History

Co-Op Cake was created by Nyma and Mis. In case you are wondering, those are not our real-world names. We are a married couple, and we are very fortunate in having a hobby we both enjoy immensely: playing games. Over the course of our gaming career, it became clear that there is one group of games that we clearly enjoy the most: co-operative. Doesn’t matter if it’s the simplest game ever invented that you can play with a deck of cards and takes one minute to learn, or the most mind-blowingly complicated monstrosity boggled down by a short novel’s worth of unintuitive rules, it could be fantasy, sci-fi, economy-simulation, noir, or cutesy, video-, card- or board game, role-playing – as long as the game is co-op, we are probably dandy. 

So we started playing these games, and wanted more and more and more. However, discovering new games we have not yet stumbled upon became increasingly difficult as we crossed out the obvious and popular ones. We could not find a reliable and comprehensive source of information that:

• focuses solely on co-op games;
• playable and enjoyable by 2 people;
• encompasses video and board games.

We realized we have to do something about that, considering there could be more people like us out there, sitting at home, with all the enthusiasm for a virtual adventure in the world but no good games to play. So here we are, more than a hundred games later, presenting this awesome knowledge we have gathered over the course of almost a decade. 

Review Philosophy

Game Library

We focus heavily on the two-player aspect, that is our main criteria, our aim is to recommend games that are truly great with one other player. From your perspective, this other person could be from your romantic relationship, best buddy, sibling, parent, or highly trained pet. We do not think there is a significant difference. However, we predominantly review games which could be described as “couple” games. 

There are a few games, in fact, some of our favourite ones, that we never played with two players, and never will, because they are legacy games, and the one time was special and never to be repeated. However, we are still reviewing them, and we believe that is OK. 

A couple of odd ones out are single-player games that we played together (usually adventure games). To signify the distinction, we put these in the “Other” category. The categories “Co-Op Board Games” and “Co-Op Video Games” should be self-explanatory. 

​There are also games that we reviewed even though we only played them for 10 minutes and we’re far from seeing everything. That is also OK. Life is too short to spend so much time on something that was just hated at first sight. 

Scoring System

We were trying to come up with a framework under which the games of different media can be consistently scored. We are working with a 6-level qualitative system, as much as we try to incorporate the objective qualities of the games, it is ultimately our emotional bond to the experience that is given a point. In case it is not clear, the levels are best to worst: amazing, great, good, mediocre, bad, terrible. You might notice how we have 3 “good” levels, but only 2 “bad” ones. We feel like if you don’t like something, there is less nuance to your relationship to that thing, so we don’t really need to give a detailed description of how much we do not like it. Generally, we try to give amazing or terrible only in special circumstances. 

The three categories for scores we came up with are: 

• Overall: The combined score, if you ask us how that particular game is, this is our laconic answer. 
• Story: This category captures everything that goes in the feels of the game, the spice sprinkled on the naked game mechanics that ultimately determine whether the meal was yummy or yucky. This is your backstory, worldbuilding, the characters, artwork, dialogue, and to some extent, music. Now wait a second, you might say, what about abstract games, how can you give them a story score? Well, you can, they are usually terrible from a story perspective, and that’s why we don’t tend to like them that much. 
• Co-Operation: The mechanisms that define how you as a team work together towards your goals. The most amazing and well-designed game can fall flat if we feel like our avatars are just sorta there doing stuff, but never together, and a mediocre game can be saved by some unique and clever co-operating solutions. 

​Now, needless to say, this is a really subjective review site. If you ever find your favourite game on the lower side – do not despair. We tend to have strong emotions when it comes to games, and we tumble in an eternal love or hate relationship with them. If a review score is bad, it simply means that we hated it. We are never implying that anyone who likes those games would be lacking in any manner. 

​Without sounding overly negative, we do think it’s important to hate games, especially on a review site. That’s how you can find what you might like. If you tend to agree with us – bam, just go for what we gave a high score on. And vice versa. 

​And finally, you might ask, are our opinions the same about every single game. Well, we are married, and our opinions about various things tend to unsurprisingly converge, games are no exception. The vast majority of the time, yes, these reviews reflect both our opinions, and we collectively stand by them. It’s all the more striking when that’s not true, and in those cases, we made a point about making it a shared review. 

​Spoilers

​The spoiler philosophy is quite simple: we are avoiding it at all costs, and strive to make it a safe space. Well, if you are reading any review of anything, there will be things spoiled for you in the truest sense of the word, at least the basics, but yeah, we try to stick to the civilized un-spoilery territory as it is generally acknowledged. That means that we do not describe nor show pictures of late stages of video games, or closed sections of legacy board games. That being said, we do show most of the stuff of regular board games, which might ruin the unboxing part for some people.