Partnership
The best board & card games that are played in partnerships... Also nominated:
- Control Nut!
- Dia de los Muertos/Four Dragons
- Frank's Zoo
- Inkognito
- Montage
- Mystery Rummy 4: Al Capone
- Tin Soldiers
- Victory & Honor
There is no comparison list, as this category did not appear in 2002.
Labels: Mechanisms
posted by Mark (aka pastor guy) at 8:24 AM
6 Comments:
I'm not a big card game guy, so I didn't pay a lot of attention to this category (I picked Mu & Mehr and Twilight, both of which I like, although I've pretty much played out Mu now after many, many games) - until I realized that another partnership game I like had been missed out of the lists - Ingenious/Einfach Genial. I think if it had been on the list sent out to voters, it would have at least made the "nomination" list.
Also, I am shocked - shocked, I tell you! - to see that my nomination of Risk -- Star Wars: The Clone Wars went nowhere.
I have to admit I have a bias against Ingenious... but this time around, we just missed it.
OTOH, Risk/Clone Wars sounds like fun. Bring it on!
Finally... if you haven't tried Control Nut! or Victory & Honor, you've missed two very cool/oddball trick-taking partnership games. (Disclosure notice: I'm friends with the guys who designed these games, so I may be a bit biased here.)
I'm sorry, but a game which has only one winner is not a partnership game. I'm especially referring to Mu, as well as Frank's Zoo. One might as well call "Diplomacy" a partnership game. In these games, players form temporary alliances, but are not truly playing as partners. Indeed, many times in Mu a player will deliberately screw his partner.
Digging through my memory banks for more boardgames that are played with partnerships:
Another good one is War of the Ring, when played with 3 or 4. I'm not a big War of the Ring fan, but I feel like the dynamics of the game actually improve with more players.
Star Wars: The Queen's Gambit can also be played partnership, although there it's not so big a win as in War of the Ring. I think the partnership game is not as good as the 2-player version, actually.
The "overlord" version of Memoir '44 is also arguably a partnership game, but it's more experience than game in my opinion. With so many players each doing so little, it's more of a social event.
And I like Wings of War best as a 2-on-2 game.
As for Mu not being a partnership game ... well, maybe. I see Jonathan's point. But even in Mu it's pretty rare for a partner to try to torpedo the boss, and this is mostly tied up with Mu's strange endgame, it's key (and only real) failing. While it's true that only one player can win, each individual hand plays much like you'd expect a partnership game to. I don't think the fact that partnerships can shift and only one player can win makes it clearly not a partnership game, at least for those of us who are not hard-core card gamers.
Which leads me to believe I could make a case for Dune, since Alliances are such a key element of that game, and those alliances work more like partnerships, since they can't be arbitrarily broken as in most games with strong diplomatic elements. The dynamics of Dune alliances are similar to Mu partnerships (or even moreso to Die Sieben Weisen, which was on the list I think) - alliances that may be of convenience, but can't be broken until a specific later time.
Last thing, I promise ... there are also of course lots of party games that are played partnership, but one that might be popular amongst the boardgame set is Time's Up!/Celebrities.
Carolus Magnus is another great partnership game -- people forget that it isn't just for 3!
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