Librarians
Librarians is a cooperative game about filling the bookshelves of a library in the right (alphabetical) order … without communication.
Each turn, you place a new book. Horizontally—per shelf—they must be in alphabetical order. You win the game if you manage to place all the books.
That’s quite hard, of course, which is why you get help! If you manage to create 4 in a row of a genre, you get a special action to help you out in the future.
Expansions add more and more ways to sort books, some of which are required, and some of which give bonus actions if used.
But in all cases, you have to get rid of the entire deck while keeping silence in the library!
What’s special?
Usually, in a cooperative game “without communication”, you have other ways to communicate. Maybe once in a while, maybe when a certain event triggers, maybe using special rules. Some games, like “The Game”, are very loosey-goosey about it and basically come down to inventing some code language with your group to still communicate.
In this game, however, I wanted to see if I could completely remove communication. You must work together by using those “special actions” at the right time or perhaps hinting using the books you decide to play, but that’s it. (Hence why I hammer on the “silence in the library!” theme in all the marketing.)
This was hard to test on my own, of course. I obviously know all the cards when playing a paper prototype against myself, which removes most of the challenge of the game. Which is why this game moved from a paper prototype to an actual game tested with other people veeery quickly.