Webcomics from Semi Co-op

A webcomic about board games and other geeky things.

Necessary sacrifice

Necessary sacrifice published on 7 Comments on Necessary sacrifice

There are quite some advantages to sleeping on the couch. It’s the living room and all the good things are there – like a TV and maybe a gaming console. The only downside is… you probably have to work and function properly the following day, 😉

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In case you missed it, we were interviewed by Fedja from Muffin Games! So if you’d like to know more about us, you can read it on his blog.

It’s been a busy week again and we’ve haven’t played that many board games. We’ve played some Kingdom Builder on the iPad in the train, a perfect way to spend your time. And we continued our Near and Far campaign yesterday and we’re getting at a point that the game seems to be getting harder. It’s a cool development that the choices that you make during an adventure seem to matter more than earlier in the game. We’re all still completely in love with this game and I think we’ll probably continue with the character campaign straight after the story campaign. 😉 We ended our gaming afternoon with playing Junk Art! It’s the perfect game when you just want to have fun, but you don’t want to sweat your brains too much.

And since this comic is also a little bit about video games, we got ourselves Rayman Legends and what a game! So much content … and the art is simply sublime.

Do you ever play video games? If yes, which video games have you been playing lately? 

So long and thanks for all the cards

So long and thanks for all the cards published on 9 Comments on So long and thanks for all the cards

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It’s is the 2nd of October and that means that the first two card cycles of Netrunner are officially out of play since yesterday, literally a big game changer! And with the disappearance of a lot of iconic cards, the biggest ‘loss’ (or at least the most spoken of in our meta) will be of the character Jackson Howard. The one card that almost every corp deck included to prevent runners to snatch some (accidental or carefully placed) agendas from the archives by shuffling them back into R&D. And Jackson was great for getting cards of course. 😉

In honor of Jackson Howard, we designed a playmat! 😀 If you like it AND would actually like to have this as a playmat, you can download the full resolution file over here and let it be printed by a service like InkedGaming.  Please do let us know if you actually printed it as a playmat – we would love to see it!

Yesterday we had a small Netrunner tournament (about 10 people) in remembrance of the good ‘old days and card decks at our favorite game and comic book store Comicasa. The participating decks could only use cards from the Core set, bigger expansions and data packs up to the second cycle. It was great fun and it all felt a little nostalgic. I even came in fifth place! Not bad considering Heinze and I don’t play Netrunner that often anymore. I won this awesome loot:

For us, this tournament was also a little bit of a goodbye to Netrunner in a certain way. Besides the fact that we don’t play Netrunner that often, we mostly own cards from the first two cycles of the game. With those cards not being tournament-legal anymore, participation in tournaments is kinda over for us. We’d still love to build fun decks with the cards we own in the future and play some Netrunner with friends, but we’re not going to invest in the game anymore. There are just so many other things to play and discover! 😀

For the Netrunner players: what cards will you miss the most?

The Greatest Adventure

The Greatest Adventure published on 6 Comments on The Greatest Adventure

The previous comic that included the game Clank!, wasn’t really about the game itself but since we like Clank! a lot, we thought it was time to make a comic about the game that showed more than just the title. Although in a way, this comic is still about its title of course. Ugh, such an ingenious name. 😉

In Clank! you can try to be a stealthy thief (and often that’s probably the wiser thing to do) but when you are presented with the option to buy for example the Monkey Bot 3000 … I know of no or little players who can resist it and they would take the extra noise for granted. Who doesn’t want to walk around with a big golden monkey in a dragon’s lair? 😀

Essen Spiel is getting closer and I’m having a lot of fun with the preparations! We’re thinking about printing some fun things for us to hand out to other visitors. Oh and if any of you will be at Essen this year, let us know – maybe we can meet up! We will probably be there on Thursday and Saturday.

What’s your favorite game in which you play a burglar?

Cardboard Dreams

Cardboard Dreams published on 5 Comments on Cardboard Dreams

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Punching out cardboard pieces of a new game… a fantastic activity. … Or is it? 😀

So it’s been an interesting week. I’ve been busy designing all sorts of things for Essen Spiel, making videos and thinking of awesome plans for Semi Co-op. After 2,5 years it’s time for a change, time for Semi Co-op to grow. Don’t worry, the comics won’t go away, we’re working on ideas to expand. So we’ve been playing with this idea of making videos, but we wanted ‘it’ to be Semi Co-op and not us sitting in front of a camera, so I’m working on animated versions of our cartoon characters!

Yesterday was an excellent opportunity to test run my unfinished puppets and to get a sneak preview of our future plans out in the open! We’re participating in a Star Realms tournament with other board game content creators and everybody loves to taunt each other through videos. We felt we needed to reply in a video as well and did so:

I don’t know yet when we will officially launch this new part of Semi Co-op – it might take a while, but the enthusiastic responses flatter and motivate me greatly. Thanks, everybody. 🙂

Have you ever dreamt of board games?

Relation 9

Relation 9 published on 3 Comments on Relation 9

Since we’re organizing a meetup during Spiel with No Pun Included, Jon Gets Games and Actualol during which we will be playing a massive game of NMBR 9… we thought it would be wise to actually get ourselves a copy of the game and know what it’s all about. It turns out to be a frustratingly good little puzzle game!

What’s this meetup we speak of? Efka of No Pun Included went through the hassle of montaging the video below to explain it to you in detail. I’m sorry to say that there are no more tickets available and it was ‘sold’ out within one day.

We’ll be at Essen on Thursday and Saturday and if you see us walking around we’ll have some cool stickers and rulebookmarks for you. Ýes, bookmarks for your board game rulebooks! Or just for your normal books if you prefer. 😉 We’ll be wearing Semi Co-op shirts and be looking around like lost little ducklings since this is our first board game convention ever.

And remember that we mentioned Clash of Creators, the Star Realms tournament in our previous post? We somehow managed to end up in second place of our pool – meaning we will advance to the next round. Woooooooooow! … We’re so going to lose our next match… eh, I mean; BRING IT ON, WE CAN TAKE YOU!

What other game is a good metaphor for a relationship?

Spiel 2017

Spiel 2017 published on 9 Comments on Spiel 2017

Spiel ’17 has come and gone and it was great! We would like to thank all the readers that said hello and everybody who worked so hard to make Spiel such a success. And a special thank you to AbacusSpiele for sponsoring the games of NMBR9 we needed for a 70+ player game of NMBR9 during the meetup we organized together with JonGetsGames, Actualol and No Pun Included. The actual meetup went great and it was wonderful meeting board gamers and content creators from all over the world. Thank you all so much!

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Right, that’s enough bold text for now. So, our first visit to Spiel was awesome. We went on Thursday and Saturday and that was quite enough for our first time ever. The size of the event and the crowds can be quite overwhelming! Although it’s nice that sitting down and playing a game allows you to filter out the masses of people a little, Besides meeting a lot of cool people (a lot more than pictured in this comic 😉 ), we’ve also demoed/played quite a lot of games, here’s a little list:

– Alien Artifacts
– Shadespire
– Hero Realms
– Giant Junk Art
– Muse
– Wordsy
– The Networks
– Burglar Brothers
– Fugitive
– Fog of Love

We didn’t buy too many games at Spiel and tried to get some titles that are hard to come by overhere. We’d like to support our local game store and will get the bigger titles another time this or next year. Also: we didn’t feel much for carrying around the heavy games all day. 😀

What was your favorite game at Spiel this year?

Cat in a box

Cat in a box published on 2 Comments on Cat in a box

This probably works… if you have only one cat.

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Azul is one of the games we picked up at Spiel this week and we love it. The first turn we didn’t really know how it was going to be ‘a game’, but when we reached the second turn… it hit us and we saw the many choices you can make! Will I take this tile just to prevent other players from getting it? If I take this, then that… etc etc! We can’t wait to play this with more than two players.

This week we realized that the Jack Vasel Memorial Fund Auction is running! So we decided to offer something to the good cause: a custom avatar or selfie shot with us… plus we’ll send you a signed fridge magnet of the image! There is already an outstanding bid of $130 – maybe we can drive up the price even higher. 🙂  We would like to say that we are already astounded by the generosity of people, it’s an amazing to see the bgg community at work. Click here to see our auction item and if you’d like to participate in the bidding for a good cause! The auction ends on November 14th.

And we’ve started Pandemic Legacy 2! We’ve been so excited to get started with this game ever since finishing Pandemic Legacy last year. Alas, we lost our first prologue game (SO CLOSE!) and thus we decided that we won’t start with the first ‘real game’ and will keep playing the practice session until we win and are familiar with all the new rules and actions. We’ll keep you posted on what we think of the game, spoiler free of course. 😉

Any good anecdotes about the behavior of your pet(s) while playing a board game?

Do something!

Do something! published on 5 Comments on Do something!

During a game of Magic Maze, players are not allowed to talk to each other during the most important parts of the game and that can be quite tricky in a real-time cooperative game. There is however… a DO SOMETHING pawn! Players can put it in front of another player to catch their attention and notify them that they are probably missing something important and should … do something! What makes this such a tricky game? Well, there are four hero pawns on the board and every player has a certain action they can make all the hero pawns do. For example: one player can move any of the character pawns to the north, another player can move them to the east, etc etc. Just thinking about that already made my head hurt. I imagine it is a little more relaxed than Escape: The Curse of the Temple though, in which players can constantly scream at each other, need to roll dice (the noise!), while neurotic music is playing on the background.

We haven’t played the game yet and we’re not sure if it is a game we would enjoy. Nonetheless, this gameplay mechanic of a DO SOMETHING pawn made for an excellent comic idea. 😉

Our item in the Jack Vasel Memorial Fund Action is a blast! The highest bid is $200 so far and THAT IS AMAZING! We’re so thankful for the generosity of people and we’re grateful we get to help people who need it in this way. If you’re interested, this is the link to the auction item: https://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/230490/item/5749356#item5749356 The auction ends tomorrow.

PS. I’ve been swamped with work since Essen, so I haven’t had a chance to work on our animated Semi Co-op project. Hopefully, I can block time in my schedule to get some serious Semi Co-op work done in December. 🙂

What’s your opinion of hastily real-time cooperative games like Magic Maze and Escape?

Near and False

Near and False published on 2 Comments on Near and False

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In the game Near and Far there are artifact cards players can build and one of them is a singing skull! Whenever a player visits the Saloon, that player gains 1 reputation. It’s quite a handy card to have and combined with my character’s talent Piano Playing (gain 1 food when visiting the Saloon), it’s a hilarious idea.

So we picked up The Networks at Spiel in Essen and after playing it a few times with two and even four players, we can really say we like this game! The artwork fits perfectly with the slightly sarcastic and funny theme. It’s a hit in our gaming group. 🙂

The end of the year is coming near and that means Board Game Geek’s Secret Santa! 😀 Members of website Board Game Geek who signed up, get assigned a victim for which they have to buy a (board game related) present! Our Santa has already been doing a great job, sending us fun messages and a series of questions. It kinda makes us feel bad that we haven’t really contacted our ‘victim’ yet. But no worries! This Santa has been very busy and will certainly step up their game – soon!

Do you ever sing or quote songs during a game?

(We tend to hum Star Wars tunes during Imperial Assault… a lot. )

PS. Heinze just noticed that our previous comic about Near and Far also contained singing… false singing. We’re not sure why this is a returning theme in our comics about this game. 

The Great Western Taunt

The Great Western Taunt published on 11 Comments on The Great Western Taunt

Great Western Trail is a highly appraised game by many people and it’s even on number 11 of the Board Game Geek ranking list! … It’s totally taunting us standing there on one of our shelves. It’s been at our house for multiple weeks now, but we just haven’t had the time to tackle this big and great game, But we really really want to, because the game mechanics seem so interesting. Hopefully: SOON! 😀

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Until then, we amuse ourselves with shorter games on normal weekdays like Pandemic Legacy. We tried beating the practice game again last week, and we lost AGAIN on the last turn. It’s definitely bad luck and not our lack of skill. 😉 We’re going to try again tonight and we hope to beat this monster and finally get started on January. I’ll let you know next week if we finally beat it or not.

The end of 2017 is nearing and that means it’s almost time for Semi Co-op’s Golden Standees! And like last year, we would like to invite our readers to participate in the People’s Choice awards! 😀 We really enjoyed giving people a platform to express their cool ideas and creativity. Remember that you really don’t need drawing skills to participate – stick figures or a photo can be really funny as well.

More info on how to participate in the blog post next week. 

Remember that we added an item to the Jack Vasel Memorial Fund Auction? It raised far more money that we could have imagined and we’re so grateful that we were able to help other people in such a fun way. We’ve made a custom Semi Co-op avatar for Ashley and this is the result!

Do you have any unplayed games in your collection that you really want to play but you just lack the time?
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