Dissent or Cooperate?

Several games have an element like this.

The games Terra and Republic of Rome are both semi-cooperative, in that players must work together against a common "enemy", and in both, it's possible for the "enemy" to win and for all players to lose.

In the game Verrater, and its sister game Meuterer, players line up on opposite sides of a conflict, and being on the winning side brings benefits, but it's not always certain which side a player is on due to the presence of a "traitor" card.

In my game "Disciples", I have a few event cards whereby if all players agree to accept some bad result, they each get a good result. But it's often hard to get all players on board for the bad result!

Not sure if any of these are exactly what you are looking for or not.

-Jeff

This seems like a classic risk/reward question which I think is all about balancing the game. If it is an obvious choice one way or the other, it doesn't require much strategy and would be quite predictable.

My initial thought is that if you have many instances for that desicion, it becomes more interesting. If you need to constantly decide which time is best to go alone and which time is best to play with the team, you give the players more chances to pick the wrong option. If players never pick the wrong option, what is the point of having an option?

Summary: You need to entice the player to do both options.

Africa 1880 (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/273) is centered around a mechanic where each turn, each player decides secretly which other players they will ally with and which they will be at war with.

As I recall, the rewards are pretty much according to the classic Prisoner's Dilemma -- if two players ally, they get some benefit; if both are at war, they get no benefit; if one allies and the other is at war, the "defector" gets the most benefit and the "cooperator" loses out.

Diplomacy and other games with a prominent diplomatic element could also be considered to have this characteristic. However, none of these really has players cooperating to overcome a "greater force", unless you consider the other players to be that force.

In Cities and Knights expansion for Settlers of Catan, you struggle to achieve your own glory until the barbarians invade your island, and at that point, players must repel the barbarians together using their knights. After that very short event, player competition resume.

In Game of Thrones, a similar event can occur, when at some point a horde (forgot the name) invade from the north, and players must secretly define the power they will invest in repelling the horde.

There are things I can see, that should be considered. First is that the invasion from an outside is very short event, considering the time spent competing with other players. Second, in both games, when the defense fails, the person who contributed the less to the defense is penalized. There is no penality if the defense succeed. Finally, players can use the invasion to weaken other players, by manipulating various elements around it (affect number of knights available, limit its contribution to ensure the defense fails without being penalized, etc).

The Game Of Thrones game has a mechanism where an outside threat builds up over time and periodically the players have to fight it off. Each player contributes to the defense via blind bid.

If the total offered by all the players is enough to fight off the invasion then the threat is dissolved (and reset) and the player who contributed the most to the effort receives a bonus.

If the total offered by all the players is insufficient, though, then everybody is punished and the player who donated the least is punished worse.

It's pretty fun, that mechanism.

-- Matthew

There is an ongoing discussion about zombies right now (Click here). I think the zombie theme is a very good setup for dissention or cooperation. Players could either fight together to achieve a common goal (such as repelling the zombies or finding the cure to the zombie disease), or try achieving a personal goal, such as reach the hellipad.

I think one of the major issues with this setup is that, once you decided to go for the solitary objective, people who decided to cooperate might be completely scewed because they no longer have enough support. Thus, players might decide to go for the solo objective all the time, because it would be the safest option available, since you do not depend on others. That is, if there is only one objective to reach in each game.

To counter that effect, you could introduce a series of sub-objectives to the game. Players would then decide which they want to achieve, and cooperate when necessary. For example, if one of the objective is to find a medical kit, players who which to succeed at that could cooperate to assault the hospital crowded by zombies. At the same time, the player who is looking for the flashlight could use the sewer to be the first to reach the toolshop.

Similarly, you could break down a game, by introducing a multi-scenes environment, where a series of events occur, and for each event, you decide to solo or cooperate. You could take any zombie movie, and for each scene, create a card with objectives and different results for solo or group success.