Integration of co-op play mechanics

I second UnnumberedT's thoughts about exploration. The players can start isolated, effectively playing a solo game until they explore far enough to encounter the other players, which then gives them access to new player-interaction actions. It sounds to me like a good way of introducing the mechanics to new players gradually through the game instead of having all options available on turn 1.

Note that the exploration doesn't have to be physical. The players could be sentient AI's running on virtual partitions of the same mainframe, and they have to crack the encryption algorithms that keep them isolated before they can start passing data back and forth. Or the players could be castaways on an island who are initially distrustful of each other and must accumulate enough goodwill with the other castaways before they are able to work on a joint project to escape. Just a few random thoughts to show how physical proximity is not the only thing that separates people.

Regards,
kos

I think the key is to have the coop mechanics in place from the get go, but to scale the challenges appropriately. If early challenges are easy the players will naturally ignore the coop option since they want all the treasure for themselves, but as the play progresses they have no option but to work with others if they wish to succeed. It produces a nice tension of "when do I need to start working with others vs taking it all for myself" and makes it a player choice rather than railroading them with heavy handed mechanics. They *might* succeed if they stay on their own throughout, but it's very unlikely.

Trade is a natural mechanic that achieves what you want, provided the game's circumstances are dire enough.

For instance, imagine a game where each player manages a colony on an alien world. Each one is self-sufficient, producing all the resources it needs to survive. At the start of the game, natural disasters start to occur -- meteor strikes, blights, pestilence, alien uprising. Each one damages or destroys resources and infrastructure in some, but not all, of the colonies. The situation leaves all colonies with a shortage of resources, but different resources in each case.

Now, players must trade with one-another to rebuild their colonies, but must also keep their populations alive.

No doubt there are other, better mechanics which are just as natural, but trade is something used in many games and is easy to study.

Neat problem.
Good luck!

As JustActCasual pointed out, you'll get natural co-op when the game environment rewards it.

One way to achieve this is to give every player a weakness that only another player can fix.

At this point, you can choose to:
1) Give everyone the same resources, which all can use, and hope they share.
2) Give everyone the same resources, some of which can only be given to others.

There are some other approaches, but these are the two with which I'm most familiar.

Situation #1 relies on trading. Player 'A' might need some of resource '1', but player 'B' needs it more, so 'A' agrees to give 'B' some '1' in exchange for some '2' he needs, or to keep 'B' in the game. The trick here is to make sure different players have different levels of need for resources. In my earlier example, the idea was that player 'A' experiences pestilence, which increases his need for food, while player 'B' suffers a plague and so needs medicine.

As you point out, pure trade can break down when players accumulate too much baggage, but in my experience, co-op mitigates this to a large degree. In the cases where it doesn't, it makes the co-op play fascinating to watch, but maybe not so fun to play.

Situation #2 relieves the "baggage" element from trading by making one or more resources worthless to the owner. For example, years ago I designed a co-op card game where players holed up in a cabin and defended themselves from oncoming zombies (this was so long ago that the zombie market wasn't saturated). Actions were limited, and everyone had his own zombies to kill. If anyone died, the game ended. Players could take 3 wounds before dying. Medical kits became available at random intervals, but *players could not heal themselves* -- they had to use an action point to heal another player.

Another way I enforced this was with "color filters." Zombies came in three colors: yellow, orange, and red, corresponding to easy-to-kill, normal, and hard-to-kill. Players drew cards, most of which had color-coded weapons that could only kill zombies of matching color. 1/2 the weapons were ranged, which meant they could attack zombies belonging to other players. The whole game was played on a 6-minute timer, so time was an explicit resource. In order to survive as a group, players needed to use the clock as efficiently as possible, which usually meant using a weapon as effectively as possible, as soon as it appeared. Often, this meant killing a zombie in someone else's group instead of stunning it in your own group by playing off-color.

This all gets back to JustActCasual's point about letting the game environment pressure players into co-op activity. The only rule I had that explicitly encouraged co-op play was the use of medical kits only on other players. Everything else stems from use of a limited resource (time) as efficiently as possible to meet the victory conditions.

Hi Sin,

What about some kind of end of turn or end of round action that each player must perform? If they don't perform the action, then the common resource pool is drained. If the common pool is drained, then all players are drained equally. If the players can't cover the difference then they are either penalized severly or knocked out of the game.

In your example of the card game, maybe the players need to do something each turn and, if they don't, then cards are discarded from the center draw pile; if the draw pile is gone, then the players discard from their hands and so on...

The "co-op" factor comes in when the players have the ability to replenish the draw pile, collectively agree who will perform the "action" and who won't so they can focus on other actions.

"eh...if we don't clean the filters this turn, Jim won't even have enough oxygen to cuss us out for letting him die..."

great question!