i have no idea if it's good or not, but it should explain it better than what i'm saying:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1BvMPf1gCE

anyway, the mediums can help each other try to decipher the hints they're given, and they can only be wrong a certain amount of times before they fail the objective.

red dragon inn is so fun! especially if you actually drink along with it.