#7 - Hanabi
Hanabi is without a doubt my favourite co-operative game. Co-op games, where the players work together to accomplish a shared objective rather than competing, have become increasingly popular over the past few years. I think co-op games as fitting into three main groups: “Alpha Player” games, like Pandemic, where the player most familiar with the game can advise the others on what to do so that the team can achieve victory; time constraint games, like Space Alert, which eliminates Alpha Players because the game moves too quickly for coherent communication in the heat of the moment; and traitor games, like Battlestar Galactica, where one or more players are secretly working against the rest, making it difficult to know who to trust. Each type is fun in its own right, but Hanabi is in a category all of its own: its not so much a game as it is a trust fall disguised as one. That allows it to better evoke the essence of co-operation than any game I can possibly imagine. 