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Meeples Together: How and Why Cooperative Board Games Work
How and Why Cooperative Games Work
This is the authoritative source on cooperative board games and card games for gamers, aficionados, critics, and designers, featuring a deep dive into co-op gaming’s titles, mechanics, theory, and frontiers.
You are on an epic mission to combat global plague. Or you are seeking out werewolves in an isolated village. Houses are on fire, islands are sinking, and enemy androids have infiltrated the fleet.
You can’t succeed alone — and victory requires more than understanding your teammates. You need to know the game.
Join experts Christopher Allen and Shannon Appelcline as they examine not only how cooperative board games work, but why . With more than 150 enlightening images showing principles and mechanisms of play in action, this book helps you see your favorite cooperative board games in new ways. Together, we look deep into the machines of great games to reveal how they work — and how we play.
Whether you want to play cooperative games better, discover your next favorite game, or design the world’s next favorite, Meeples Together is for you.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Matt Leacock (designer of Pandemic )
Chapter 1: The Basics of Cooperation
Part The Spectrum of Cooperative Gaming
Chapter 2: Styles of Competition
Case Terra
Chapter 3: Styles of Teamwork
Case Contract Bridge
Case One Night Ultimate Werewolf
Chapter 4: Styles of Cooperation
Case Pandemic
Case Forbidden Island
Case Forbidden Desert
Part The Mechanics of Cooperative Games
Chapter 5: Cooperative Systems
Case Flash Fire Rescue
Chapter 6: Challenge Systems
Case Robinson Crusoe — Adventures on the Cursed Island
Chapter 7: Players Facing Challenges
Case Shadows over Camelot
Case Battlestar The Board Game
Chapter 8: Players Undertaking Tasks
Case Arkham Horror 2e
Chapter 9: Adventure Systems
Case Mansions of Madness 2e
Part The Theory of Cooperative Games
Chapter 10: A Theory of Cooperative Gaming
Case Space Alert
Chapter 11: A Theory of Challenge Design
Case Ghost Stories
Chapter 12: When Games Go Wrong
Case D-Day Dice
Part Cooperative Frontiers
Chapter 13: The Psychology of Cooperative Gaming
Case Hanabi
Chapter 14: Assembling the Puzzle
Case SOS Titanic
Appendices
Appendix The Basics of Game Design
Appendix Game Design Dilemmas
Appendix Game Design Types
Appendix Game Design & Social Theories
Appendix Cooperative & Teamwork Game Synopses & Reviews
This is the authoritative source on cooperative board games and card games for gamers, aficionados, critics, and designers, featuring a deep dive into co-op gaming’s titles, mechanics, theory, and frontiers.
You are on an epic mission to combat global plague. Or you are seeking out werewolves in an isolated village. Houses are on fire, islands are sinking, and enemy androids have infiltrated the fleet.
You can’t succeed alone — and victory requires more than understanding your teammates. You need to know the game.
Join experts Christopher Allen and Shannon Appelcline as they examine not only how cooperative board games work, but why . With more than 150 enlightening images showing principles and mechanisms of play in action, this book helps you see your favorite cooperative board games in new ways. Together, we look deep into the machines of great games to reveal how they work — and how we play.
Whether you want to play cooperative games better, discover your next favorite game, or design the world’s next favorite, Meeples Together is for you.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Matt Leacock (designer of Pandemic )
Chapter 1: The Basics of Cooperation
Part The Spectrum of Cooperative Gaming
Chapter 2: Styles of Competition
Case Terra
Chapter 3: Styles of Teamwork
Case Contract Bridge
Case One Night Ultimate Werewolf
Chapter 4: Styles of Cooperation
Case Pandemic
Case Forbidden Island
Case Forbidden Desert
Part The Mechanics of Cooperative Games
Chapter 5: Cooperative Systems
Case Flash Fire Rescue
Chapter 6: Challenge Systems
Case Robinson Crusoe — Adventures on the Cursed Island
Chapter 7: Players Facing Challenges
Case Shadows over Camelot
Case Battlestar The Board Game
Chapter 8: Players Undertaking Tasks
Case Arkham Horror 2e
Chapter 9: Adventure Systems
Case Mansions of Madness 2e
Part The Theory of Cooperative Games
Chapter 10: A Theory of Cooperative Gaming
Case Space Alert
Chapter 11: A Theory of Challenge Design
Case Ghost Stories
Chapter 12: When Games Go Wrong
Case D-Day Dice
Part Cooperative Frontiers
Chapter 13: The Psychology of Cooperative Gaming
Case Hanabi
Chapter 14: Assembling the Puzzle
Case SOS Titanic
Appendices
Appendix The Basics of Game Design
Appendix Game Design Dilemmas
Appendix Game Design Types
Appendix Game Design & Social Theories
Appendix Cooperative & Teamwork Game Synopses & Reviews
379 pages, Paperback
Published May 1, 2019
9 people are currently reading
54 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 11, 2019
Meeples Together is an encyclopedic treatment of cooperative boardgames. Given the paucity of good books about boardgames design, period, this book is important for game designers in general, and absolutely vital for anyone making a cooperative boardgame.
While competitive boardgames are made interesting by opposing tactics and hostile interference, cooperative boardgames pit the players against the rules. In order to make this interesting, to make it truly cooperative, the game must be flawed in some way, with imperfect information, randomness, or hidden teams and traitor mechanics. Meeples Together surveys the history of cooperative games, develops a general theory of what makes them fun, deeply investigates key mechanics for games, and conducts in depth case studies on about a dozen games. The paradigm games are Pandemic, The Lord of the Rings, and Arkham Horror, though other games come up frequently.
While this is an excellent book, it is on the dry and technical side. And given the otherwise exhaustive nature, I was puzzled by the omission of two games, the complex Pandemic successor and heavy gamer darling Spirit Island, and 2017 Spiel de Jahrs finalist Magic Maze. Certainly, a complete review of all games is hard, but both games are major contemporary coop games.
While competitive boardgames are made interesting by opposing tactics and hostile interference, cooperative boardgames pit the players against the rules. In order to make this interesting, to make it truly cooperative, the game must be flawed in some way, with imperfect information, randomness, or hidden teams and traitor mechanics. Meeples Together surveys the history of cooperative games, develops a general theory of what makes them fun, deeply investigates key mechanics for games, and conducts in depth case studies on about a dozen games. The paradigm games are Pandemic, The Lord of the Rings, and Arkham Horror, though other games come up frequently.
While this is an excellent book, it is on the dry and technical side. And given the otherwise exhaustive nature, I was puzzled by the omission of two games, the complex Pandemic successor and heavy gamer darling Spirit Island, and 2017 Spiel de Jahrs finalist Magic Maze. Certainly, a complete review of all games is hard, but both games are major contemporary coop games.
April 11, 2019
It's not that it's a bad book, exactly. But it's tough to identify the intended market, as a lot of the lessons are too simple for people who want to design games, the examples given are usually from very big names in the cooperative gaming space, and it's unclear why you would want it if you weren't interested in designing games.
Maybe suited for the small intersection of people who haven't played many different games, but want to design them. But then I'd recommend to them to play more games first. And cooperative games are hard to design well.
It's pretty well written, and I agree with a lot of the reviews? Probably best avoided.
Maybe suited for the small intersection of people who haven't played many different games, but want to design them. But then I'd recommend to them to play more games first. And cooperative games are hard to design well.
It's pretty well written, and I agree with a lot of the reviews? Probably best avoided.
June 25, 2020
For a first time game maker, this book was quite useful in prompting me to think on various aspects of design for a game I want to create. As I went through the first section of the book I was frequently struck with ideas based on their discussion and descriptions of other games. So that portion was good.
As a book though this has some serious flaws. The authors frequently repeated themselves and seemed to split hairs pretty finely on design concepts. I ended up thinking that they were trying to pad for length for some reason. I also think that the 'theory' of cooperation section at the end was quite redundant to what they had already discussed in the mechanics section. Their dive into the psychology of gaming and cooperation was too shallow to be insightful and would have been better left out in general. If they thought this was important, it definitely should have come at the beginning of the book. The theory would then be demonstrated and supported in a following mechanics section. Also the diagramming of game design ideas/mechanisms was and interesting idea and theoretically would allow one to describe a game in one diagram. But in practice there were 100 different pieces and no one is going to remember all of that, meaning it was just another extraneous feature in a book that was twice as long as it should have been.
Read the mechanics section to think through all of the steps of game design and get some inspiration. Leave the rest.
As a book though this has some serious flaws. The authors frequently repeated themselves and seemed to split hairs pretty finely on design concepts. I ended up thinking that they were trying to pad for length for some reason. I also think that the 'theory' of cooperation section at the end was quite redundant to what they had already discussed in the mechanics section. Their dive into the psychology of gaming and cooperation was too shallow to be insightful and would have been better left out in general. If they thought this was important, it definitely should have come at the beginning of the book. The theory would then be demonstrated and supported in a following mechanics section. Also the diagramming of game design ideas/mechanisms was and interesting idea and theoretically would allow one to describe a game in one diagram. But in practice there were 100 different pieces and no one is going to remember all of that, meaning it was just another extraneous feature in a book that was twice as long as it should have been.
Read the mechanics section to think through all of the steps of game design and get some inspiration. Leave the rest.
June 27, 2019
It was interesting to read analysis of various cooperative games that I'd played, but at some point it got a little repetitive. Hard to recommend to anyone but budding game designers.
July 29, 2022
The last chapter is decent, but the overall structure doesn't quite fit together. It's also become outdated quickly with multiple new types of cooperative games released since.
October 26, 2025
Basically deconstructs the mechanics of Co-op games… puts a structure/framework to the various board games I’ve played, and linking them to human behavior theories as well.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews