Cooperative games with the need for individuality

I've always liked partnership games. You still get a good sense of cooperation and a feeling of being on a *team*, but without some of the negatives you wrote about. I think partnership games are a great way to introduce a game to new players as well. Put one experienced player on each team for a few games, and sure they may be driving for those games. But then put the newbies on a team together and then it's sink or swim!

In one of my 'abbozzo' games, players play on two or three teams of two. But each player has a secret victory condition. So to win the game you must first win a team (partnership) victory. Then to win individual or ultimate victory you must have better met your secret victory condition. You can never win ultimate victory, no matter how much you crushed your secret victory condition, unless you also take the partnership victory.

In another game I finished that was cooperative, all players played on the same team and played for a team victory. If there was a team victory, the players counted up there various VPs to see who was the overall leader. I really like this because in order to get individual victory you must first ensure team victory. So it was a fine balance (a good tension) between helping the team...but not too much.

Ideas:

(A) Make the game too complex for one player to hold in their head at once, but simple enough that each player can understand what's allocated to him or her. I have a co-operative game coming out soon and I tired to simulate a five-person playtest. I managed to make it through eight turns before my brain totally melted, and it took me way longer than eight turns of a five-player game would have. Incidentally, the game plays fine solitaire – the complexity scales with the number of players.

(B) A variant of (A): Time the game so that players have a limited amount of time to "lock in" what they're doing. If one player tries to boss everyone around, the team will fail. Collaboration becomes essential.

(C) Have "leadership control" pass around from player to player. When one player is the leader, the other players may not speak unless spoken to and can only answer yes or no. Every response you give the leader costs you important energy points, so you don't want to talk to the leader too much or you can't use your cool special powers.

How do you make sure that is a true cooperative game one player doesn't dominate everything? This is a very interesting question. Different coop games have different solutions, but in the end I think this is a problem that isn't 100% fixable. If you have one dominant player, and the other players are easily intimidated, then there's not much you can do about it.

Lord of the Rings tries to fix that by giving the players cards in their hands, which they are not allowed to show to eachother. However, they are still allowed to say to eachother what they have in their hands. This may seem a bit artificial (and it is), but at the very least it makes sure that each player has to communicate with (speak to) other players. It is still possible for one player to bully the others, though.

I guess what it comes down to is that coop games are very much group dependend. In a "good" group, a coop game may work group, while in another group it goes over like a lead balloon.

The best you can do, I think, is to give each player some individual, hidden information or resources (like cards in hand), and just enough information per "character" so that it is easy for one player to keep track of his own stuff, but just too hard to keep track of all of the other player's stuff too, so that communication and cooperation becomes important.

Two quick thoughts:

1. Sporting games rely on cooperation, but the individual athleticism is very important. Games like basketball emphasize cooperation more so than show-boating (The equivalent of bossing everyone around)

2. Create an obstacle that is NOT another player: time-limit, appearance of a specific card, etc. Each player tries to further the overall goal of the game (Beat the clock, complete the tasks before the whammy pops up). Design the game so that individual efforts never quite reach the pinnacle. Eventually, veteran players will realize that they must work with each other.

These two ideas, taken together, remove the solitaire aspect of cooperative games. Whether you need to incoorporate both into a single game, I'm not sure...

Cheers,

Mitch

I'm designing a co-op game right now where players decide if they're staying together or splitting into teams at the start of each turn. If players stay together, they're safer, stronger, and have all of their combined resources to bring to bear against any obstacles. However, they're slower; they don't advance very far toward the endgame. If players split into two or more teams, they cover more ground, but each team only has access to the resources within that team. Also, the encounters aren't any weaker - they're still scaled for the number of players playing the game, not the number of players in the team.

How does this address Simons' original question?

1) Each player has special powers and their own resources. This encourages a sense of individuality, and encourages players to barter and swap during play to optimize their characters.

2) The rules explicitly encourage team decision-making during exploration.

3) With each player having several special powers and resources, and the encounters requiring different combinations of resources with different results, there are enough variables that no one player can keep track of them at the same time.

4) Similarly, there are mini-encounters where each player is simultaneously doing his or her own thing. You're making your own decisions to ensure your own well-being. You really don't want to place responsibility for your safety in someone else's hands... This reluctance, combined with the simultaneous nature of the activity, thwarts attempts to consolidate the decision-making with one person.