The idea of playing a co-operative board game, where all the players work together to defeat the game itself, might have seemed strange ten years ago. Today, it seems strange that people might ever have thought it seemed strange. And that is largely because of a little game called Pandemic, which goes under the game spotlight this week. We'll also be talking about Pandemic Legacy, which a lot of people are calling game of the year for 2015.

Certain things make a game really well-suited to recommending at a board game café. Cute artwork, being awful to the other players, and amusing failures, for example. But other things can make a game a pretty hard sell in that environment. Things like card counting, fantasy themes, and game mechanics that aren't easy to compare to anything well-known. This week's game spotlight shines on a title with all of the above. Let's see how it does.

You can learn a lot about someone by playing with them. When you watch how people make choices, how they react to adversity, how they manage their resources, negotiate, plan, lie, tell the truth, win, and lose, you see a great deal of who they really are as people. But most of the time when people ask for a "get-to-know-you" game, that's not what they have in mind. This week on the SnakesCast, we talk about the disconnect between play and conversation, and which one is truly more revealing.

We've talked before on the SnakesCast about how to teach games, but we've never talked about how to learn them, especially when you don't know anybody who's played before. Everyone's process is different, and this week we're going to hear about some very different ideas about how to learn a game well enough to be able to teach it to your friends.

Acclaimed French board game designer Antoine Bauza has taken us on many trips to Japan through his games, including Tokaido, Hanabi, Takenoko, and now Samurai Spirit. It's a co-operative game based on legendary film maker Akira Kurosawa's classic "Seven Samurai". And it's just as hard to beat as Bauza's other famously punishing co-op game, Ghost Stories. What gives Samurai Spirit its strength, and what are its weaknesses?

"Hide and Seek" is one of the most popular and enduring games in all of human history, and with good reason. But modern life can present some practical barriers to that game, and so this week in the Game Spotlight we present the latest entry in the world of board games that takes on this venerable and tense dynamic of hunters and hunted. It's called Specter Ops.

"Simple games are short, complicated games are long." For people into this hobby, that tends to be the rule. But every rule has exceptions, and this one has a lot of them. So if you're trying to stump the gurus, asking for a long game that's simple to learn might be a good way to do it. In this week's Guru Voodoo episode, that's the challenge we're up against.

Anyone who loves starting with something small and growing it into something massive and awesome can enjoy the basic engagement of a deckbuilding game. And although other games as early as 1993 featured building a deck of cards from a collection, it wasn't until 2008's Dominion that players would get to build their deck as part of the game itself. In this week's SnakesCast, we take a look at this popular genre and what makes it so widely beloved.

Certain games form part of a kind of ludological canon. Catan, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne... these are games whose name alone keeps them selling well. It's hard for a new game to join that hallowed group. But this week in the game spotlight, we take a close look at a game that seems to have been designed with the express purpose of taking Carcassonne's place in the canon. It's a little game called Cacao.

The year was 2000. The Settlers of Catan had only recently been translated into English, and a small but dedicated groundswell of players was coming to discover an amazing new world of games. Into that world sprang a game called Carcassonne. Small, inexpensive, quick and easy to play, it was THE game to introduce to people who weren't so sure about straying from Monopoly and Uno. But that was fifteen years ago, and games have come a long way since then. How well does the original "gateway game" hold up today?