Well, I can certainly try.
So, X-COM: The Board Game, Space Alert!, and Space Cadets -- these are all co-op games involving real-time elements mixed with untimed resolution and bookkeeping. All three are games I have enjoyed immensely, and rate highly as cooperative tabletop gaming experiences. So let's dive into what I like about each, and how they differ in how they delight me.
First off, let's preface this with a disclaimer to provide some context: while I love cooperative gaming, I'm competitive enough that I crave co-op games that are (or at least, can be) brutally hard. If we're winning consistently, we're not challenging ourselves enough. There's nothing like working together to achieve victory, but it's sweetest when that working together is really more like desperately clawing your way to snatch victory from the jaws of looming disaster. Better to barely win once out of 3 or 4 games than to easily win more than you lose.
Okay, so.
X-COM: TBG tackles the subject matter from a high level. When you bring up X-COM to a video gamer, their reaction is most likely to be to remember the game as one of tactical squad combat, of carefully fanning your squad out to cover ground and find the enemy before they find you. This isn't that. X-COM: TBG evokes the strategic game of X-COM video games, the part where you stare at the globe in your command center, waiting for the next threat to appear, managing your resources to try to get that new tech in your soldiers' hands to give them a fighting chance to not die against the escalating alien threat.
X-COM: TBG places 1-4 players in the shoes of 4 high level officers in the X-COM organization's command structure: the Squad Leader, the Commander, the Chief Scientist, and the Central Officer. Each of these officers has organizational resources they must shepherd, marshal, and ration to combat the alien menace. Each turn consists of a timed phase and an untimed resolution phase. In the timed portion of the round, each player will be making a number of decisions under pressure about how to use the limited resources under their control. There's rarely ever enough to do everything that needs to be done, so it's very much a game of prioritization and compromise.
The Chief Scientist chooses what research projects to pursue and allocates scientists to projects to turn them into usable technology that players can utilize to enhance or otherwise facilitate their own task resolution.
The Commander keeps an eye on the budget, chooses where to deploy interceptors to counter UFOs invading each continents' airspace, and is responsible for crisis management via the crisis deck.
The Squad Leader chooses the composition of the forces dispatched to execute missions and defend the X-COM base from ground assault.
Finally, the Central Officer interfaces with the app and is in charge of deploying X-COM's satellites to counter the aliens' presence in orbit.
The real beauty of the game is in how these roles interact with each other. The Chief Scientist has all kinds of awesome tech at his fingertips, and needs to prioritize what's most critical to research. Everybody else depends on him to get the tools they need to carry out their duties competently. Everybody else will be bargaining with the Commander to get funded; every resource you commit costs money. "Give me 5 billion dollars this turn so I can get Joe those plasma rifles and carapace armor, and I can scrape by with 2 billion next turn." The Commander also has the delightful (to my viciously dark sense of humor) task of, several times a turn, drawing two cards off the crisis deck and choosing *which* disaster the team can best afford to deal with. There are never good choices here, whatever you choose, your team will groan when it comes time to reveal exactly what you've inflicted upon them, and you'll protest that at least it doesn't mean you're going to lose a third of your soldiers... The Squad Leader is trying to solve puzzles relating to how few soldiers he can afford to send on a mission, while still adequately covering the spread of task types (represented by 4 icons, each soldier specializes in one and can do another) and not skimping so much on manpower that he fails a task and gets soldiers killed. Meanwhile, the Central Officer has a huge array of tech that will eventually come under his jurisdiction that he can use to help everybody else... a limited number of times per turn. Is it worth saving those interceptors and eliminating that UFO over South America, or will using that Satellite Uplink now mean that the soldiers defending the base will die and let the alien assault damage the base?
The success of X-COM: TBG really lies in those interactions, which it does very well. The decisions must be made under pressure; typically, you'll only have 10-20 seconds to make any one decision, so you have in-depth strategy debates over any one of them as they come up.
Ultimately, it does come down to the push-your-luck dice rolls in the resolution phase, but there are so many tools to tweak the probabilities, give yourself mulligans on critical failures, and so on that it doesn't feel like the outcome of the game is out of your control. It's very much in your control, but you're not in control of the situation, if you get my meaning.
Moving on to Space Alert!, though... Space Alert! is a very different game. X-COM: TBG is exciting and tense, but Space Alert! is outright stressful and adrenaline pumping. A few of the players in my gaming group have outright refused to play it after the first or second game because of that.
In Space Alert!, you play the barely competent crew of a terribly inefficiently designed spaceship. You're trying to survive insanely dangerous space for the 10 minutes it takes replot your course between legs of a hyperspace journey. You're dealt cards before the game begins in three stacks. Each stack corresponds to 3 stages of the 10 minutes, and the cards each have two actions you can program your crewman to do in the 12 turns that comprise the resolution of those 10 minutes.
So, during the timed planning phase, you and your fellow players listen to a 10-minute soundtrack that will periodically prompt you to draw cards that will inform you of what threats have come to your attention and are trying to destroy you. These range from alien raiders, to asteroids, to rebellions staged by your robot defense squad.
The ship is laid out in 6 sections. Each section has 3 different stations; a weapon (labelled A), a power or shield station (labelled B), and then a third option (C) that's different for each section. Each card has a movement arrow on one half, and an action (A, B, or C) on the other. You try to cooperate with the other players in order to scurry around the ship, shifting power to replenish shields, firing weapons, recharging the capacitors that power the weapons, and so on. Timing is important, though -- firing a weapon before you've replenished the power it draws on will have no effect, and so forth. So it becomes challenging trying to coordinate timing, keep track of what your friends are doing -- "I thought there was power for the shields!" "Well, there was until I shot the weapon that's hooked up to the same power reservoir. Oops."
Once the 10 minutes are up, you step through each turn, each action, one at a time to track the resolution of what actually happened. And almost inevitably, it will diverge from what you thought was happening, because there's simply not enough time to reliably communicate what everybody's doing and it's easy to mix up timing dependencies. How badly it diverges from what you thought you were doing will determine whether the ship survives long enough to warp back out of there, or whether you explode or get slaughtered by a boarding assault of xeno-fauna.
Space Alert! is great because it's the only board game that gets my blood racing and my adrenaline pumping. It's about panic and chaos, and trying to coordinate with each other under a huge time pressure, with new dangers and stresses being thrown at you in real time that need to be revealed and then planned for. Then, time's up, and you get to watch your hastily-constructed plan of attack fall apart in hilarious failure and confusion.
Finally, Space Cadets both draws elements from the other two, and yet is completely different. Like X-COM: TBG, Space Cadets assigns unique roles to each player. Like Space Alert!, players are crew aboard a ship. Space Cadets sees players given a mission, and they need to complete it and jump out of the sector before they die.
What sets Space Cadets apart from the other games is that each player's role aboard the ship is represented by different mini-games, several of which are games of physical dexterity in some form or another, others of which are more like puzzles.
The amount of stuff each player can do depends on how much energy they've been assigned by the previous turn's performance of the Engineer. The Engineer plays a tile laying game in which he tries to match symbols along the edges that correspond to each station.
There are 9 different mini-games or something, so I won't go into them all, but I'll touch on some of the more clever and elegant ones to give a sense of the variety.
The Sensor Operator has to get locks on enemies (and valuable crystals to be tractored in) by picking out tetris-shaped cardboard pieces from a fabric bag by touch. The Jump Drive is engaged by an advanced game of Yahtzee -- 5-of-a-kind will engage the drive and allow a successful end of the mission. Power to the jump drive throughout the mission can be used to "buy" cards that let you manipulate the rolls in various ways to make that an achievable task. These cards do things like allow you to add 1 to two dice, or change a single die that rolled an even face to an odd face.
The catch? Every job has to be completed in 30 seconds.
Space Cadets puts the success of the mission in everybody's hands, as everybody needs to do their part competently to contribute. The mini-games are, for the most part, lovely little things that gain context and import based on how your success is crucial to the objective. It's not quite as stressful, especially because it's broken up much more than either of the other two -- 30 seconds racing, then a break, then 30 seconds of pressure again, and so on. I don't get the same sense of crisis management from Space Cadets, though, because generally, you know exactly what's demanded of you, and the unexpected surprise only comes in when somebody else failed a task, making your efforts useless or misdirected. It's challenging only because every turn counts (there's a Nemesis ship hunting you that shows up a few turns in and gets stronger as the game goes on) and you need everybody to be on top of their (mini)game to have an efficient turn.
Anyways... each game does a good job of creating a fast pace in its own way. Space Alert! is by far the most stressful, followed by X-COM: TBG, and Space Cadets is downright relaxing in comparison.
I like X-COM: TBG because of the way it fosters interaction and dependency between the different roles, and demands you make (frequently terrible) snap-decisions under pressure and with limited information. Space Alert! is frantic and panicy, plays quickly (30-40 minutes, all-told), and gives you the awesome opportunity to just watch the train wreck in slow motion after it's all said and done. Space Cadets gives you the Star Trek experience in board game form, and is more overtly farcical in its presentation (though Space Alert! is up there, too, considering it's the same universe as Galaxy Trucker).
As far as the app goes for X-COM: TBG, I can't criticize its inclusion or necessity at all. It could probably be replicated by some complex card system, but you'd likely lose some of the mystery and obfuscation of the "systems" involved in the game's AI, then, and it would be a really brutal task to try to manage such a non-electronic system under a time pressure. The app provides a handy adaptive timing mechanism (since you can accrue extra time by completing other tasks ahead of schedule), a hands-off AI that resists overt solving and prediction, and the ability to scramble the ordering of the turn (Oh, I forgot to mention that! Basically, if your Central Officer's satellites don't do their job well enough, UFOs in orbit at the end of the turn "disrupt communications," forcing you to complete tasks out of order in the next turn -- you'll have to do things like deploy interceptors before you detect where UFOs will appear, or assign a bunch of resources before you know what your budget for the turn is, and so on), all of which would be Herculean tasks, both to design and to manage in-play, without it. It indisputably adds to the game, and helps the game achieve a very X-COM feel, and it's incredibly obvious that the game was designed around the capabilities it provides.
The roles in X-COM: TBG (and in Space Cadet, for that matter) are all unique. I was a little concerned at GenCon when we demoed X-COM: TBG that the Central Officer and Chief Scientist might feel shallow in comparison to the other two, but having played a full game, it became obvious how much control and influence they have over the game through the tech cards. Some of the Space Cadets roles are more fun for me than others, but I think that's more a matter of personal taste than anything (with the exception of the Damage Control Officer, whose job is pretty lackluster -- but that's okay, because Space Cadets assigns 2-3 roles to everybody even with 6 players).
Each game plays pretty well throughout its player count. X-COM: TBG will have one or more players double-up on roles and adjust the amount of time you have to perform your tasks with fewer than 4 players. It roughly doubles the amount of time everything gets when playing solo. Space Alert! adds additional events if you play with the full 5, and fewer than 4 is achieved by drawing extra cards and sharing control of 1-2 crewmen between the remaining players. This is.. a little bit more confusing, and thus more challenging. Space Cadets breaks one of the simultaneous 30-second action phases into 2 steps with less than 5 (since there are 5 stations that work simultaneously normally) to play just fine with 3 or 4.
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