Cooperative Game

Welcome to Anytown, U.S.A. where people grumble about the quality of their health care but still show up at Healthy Heart Hospital hoping they made a smart decision. Much has been said (and even more has been written) about the previous administration’s haphazard management of Healthy Heart. In an effort to save the Hospital, you and your allies among its leading Physicians have staged a recent “Clinical Coup” and taken over the Hospital to restore its prestige. However, actually managing things from the inside is never as easy as it appears from the outside, and juggling the responsibilities at Healthy Heart Hospital can quickly turn even the noblest healer into a money-grubbing pragmatist cynically looking for a place to hide the victims of your “care.”
Does your team have what it takes to bring Healthy Heart Hospital back to its former glory without becoming Hard Hearted in the process?
Healthy Heart Hospital is a cooperative game for 1 to 5 players, played in rounds, with each player spending actions to treat and (hopefully) cure the various patients that come pouring into the hospital each round. Patients are represented by a number of cubes of various colors. Color represents the type of illness, while the number of cubes represents the severity of the illness.

Legend has it that the old mansion on the outskirts of the city is home to a fabulous treasure! Hoping to find it, you decide to spend the night there. You are about to give up when the ghost of Captain Echo appears to help you find his treasure. He isn’t much of a talker, but he plays a mean tambourine, and he’s going to use it to tell you which rooms to search in!

Players cooperate to find Captain’s treasure before the moon has traveled across the sky and the night is over. Each round, one player becomes the Ghost of Captain Echo. The Ghost must use a tambourine to give clues that help the other players guess the correct Noise card. If they do, they get to reveal a piece of the Captain’s treasure.

—description from the publisher

The Illiterati are an evil secret organization that has taken over the world. Your job as a member of the League of Librarians is to save the world's books — one word at a time.

Illiterati is a real-time, co-operative word game in which players work together to form words and bind books. Each player starts the game with five letter tiles and a red torched book that shows a condition that player must achieve to restore that book, e.g. using 8+ tiles with at least 3 green symbols, create words that are all animals. A library of three random tiles is placed in the center of the table. The game takes place in three-minute rounds, and before the round begins each player draw seven letter tiles from the draw bag.

Once the countdown begins, players can talk and trade letters as much as they want with one another and the library to try to achieve their goal. Once time ends, if the library contains too many letters — and this threshold is based on your difficulty level — then you trigger a burn event. Flip all of these letters face down, then remove one of them from the game, then discard excess letters to the discard bag. If you burn too many letters, you lose the game. If you didn't burn any letters and you've completed your goal, flip your red book face down and draw a blue waterlogged book to give yourself a new goal.

At the end of the round, draw an illiterati villain card and resolve its effect. If you've drawn this villain previously — and the deck contains five copies of five villains — then all of the previous effects from this villain also resolve in a chain attack from newest to oldest. Villain attacks often strip letters from words, which means you'll need to create new words with what's left during the next round to avoid burning another letter.

Once all players have completed two books — or three or four depending on your difficulty level — draw one more book, the Final Chapter, with all players needing to complete this challenge in the same round, e.g., using 12+ tiles, create words in which all of your vowels are the same color. If all players meet this goal during the same round, you win; if even one person fails, another villain attacks, then you draw new tiles to start another round. You can discard and redraw up to seven tiles at the start of a round, but you must draw a second illiterati villain card that round — and if the villain deck runs out, you lose.

Rippling rivers, rustling forests, wheat fields swaying in the wind and here and there a cute little village - that's Dorfromantik! The video game from the small developer studio Toukana Interactive has been thrilling the gaming community since its Early Access in March 2021 and has already won all kinds of prestigious awards. Now Michael Palm and Lukas Zach are transforming the popular building strategy and puzzle game into a family game for young and old with Dorfromantik: The Board Game.

In Dorfromantik: The Board Game, up to six players work together to lay hexagonal tiles to create a beautiful landscape and try to fulfill the orders of the population, while at the same time laying as long a track and as long a river as possible, but also taking into account the flags that provide points in enclosed areas. The better the players manage to do this, the more points they can score at the end. In the course of the replayable campaign, the points earned can be used to unlock new tiles that are hidden in initially locked boxes. These pose new, additional tasks for the players and make it possible to raise the high score higher and higher.

—description from the publisher

Disparity Trap: The Socially Conscious Board Game provides an easy way to have the hard conversations around race & privilege in America and how they impact society in systemically dominant (SD) and systemically non-dominant (SND) ways. The game play is like many of its kind, where your individual goal is to accrue as much wealth as possible.

But where it differs is that you can have a team goal as well where you work with your fellow players to dismantle the Disparity Traps seeking to keep everyone in poverty. Within this game you also step into someone else’s shoes; to experience the disparities within an identity different from your own. Throughout the game, the dice roll correlates your identity in the game to real life statistics.

So like life, the dice are in your “hands,” but the odds are not.

—description from the designer