Friends and Enemies Trivia Quiz

Answer: Farming

"Stardew Valley" not only began as single player, but also as a game created by a single person - even down to the music. The game updates tend to be occasional, but are often quite significant: for instance, the addition of Ginger Island which added a significant amount of content, as well as the cooperative multiplayer update itself.

Up to four players are supported in multiplayer on console versions. This used to be the same on PC, but the limit for PC extended to eight players. Multiplayer can be either people playing remotely, or there is also a split-screen multiplayer mode, although no combination of the two is offered. A group can also decide quite how communal they want to be with resources: for instance, if money will be truly communal or whether players will instead just have what they personally earn.

"Stardew Valley" has sold over 41 million copies, which makes it one of the highest selling games of all time.

A cooperative board game of "Stardew Valley" was also released in 2021.

Answer: Darkling

"Dokapon Kingdom" allows up to four friends to compete against each other to try and win the hand of Princess Penny - by earning the most money. As the leaderboard (based on money and total assets) is very important if you want to win the game, the game offers lots of opportunities to mess with fellow players. For instance, there are field magics that can be used to cause problems for other players such as stealing items or inflicting them with status effects.

Players can go into combat with each other, and the winning player may take their possessions, change their hair style or give them a different (silly) nickname. Combat uses a rock-paper-scissors style system where you need to try and predict what your opponent will do and what you are able to survive.

If a player has been doing poorly for long enough that the Darkling mode becomes an option, then this has a real chance to shake up the leaderboard. A player who accepts the Darkling offer has a huge increase in stats and health, gets 5 spinners each turn giving them huge reach to other players, and can place monsters back on earned cities, making another player lose their control of them. They also gain points that they can spend before they turn back that can be gain changing: some of the options include closing bank and item spaces, cutting their money in half, summoning all players to them, summon monsters to all towns on the current or all continents (thereby making anybody who owns them lose possession of them), or stealing a castle. These are all actions that can make massive changes to the leaderboard rapidly, as it is based so much on money and assets.

Answer: Rot

Coming with both a single player mode as well as its competitive multiplayer, "Armello" is a four player experience. After selecting a character, players compete against each other to earn the next crown. They can either battle their way to victory by defeating the afflicted king, become even more corrupted than he is, be the most prestigious hero, or can cleanse the corruption from the king. Characters all have different traits, which may lend themselves better to some victory conditions than others.

"Armello" is a turn-based experience, and it takes place entirely in real time like a board game - you must wait for the opposition to complete their turn, and you can see the game board and their actions the entire time. Also included in the turn order are the King's Guard and any Bane on the board, which are enemies not controlled by other players. As the king is dying, the game is time-limited by the amount of turns allowed.

Gameplay is centred around cards: there are three main types of card, item, spell, and trickery. There are also follower cards, but these are much rarer and tend to be rewards from miniquests if you see them at all with one notable exception. Cards are used to equip gear to modify combat or other parameters such as prestige, allow use of items such as heals, give buffs to characters, debuff characters, steal from characters, swap hands with characters, as well as miscellaneous effects such as making somebody a fugitive. Each character can hold a certain amount of cards which can be modified by card effects, and each turn they will draw up to their maximum if their hand is not full.

There is now also an "Armello" board game!

Answer: Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

"Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes" is a cooperative multiplayer game where one player plays as a defuser - this player runs the game, and is prohibited from sharing the screen with their partner(s), who act as the bomb disposal experts. These experts in fact don't run a copy of the game at all - they don't even need to own it - they instead have a long PDF file, the bomb defusal manual.

Everything the defuser needs to know to defuse any bomb is in there, but there's a catch - the manual is written in a deliberately inefficient way, all of which are their own puzzles and written in a way to really test the clear communication of the players and where they need to both participate to defuse the bomb in time.

Some of the more noteworthy and challenging puzzles include the defuser having to verbally relay morse code flashes for the expert(s) to interpret from a morse code letter chart, a fiendish venn diagram with a significant amount of overlapping parts, and a "Who's on First?" (by Abbott and Costello) style puzzle where words must be relayed between the two, and they all consist of different amounts of homophones to force clarification.

Answer: False

As the name implies, "It Takes Two" literally takes two people to play. It is a cooperative multiplayer game that utilises a split screen mechanic so both players can see what is occurring on each screen. This means that unlike in some of the other games in this quiz, a player gets to become fully familiar with both characters (in some of the other games here, you will only ever see one of the characters) and puts the cooperative element at the very core of the story, where both characters - and their relationship to each other - are equally important. Both local multiplayer and internet multiplayer are available.

The two main characters will have different abilities at different points in the game which can be vital for progression in the different puzzles that players will encounter.

The developer, Hazelight Studios, is known for their games putting cooperative gameplay right at the core of a game rather than as an afterthought or an additional game mode. Their first released game was "A Way Out", while "Split Fiction" is often lauded, all of which have very different stories but are designed around split screen cooperative multiplayer.

Answer: Town of Salem

Although these are all social deduction games, they all have different takes on death, and "Town of Salem" is the only one that uses the last will mechanic: in "Blood on the Clocktower" dead players can still talk just only have one vote left, "One Night Ultimate Werewolf" is specifically the single night version and is more interested in tracking moving cards, and "Among Us" has ghost chat and players being able to move around as a ghost after their death.

The last will can be impacted by various evil roles such as the janitor (who can hide both the role and will of a dying player), or the forger (who can forge a new will - or just blank it so it appears as though the player didn't write one).

As the name implies, "Town of Salem" takes some inspiration from the Salem witch trials, and thus whoever the town by majority votes to kill in a day gets executed in the town square. Although the game's main evil faction was initially the mafia (although there was a single minion called the witch), the game later also released a "coven" expansion where the evil team is a coven of witches instead.

As well as these main evil parties, neutral characters also exist, who rather than playing for a team, are generally playing for a self-serving goal: this could be due to being solo killers such as a werewolf or serial killer, a jester whose goal is to get themself executed (taking out one of the people who voted to execute them for their trouble), an executioner whose goal is to get a single assigned player executed, or a guardian angel whose job is to ensure a single assigned player doesn't die instead. These are just a few variations.

There have been several variations on the game: a sequel was released in 2023 called "Town of Salem 2", and prior to that "Traitors in Salem" in 2022: this attempted to blend the core mechanics of "Town of Salem" with the free-moving style gameplay of the by then very popular "Among Us".

Answer: A walkie-talkie

In "We Were Here", the weather is awful - there's a deluge of snow, and then the players find themselves separated in an abandoned castle which turns out to be filled with devious puzzles, and with an inability for players to progress without these puzzles being solved. As you work together to try and reunite, a walkie-talkie must be used to communicate and find these solutions. Many of the puzzles are often visual and trying to convey this information can be challenging as you cannot see what the other person is seeing - you can only describe, and it is designed in a way where precise communication is key, so it's easy to misidentify figures that the other person is trying to describe.

There are four other games in the series, including "We Were Here Too" (2018), "We Were Here Together" (2019), "We Were Here Forever" (2022) and "We Were Here Expeditions: The Friendship" (2023).

Answer: Overcooked

"Overcooked" allows for cooperative play for up to four players. This can include the four players all playing together as a team, but it also has a versus mode where two players can compete against another two to see who gets the most money.

To ensure the need for cooperative play, "Overcooked" does its best to distract its players and need them to work together. This can be from kitchen layouts that are extremely inefficient to travel around yourself and require constant toing and froing around an outer edge, to distractions such as moving NPCs, to the kitchen itself moving around and changing which players can access which pieces of equipment. On some maps, players can fall off the level and have to wait for five seconds to respawn - this is particularly noticeable in a level where you have to manoeuvre across two trucks, but they do not always travel together so you don't always have access to both parts constantly.

"Overcooked" is ultimately a frenetic game by design, but its very busy gameplay gives a challenge and does mean that cooperative play is required. Although there technically is a single player mode, it's still balanced in a way where more than a single chef is required, only this time a player must switch between two different characters to perform their tasks.

Answer: Red Bull

"Age of Empires II" persisted as a very active game, having had two different Steam re-releases - originally "Age of Empires II HD" and more recently "Age of Empires II Definitive Edition". Long before the release of HD and DE, "Age of Empires II" multiplayer used to exist primarily through the MSN Gaming Zone (sometimes just referred to as The Zone), with multiplayer on the original game being used for LAN multiplayer, with it being an otherwise single player experience.

With the HD and DE editions utilising Steam, it became more viable for the game itself to be used for other types of multiplayer. The current Definitive Edition allows players to join lobbies, as well as to be assigned an opponent using a ranked ladder system, where the game attempts to place players against others of a similar skill level, using an ELO system. A new player begins at 1000 ELO, and takes heavy rises or losses for their initial ten or so games, to more rapidly place them at the correct ELO. After that, ELO still raises or falls based on performance, but not as dramatically.

Up to eight players can play in a game - on the ranked ladder, that can be a 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 or 4v4 game.

Random Map tends to be the most played game mode, although Deathmatch (where players start in the Imperial Age with significant resources to be able to instantly start battling), Empire Wars (a game mode that starts in the Feudal Age to still allow build up but aims to remove the initial slow stages of the Dark Age), and Regicide (where each player has a king and if that king dies, they instantly lose) are also popular game modes that are available for multiplayer.

The Red Bull Wololo "Age of Empires II DE" tournaments have sometimes been combined with other "Age of Empires" game tournaments. They're noteworthy for being in-person tournaments rather than remote, with locations including Heidelberg Castle and Castillo de Almodóvar del Río.

Answer: Dual screen

The original "The World Ends With You" was a game truly made for the DS - its attack types used different ways of using the stylus (drawing a circle around something, tapping, scratching etc), it used little known features such as the microphone, but most importantly, its combat was presented as a dual screen - the main player character on one screen, controlled with the stylus, and the assigned partner character on another screen, controlled simultaneously with the dpad.

When the game came to be ported to different consoles, this was changed to have the partner character activated as a pin for a short amount of time, like the rest of Neku's psychs, and both characters are depicted as present on the same screen. However, the original game made a huge deal of it being a battle on two planes - the UG and the RG. It was the reason partners were so important to the game - you could not fight on one plane only.

In "The World Ends With You Final Remix", introducing a co-operative multiplayer mode helped to breathe a bit of life back into this mechanic. Although it still uses a single screen, instead of the partner character only appearing for a very small amount of time, they stay on the screen for the full combat and it meant that combat could be done in tandem, as originally designed, with both characters being continuously present and able to attack at once. It also reinforced the partners working together message that is at the core of the game.