The first time I remember actively killing my sister, I was around six years old. She would’ve been eight or nine and we were crouched in our aunt and uncle’s basement, tiny hands holding too-big Xbox controllers. Our brother and cousin were coaching us through the game—a homebrew challenge they’d devised after hours compounded upon hours of playing vanilla Halo forwards and backwards and sideways.
The rules were simple: get in a Ghost and line yourself up with a Scorpion tank, then hold up on the joystick and prepare for launch. If you hit the tank’s turret right, some quirk in the game’s physics engine (and it only works in Halo 1) will launch your plastic-y alien ship straight up in the air. Points for height, distance, best bail, etc. The possibilities are endless.
Or at least they were until six-year-old Annaka figured out how to pull the trigger and put a staccato spray of digital death into the back of her sister’s helmet. I don’t remember who won the Ghost launching game, but when the multiplier match we’d been using as a sandbox ended, I had the most points.
My sister and I don’t play Halo anymore (too many trust issues), but we still game together—a lot. We play Jackbox and The Red Dragon Inn with our friends, she spends days farming in Stardew while I kill my ninth horse in Skyrim, and she even lets me over-the-shoulder answer the current event questions in her crossword puzzles.
It’s a near perfect symbiosis, except for one thing: I love to win, but Erin’s just better at games.
I love winning because it feeds that horrible little gremlin inside my head by telling it, see, you are smarter and funnier and better than all your friends. After all, you’ve never lost a round of Egyptian Ratscrew, a children’s game that’s eighty percent luck. You must be a genius.
You can see how playing with Erin keeps me humble.
But my sister is a good person. Good to the point where she begins to feel honest, soul-wearying guilt about how effortlessly she’s destroying us all in Jeopardy! and Trivia Murder Party. So I’m miserable because I’m losing and she’s miserable because she’s winning.
Fortunately, the ongoing board game renaissance has provided a convenient solution in cooperative games. Titles like Pandemic and Mysterium scratch the board game itch without causing justifiable homicide, and even co-op-with-a-defector games will keep your friendships intact, at least until someone who spent all game buffing their mental stats flips challenge twenty-one of the “Let’s Play a Game” haunt and uses it to ruthlessly and systematically break someone else’s ability to win the game. (Which, for the record, Maddy, was a legitimate strategy.)
Erin’s and my co-op game of choice is Forbidden Desert, for the very abstruse reason that it is the only co-op game she owns that can be played by just two people. In it, your team plays a group of stranded adventurers searching a hostile wasteland for the artifacts you need to rebuild ye olde steampunk airship and make your escape.
Like all good co-op games, there are a number of ways to fail. Got buried in sand? Done for. Ran out of water? Toast. Sandstorm got too strong? Prepared to have what’s left of your sun-bleached corpse picked clean by vultures. You only need to hit one of those conditions to fail and if any member of your team kicks it, you all lose.
Erin and I lose Forbidden Desert. A lot.
The last time we played was the closest we’ve ever come to winning. We had the artifacts and all we had to do to win was get both of our pawns to the launch pad. I was a turn away from making it. Then Erin died of dehydration.
I took my next turn and got on the ship anyway.
After all, there’s no i in “team,” but there is one in “win.”
(There’s also an i in “your airship crashes because you can’t fly it by yourself,” but who remembers things like that.)
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My sister is Very Good at card games, to the point where my cousins and I would rib her so much about winning that she’d either apologize or surreptitiously try to hold herself back. Also, Betrayal rules.
Baldur’s Gate is a new iteration of Betrayal with some game play is improved and new features 🙂
Annaka—you may also be intrigued by Magic Maze, the ultimate infuriating cooperative game.
And it’s D&D themed! Match made in heaven. (Or by Wizards of the Coast but you know what I mean.)
Doesn’t it??? Fortunately my friends will still play with me. Next time you’re on the west side, let me know and we can get all murdery together (in the game, I mean).
My mediocrity at Egyptian Ratscrew was a sore point in middle school.
I never heard of cooperative games! Thanks for my next boomerang gift idea.
Let me know if you need recommendations! Betrayal at House on the Hill is excellent, but if does have that defector role. Forbidden Island (the game that Forbidden Desert is a “sequel” too) is great for co-op beginners.
Pandemic was a lot more fun in 2019. (At least the Cthulhu version is as of yet untainted by current events.)
Great post, Annaka! Really enjoyed it, especially as someone who has played Secret Hitler with you, is a little too competitive myself, and who has also wasted way too much time playing Halo trying to “bounce jump” out of the legal map haha.