like, we love coop board games but they all are extremely Commercial Products, with specialized materials.
a thing we love about chess, or go, or to a lesser but still significant extent, card games, is their material simplicity and their openness. nobody owns go. you could make a go set out of literal garbage, you could make it out of dirt and pebbles. you could make a set of playing cards with a pen and paper. you could be stranded in the woods with hardly anything, but you could still cobble together a game of checkers with your compatriots
and you can make weird chess variants, you can invent new card games. they are as free as language, as poetry. the rules are simple enough that anyone can remember them off the top of their head, or at least a workable version of the rules. you dont really need a manual to play chess or rummy or manacala if you know someone who mostly remembers the rules.
but all those games are competitive.
the wikipedia page for coop board games only goes back to the 20th century with monopoly. on the one paw, im like, surely there were board or card games out there in history that were coop, that we just dont have a lot of records of
but also, i want to see ppl fill this void, to make NEW folk coop games. i want there to be a cooperative game that has that same material and conceptual simplicity as go, that nobody owns, that you could scramble together out of nothing, or modify the rules of.
the closest i have ever seen to this is the completely wonderful 2-player co-op card game shamus. it is played with a standard deck of playing cards, so it has a lot of material simplicity. in a nutshell, one player is playing rummy 500, and the other is playing uno, and they share a discard pile. communication is disallowed and a stack of face down cards serves as a turn limit and antagonistic source of chaos against the players.
it's still pretty complicated though, conceptually. it kind of sounds like an elaborate prank you would play on someone. but it's a really cool game, and part of what makes it so cool is the fact that it's a cooperative game but nobody owns it or controls it. it's not a commercial product, you don't need to go to a board game store and pay 70$ for it. shamus is not a registered trademark.
i want more stuff like that!! it would rule to see stuff that is perhaps even more elegant. i want games i could draw lines in the dirt and use rocks to play. unfortunately i don't know that much about game design, so i'm not really destined to invent such a thing. but we just really want to see stuff like that out in the world