Co-operative Play

Game description from the publisher:

In Mice and Mystics players take on the roles of those still loyal to the king – but to escape the clutches of Vanestra, they have been turned into mice! Play as cunning field mice who must race through a castle now twenty times larger than before. The castle would be a dangerous place with Vanestra's minions in control, but now countless other terrors also await heroes who are but the size of figs. Play as nimble Prince Collin and fence your way past your foes, or try Nez Bellows, the burly smith. Confound your foes as the wizened old mouse Maginos, or protect your companions as Tilda, the castle's former healer. Every player will have a vital role in the quest to warn the king, and it will take careful planning to find Vanestra's weakness and defeat her.

Mice and Mystics is a cooperative adventure game in which the players work together to save an imperiled kingdom. They will face countless adversaries such as rats, cockroaches, and spiders, and of course the greatest of all horrors: the castle's housecat, Brodie. Mice and Mystics is a boldly innovative game that thrusts players into an ever-changing, interactive environment, and features a rich storyline that the players help create as they play the game. The Cheese System allows players to hoard the crumbs of precious cheese they find on their journey, and use it to bolster their mice with grandiose new abilities and overcome seemingly insurmountable odds.

Mice and Mystics will provide any group of friends with an unforgettable adventure they will be talking about for years to come – assuming they can all squeak by...

Expansion advice:

For those who have expansions for this game the recommended order by the game designer for playing them is as follows (see original post HERE):

Sorrow and Remembrance (Base game)
Cat's Cradle (Lost Chapter 1)
Heart of Glorm
The Ghost of Castle Andon (Lost Chapter 2)

"The Perfect Heist" is a cooperative/competitive board game based on the heist movie genre. It is designed to capture the excitement of pulling together a handpicked crew of professionals and loose cannons to pull off epic heists. To win, you must convince your friends — those gunmen, con men, getaway drivers, and grizzled vets who are "getting too old for this" — to join your crew and take on increasingly more difficult jobs ranging from boosting cars to nicking top secret documents and biological weapons.

But even as you need their expertise to chase the big scores and make a name for yourself, don't think for a second they're doing you any favors. They are trying to win, too. And they may double-cross you any chance they get to steal the loot for themselves and leave you for dead.

Ultimately, the player with the most notoriety wins. You accrue notoriety points from heists, by successfully completing hidden agendas, and more. But, you need to hustle for it. A clever player could win by only pulling off 2 jobs, so long as they hustled other players for a better cut of each job's notoriety. Likewise, a player could pull off 15 jobs and yet still lose if they made bad deals with other players.

Ghost Stories is a cooperative game in which the players protect the village from incarnations of the lord of hell – Wu-Feng – and his legions of ghosts before they haunt a town and recover the ashes that will allow him to return to life. Each Player represents a Taoist monk working together with the others to fight off waves of ghosts.

The players, using teamwork, will have to exorcise the ghosts which will appear during the course of the game. At the beginning of his turn, a player brings a ghost into play and places it on a free spot, and more than one can come in at the same time. The ghosts all have abilities of their own – some affecting the Taoists and their powers, some causing the active player to roll the curse die for a random effect, and others haunting the villager tiles and blocking that tile's special action. On his turn, a Taoist can move on a tile in order to exorcise adjacent ghosts or to benefit from the villager living on the tile, providing it is not haunted. Each tile of the village allows the players to benefit from a different bonus. With the cemetery, for example, Taoists can bring a dead Taoist back to life, while the herbalist allows to recover spent Tao tokens, etc. It will also be possible to get traps or move ghosts or unhaunt other village tiles.

To exorcise a ghost, the Taoist rolls three Tao dice with different colors: red, blue, green, yellow, black, and white. If the result of the roll matches the color(s) of the ghost or incarnation of Wu-Feng, the exorcism succeeds. The white result is a wild color which can be used as any color. For example, to exorcise a green ghost with 3 resistance, you need to roll three green, three white, or a combination of both. If your die rolls fall short, you can also use Tao tokens that match the color in addition to your roll. You may choose to use these after your roll. Taoists gain these tokens by using certain village tiles or by exorcising certain ghosts. One of the Taoists has a power that allows him to receive such a token once per turn.

To win, the players must defeat the incarnation of Wu-Feng, a boss who arrives at the end of the game. There are also harder difficulty levels that add more incarnations of Wu-Feng, in which to win, you must defeat all of them.

There are many more ways to lose, however. The players lose if three of the village's tiles are haunted, if the draw pile is emptied while the incarnation of Wu-Feng is still in play, or if all the priests are dead.

In Atlantis Rising you are one of the citizens of the stricken island Atlantis. However, hope is not lost, a mystical portal of 10 components can be built and save the island and all its inhabitants, but fail to build it in time and the island will sink forever under the waves, lost to legend.

Atlantis Rising is a fully co-operative game in which the players must race to create a cosmic gate before all of the island tiles have been destroyed. The gate's components are variable and determine the difficulty level of the game - Easy, Normal, Hard, or Cosmic. The players must also contend with the continually escalating threat of their Athenian enemies, who may destroy one or more island tiles each turn if insufficient Atlanteans are allocated to the island's protection.

Each turn players can choose to place their Atlanteans in any of eight different areas - with placements closer to the sea being more rewarding, but subject to a higher risk of flooding (and the subsequent loss of the associated action).

After placement of meeple but before gaining resources 'misfortune' cards are drawn per player indicating which areas of the island sink, any meeple stood there have a long swim back to shore and do nothing for their turn.

Players have limited 'mystical energy' which they can use to predict or prevent certain misfortunes and cards are available from the libraries that offer powerful one time use effects.

From the back of the box:

Will you send your Atlanteans to mine the untapped veins of precious resources at the very tip of the island, hoping to reap great rewards before the oncoming waves smash into the shores? Or will you remain in the relative safety of the island’s center, where resources have grown scarce? Perhaps you will tap into the power of the mystic energy source - the lifeforce of Atlantis and key to its advanced technology. You may even seek refuge in the vast libraries of the Lost City, hoping to find some tome which will lead to salvation for the doomed isle. Beware though - even as the island sinks into the sea, the Athenians continue to assault Atlantis, hoping to plunder its riches before it disappears beneath the waves.

It's your lifelong dream – to join the Star Patrol and be part of the crew of an interstellar Starship. You've worked hard, graduated from the academy, and received your first assignment as part of a team of young recruits, confident in your training and ready to be put to the test. Nothing can possibly go wrong as you are prepared for anything...

You are the Space Cadets.

Space Cadets is a fun and frantic cooperative game for 3-6 players who take on the roles of Bridge Officers of a Starship. Each officer must accomplish his specific task in order for the team to successfully complete the mission. You might be the...

Helmsman, plotting the ship's course through asteroid fields and nebulae.
Engineer, using dominoes to get enough power to each system.
Weapons Officer, completing puzzles to load the torpedoes and flicking a disc down a track to launch them.
Shield Officer, using tiles to form poker hands to get the strongest shields.
Sensor Officer, using your sense of touch to scan and lock on enemy targets.
Captain, setting the plan and making sure that everyone stays focused and does their job.

If your crew can work together to accomplish the mission goals, you just might make it home in one piece.