cooperative play - opinions?

I hear Terra is like that as well... only one player wins, but it's possible that everyone loses.

jwarrend has made a game which he put in the Game Design Workshop called The 12 disciples in which he tried very hard to encourage cooperation through scoring and game mechanics even though the game is not relaly cooperative (like all vs a system). In that game there were hidden goals the players were trying to accomplish, and one of them was to (in a way) thwart the other players. More like end the game early, possibly thereby winning by outscoring the other players.

I think encouraging cooperation through game mechanics is better than simply having a goal that everyone is trying to accomplish together- for example Lord of the Rings is really sort of a Solitaire game, and that's not as fun (for me anyway).

- Seth

There are other games; one that I've played that's pretty good is Sherlock Holmes: consulting detective. There's also a company called "Family Pastimes" that produces nothing but cooperative games.

I think that, as a designer, it's easier to present players with the challenge of overcoming each other than challenging them to overcome the game itself (and, in effect, you as the designer). LotR does the latter incredibly well, but it's a hard balance to strike -- you want an appropriate balance between difficulty, predictability, and replayability, which is hard to pull off.

There are two other "models" of cooperative play. One is "cooperative competition", such as one sees in Republic of Rome or Terra; the idea there is that players are each trying to win, but must work together to prevent some bad thing from happening. As Seth mentioned, in my game "Disciples", several scoring systems incentivize you to help other players along.

There's the other model of "everyone against one other player." A good example of this is Scotland Yard, in which one player is "Mr. X", and the other players are working together to try to capture him. There's also a game coming out called "Betrayal at House on the Hill" that has this element as well.

My experience is that this is a very hard thing to pull off. If the "bad guy" is known at all times, your job becomes much easier, but if his identity is secret, and you want him to be "subverting" the game, then you also need to cook up mechanics for him to act secretly, and secret actions are always a pain to implement. In my game "Disciples", I have one player who is secretly a traitor, and initially I was trying to come up with ways for him to work against the team. In practice, this just required an edifice of complexity that didn't contribute anything to the rest of the game -- it was just being force-fit in to give this "secretly subversive actions" scheme more meaning. In the end, I only retained my original idea -- the "traitor" has the ability of ending the game early, and scores in a different way than the other players. I think that if the traitor must be kept secret, it's still important to keep the scope of his actions and goals as simple as possible. For another model of this, check out the "Corrupt Hobbit" variant of the Lord of the Rings board game.

I found that this was a double-edged sword; in my game, some of the tension comes from the concern that one of the players will end the game, and when it's revealed that in fact, no one was the traitor, it feels anticlimactic. In other implementations of this idea, it would probably work ok. It would probably even be a nice source of paranoia, as players try to figure out which of them is "dirty" (or whether any of them are!)

Good luck!

-Jeff

paolo wrote:

I wonder if it's clear... Do you think could work?

Sounds very interesting. Will it work? Try it and see! I think its worth following up on ... Also open the door on the interetsign 'slow down the leader' idea where you need to hurt yourself to do it ...

No offense, but how could you not?

I remember thinking the game was fairly easy, maybe too easy the first few times I played it. I guess it was a little tougher with fewer players, but we never failed to finish.

Then I got all the expansions and dumped them all together, and that sort of killed the game for me. It was harder, sure... but less fun and interesting. I don't know why I think so.

|ndeed. I find LotR to be one of the most challenging games I know, simply because it's so tempting to try and steam-roller your way over the other players: especially when you know the game well.
(In which case, you start playing the properly tough variants, such as starting Sauron on 10, or losing the game when any Hobbit dies, not just the Ring-bearer etc.)
Friends & Foes is a great expansion as long as you don't consider the "military victory" to be an actual win.
The Dark Tiles introduced in the Sauron expansion make the whole game a (wonderful!) nightmare. If you can win consistently under that variant then you probably have cracked it, in which case you probably don't need to play it any more.
FWIW I don't like the actual "Sauron player" version, even though the Black Rider makes for a brilliantly tense mechanic.

As a piece of design, LotR is amazing. The basic game works like a dream, with plenty of tough variants to challenge you if you get too good at it. Then you add the expansions and get a fuller experience in a whole varienty of permuations (you can play with or without most of the additions and the game still works: I like adding the F&F scenarios but ignoring the Foes and playing with the Dark Tiles instead of the usual ones.)

And on that note (what Richard just said) I think the way to go is what Jeff did with Desciples. Construct mechanics that reward helping other players. Scurra and I (and others) discussed the same kind of thing for the X-Men idea in the wiki not too long ago- promoting teamwork between characters by adjusting rewards for players. I think it can give the game a real cooperative feel, even if strictly speaking the players are not really cooperating.

I think that's mostly true, although I had an idea for a LOTR game in which the "good guy" players weren't fully cooperating; they were on the same team, but they won in different ways. e.g., Frodo wins by tossing the Ring, Boromir wins by saving Gondor; so, it's possible for both to win, but if Gondor gets destroyed, then even if Frodo destroys the Ring, Boromir wouldn't win. What I was trying to get at with the game was the idea that asymmetry in the goals of the players would potentially create an impetus for the players to deviate from the "script" of the books.

I actually have a few cute ideas for this game, but I assume the LotR games well has dried up by now, so I may try to port them over to some original game. But the broader point is that there may be some potential for a game where players are on the same team but have different individual goals...

-Jeff

Don't forget "Lord of the Rings Monopoly"!

That's quite true, and indeed, this game wouldn't necessarily be intended for the publication route anyway, more of a fun design challenge: making the "ultimate" LotR game. This one will probably be closest in feel to the upcoming "War of the Ring" game, which sounds absolutely fantastic, and that's probably the closest thing to a project-killer on my end, but the other problem is that my game will likely be like Dune or Diplomacy in that you really need the full group of players for it to work, and in my case, that will be 6. So, the question for me is whether I want to plug ahead with a game that will be hard to playtest, or take the ideas I've developed and find a new (or multiple) home for them. The answer is probably "both", and I'll share some of these mechanics at some later time. Nothing earth-shattering, but one that I came up with the other day is a way of resolving actions variably without dice, in a way that I at least haven't seen before. I'll probably start a new thread to discuss it at some point...

-J

Hey Brian,
I hope this post isn't too late to be useful.
I've recently been playtesting a cooperative "campy-survive-relentless-waves-of-Zombies"-type card game (tried it on 4 groups, so far). Players are trying to beat the clock (kill off all Zombies before sunrise), which is probably a mechanic you wouldn't want to use, so my experience might not relate too much. Nevertheless, I'll say that the various groups on which I tried it seemed to like it.

There are a couple of ways it enforces co-op play. First, even though every player has his own group of Zombies to deal with, if *any* zombie remains in *any* group when the sun rises, everybody loses. Second, ranged attacks let you hit zombies in other peoples' groups, so you can help your buddies if need be. Third, you can play first aid supplies on everyone *except* yourself.

Victory definitely depends "on the people you game with" (as quoted above RE:LoTR). I had one group where one guy insisted on killing as many of his own zombies as he could every turn, regardless of his teammates' situations. They never won.

Which makes an important point RE:co-op games -- whereas competitive games might be "ruined" by the presence of a poor-sport, co-op games can be rendered less enjoyable by people who by nature don't "get" the idea of working with others, even though they might otherwise be competent and amiable.

I hope that's somehow useful info.

K.

Hmmm...I'm not entirely sure this is fair. To some degree, you could make the same argument against competitive games -- the "solution space" for any set of rules favors certain types of thinking/action. To which everyone replies, "yes...BUT...you can't really predict that actions of the other players, and they change the way the game plays".

That's true, but it's no less true of co-op games. In one of my co-op play tests (mentioned above), there was a "selfish guy" who never helped his buddies. That really changed the game dynamic and forced everyone to play differently to compensate. In a later playtest, we had the "forgetful guy" who, under a consistent set of circumstances, would forget to cover his buddy's back. Again, this significantly altered the experience and forced the rest of the players to "think outside the box", adopting new strategies to compensate for the problem.

In an interesting way, this does show a difference between competitive and co-op games: in the former, we are most often forced to work around other players' strengths, while in co-op games, we are forced to work around their weaknesses...

K.

Kreitler

The point I was making was not about players at all. I was referring to the rules set. Regardless of who is playing the game it needs to be solvable, not to everyone that might play it, but solvable nonetheless. If a player makes a mistake in a cooperative game it is no different to them making in a competitive game. Either way it is a matter of how many mistakes you can make and still win against your opponent. In this case it would be the game not a person you are working to overcome. A game that you can’t win because of a random set-up even if you make no mistakes is a broken game.

I find your play testing experiences with unpredictable players interesting. Maybe you can start a post just about that and see who else has encountered it.

Good idea. I'll give it a whirl.

K.