Some thoughts bundled in with a small piece of advice.

I found a good thought about Pandemic Legacy, and how it helps with one of the mastermindiest co-op games out there. It’s not that PL does anything at all to fight it, except for that the way the game plays out makes it such that everybody cares about the game: in a sense, you all become masterminds, because you’re all bought in at a high level.

The first loop in Tragedy Looper is always a low attachment loop, (especially in the first game, where you don’t even really know what to look for). I find that leaving table talk on for a first game is actually a bad thing. The more you can short circuit talking, the more people will just play, and then realize how their plays can matter.

I agree with pretty much everything you said: it’s a weird, dense game to get a handle on, and it suffers from the same problem a lot of the bigger co-op games have: it’s hard to get new people to play without dragging the game back to the training missions.

I wish it were just a tiny bit faster? Like, the first Space Alert play is rough, but the game takes 25 minutes, so you get to play again and get into the groove. But the game is just too long to be like: “Okay, warm up game, now we play again.”