Design of Co-Op Board Games and Card Games

[Chamomile]

Here's a question. Several cooperative board games, especially those that are some variant on a standard RPG scenario, involve the possibility of death. But it's well-known in board game design that a good board game keeps all players playing until the very end. Is there a way to keep a player playing after their token is dead?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Sure. There's a lot of options, depending on the game's setup and resource mechanics.

• In Arkham Horror, you just get another Investigator. He's at a disadvantage because he's a starting character who hasn't accumulated any extras.

• In Ghost Stories, you are such badass monks that you are only dead for as long as it takes your friend to come yell "no loafing!" and pull you out of your grave. You don't lose any stuff, but the lost action it takes to rez you hurts.

[Manxome]

Is there a way to keep a player playing after their token is dead?

Your options here fall into 3 categories:

• Give them something to do that doesn't require a token. Maybe you manage the NPCs, or continue drawing cards but play them on allies' turns or something. I haven't played Sentinels of the Multiverse, but I believe each character comes with a special action they can use after being killed to help the remaining players.
• Give them a new token. You come back as a different character (or maybe as a zombie), but you're somehow weaker or less well-positioned than your old character.
• Never actually take away their token; you're only mostly dead, and the bad guy scores a point for overrunning your position or you have to take a time out to recover or something, but then you get back in the game.

There's also a fourth solution which doesn't strictly speaking answer your question, but addresses the underlying problem: you can make all players instantly lose if any one of them dies. (Often if you're doing this, you just give everyone a shared health pool.)

[RobbyPants]

Pandemic

Running around the world curing viruses. Pandemic I think also just falls over and dies from the "one person plays as leader" mechanic. While popular, I can't really recommend it.

In my experience, if you have one person teaching a group, that person becomes the de facto leader, unless they make a point to try to get the group to discuss. If a group is adopting a new player, the group tends to make decisions for that player.

However, it seems that once any given player has one or two games under their belt (depending on how quick they pick things up), they are much more assertive and declare their own actions. So, it seems like a problem that typically solves itself withing one or two play-throughs.

[Chamomile]

I've read the rules for Arkham Horror since they're available free online, and Pandemic is probably available to. But the trouble is, I'm having trouble analyzing how Arkham Horror would actually play. I mean, I don't have any difficulty understanding the rules, but what is the flow of the game? What feel do the mechanics produce? Likewise with Pandemic. Those two seem to be the biggest successes and thus probably the best place to learn. Normally I'd figure this out by actually playing a few games, but unfortunately online board gaming hasn't really taken off the way online roleplaying has, and buying a game and subsequently assembling a group to play is an awful lot of effort just to do some ground research because I think maybe I might want to take a stab at writing up rules for a hypothetical board game maybe. What'd really be nice is an actual OSSR-style point-by-point review of one or both of these things, including analyses of what they did right or wrong (there's some good stuff in this thread but it's hardly exhaustive) but I'd settle for a description of how the game plays in practice.

Also there's that one necromancer game that someone from the Den made and they can probably rant about that for a bit and it'd probably be enlightening, seeing as how he's actually created a playable board game that got published and everything. It looked pretty interesting when he posted the free beta version before it was officially published, but again, no group to play it with, so I don't really know how it works as a designer, and can barely remember how it goes as a player.

[Username17]

Arkham Horror turns have the following phases:

• Flip over the Mythos card, and do the enemy accounting it tells you to do. Technically, this is the last phase of the previous turn, but that is just the rules being unnecessarily baroque. Functionally, it's the beginning of this turn. There is a fair amount of accounting here, and players may forget to place a doom marker, advance the terror track, move enemies, or count monster limits.
• After enemies have been placed and moved and clues placed and all that, the discussion phase starts. This is longer than it needs to be, because technically your focus adjustments have to be made before anyone starts moving. The game could be cleaned up considerably by putting choices later in the turn.
• Then players do movement in order, doing the things they agreed to during the discussion phase. Most players only have their character walk from point A to point B, but the phase is sometimes much longer because street sweeper characters do all of their actions and die rolling right in the middle of their movement.
• Now encounters. This is the longest part of the turn, and it's where most of the meat happens. Street Sweeper characters already had their actions, and have nothing to do here. Encounters are drawn clockwise around the table, except for people in outlands who get their cards drawn second, which is confusing and completely pointless. People who are planning to activate board elements don't draw encounters and actually had their entire turn planned and resolved back in the discussion phase and are usually fairly impatient at this point.

It's a game I think highly of, but it's clear that it could be improved substantially by being simplified in a couple of key ways.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

I've read the rules for Arkham Horror since they're available free online, and Pandemic is probably available to. But the trouble is, I'm having trouble analyzing how Arkham Horror would actually play. I mean, I don't have any difficulty understanding the rules, but what is the flow of the game? What feel do the mechanics produce? Likewise with Pandemic. Those two seem to be the biggest successes and thus probably the best place to learn.

Pandemic is largely about reacting to a bad situation that gets worse at unpredictable times, and often in unpredictable ways. So, the majority of the time, you'll look at the situation on the board, and try to prioritize what you should do. You may want to look a few turns in advance to see if someone else can do that task better, and if you think you can wait that long. Then, you have to hope things don't drastically take a turn for the worse between those turns. I have literally had the game beaten within a turn (we knew we could cure the forth disease on the next turn), only to lose the game at the end of the second to last turn, even when it looked like we were completely safe.


So, here's how it actually works in play. Each player will get a turn, going around the table. Each turn has several phases:

Action phase: You get four actions. Everyone can do the same general stuff, and each player can either do one thing better and/or do something special. This is when you go around treating infections, curing diseases, and doing your "research" (trading cards).

Draw phase: You draw two cards. These are mostly city cards, which can be used for travel and curing diseases. There are a few special cards in there*, and several Epidemic cards (the number of cards used controls the difficulty of the game). So, this is usually a good phase, but drawing an Epidemic card sucks.

Infection phase: Draw 2-4 cards from the infection pile (the more Epidemics you've had, the more you draw), and add a cube to each of those cities. If any city has three cubes already, an Outbreak occurs (add one cube to each neighboring city). Outbreaks can start chain reactions with other Outbreaks if too many adjacent cities have two or three cubes.

*These cards can be real life savers, and don't require an action to play. They can typically be played when it is not your turn, even.


So, in practice, you take your actions, then things get worse. Then the next person gets their turn and tries to react to it. The game is primarily about managing your resources, trying to win the game and not lose the game. You figure, you will likely be doing one of two things on any given action:

1) removing cubes (keeping you from losing the game), or

2) working on a cure (getting closer to winning the game).

Obviously, you can't win if you've lost, so you have to spend some action on cube mitigation, but the game has a sharp time limit (you lose if you have no draw cards left when you go to draw one). So, you cannot spend too much time focusing on cube mitigation. Because the Epidemics will happen at unpredictable times and change the nature of the threat in unpredictable ways, it's hard to effectively plan ahead by more than a few turns. You have to be willing to adapt and make sacrifices.



Edit:
I suppose I should explain why Epidemics and Outbreaks are bad from a mechanical stand point. The biggest issue is that the Epidemics occur in phase 2 and the infecting occurs in phase 3. Normally, you start the game with nine infected cities (and those cities in the infection discard pile), and you infect new cities by drawing off the top of the pile. This means that at the start of the game, new cities will become minorly infected, but already infected cities won't get worse. An Epidemic does three things:

1) You draw a card off of the bottom of the infection pile (this means that it has to be an uninfected city, assuming it wasn't infected from an Outbreak), and put three cubes on it. Put this card in the discards.

2) You increase the infection rate (you will eventually infect 3 or 4 cities a turn as you get more Epidemics).

3) You shuffle the infection pile discards and put them on top. This means that for a while, you will now be adding cubes to already infected cities rather than new cities, and that new city that just got three cubes is somewhere near the top.


Because the infection phase happens after the draw phase (where epidemics happen), it's entirely possible you will get an Outbreak on the same turn as your Epidemic (that city has three cubes, so adding another creates an outbreak). This is why it's exceptionally dangerous to allow multiple adjacent cities to have two or three cubes. You can be feeling relatively safe, then have a nearby city get hit by an Epidemic, then draw that city (and possibly some of those other adjacent cities) and trigger multiple Outbreaks, putting you over your limit of 8 or running you out of cubes in an instant. Again, I've lost at least two games where I thought we were safe and were otherwise guaranteed to win on the next turn.

[TheFlatline]

I really like Pandemic, because it extremely faithfully recreates the feeling of being part of a disaster response team. You're given a shitty situation, and you fight back by holding meetings and assigning heavily limited resources. It is the most simulationist game I have ever seen on any topic, and it's over for good or ill in about half an hour.

Yes, you can just have one person tell every other player what to do and solve the game that way, but if everyone at the table knows what they are doing it genuinely doesn't degenerate into that.

-Username17

I agree, I love Pandemic something fierce. It's quick, it's elegant, it's maddeningly frustrating, and it's *easy* to adjust the difficulty all the way up to "are you fucking insane?" levels.

Sadly, it does have the quarterback issue.

One solution to this is the "competitive cooperative" game where there can be only one winner, but everyone loses if you don't work together. Or, if you prefer, everyone wins, but there's a "super winner". Defender's of the Realm does this, and is basically a moderately more complex version of Pandemic with randomness from the dice and 80's D&D artwork (seriously, check it out). It's usually a hit with my group but I miss that elegance and speed that is Pandemic.

I'm actually a big fan of co-ops, because sometimes I'm just not in a competitive mood but still want a challenge. There's actually a *huge* amount of co-op games out there, it's a surprisingly big genre.

Arkham Horror is probably the great grandaddy of them all but... I've gotten to the point where it's either more or less impossible to win or it's too easy. One of the two. Either the game state randomly fucks us beyond winning, and we see that in the first 20 minutes, or we win. We usually can tell when we've won within 30 minutes, but it takes another 2 hours to get to the end.

Mansions of Madness... We're not going to go there. Worst 5 hours of my life. A game that is less than the sum of it's parts. It doesn't help it takes 20-30 minutes to *set up*.

Lord of the Rings the LCG is another super popular Co-op, and one I found terrible. It breaks a lot of co-op molds and is kind of interesting, but deck building isn't my big thing these days I guess.

Co-ops are either puzzles that are set up at the start of the game, or are incredibly harsh gaming systems with strict loss conditions. Try playing Ghost Stories on it's hardest difficulty level and watch how fucking fast you get schooled. Quarterbacking is always an issue in this genre, but it's less so if you have hidden information or way too much info to keep track of so you don't have a perfect idea of the gamestate. That's why most co-ops have billions of tokens and figs and cards and decks: to discourage quarterbacking.

[TheFlatline]

Oh I almost forgot my personal favorite in the co-op genre: Space Alert.

It removes the quarterbacking issue by giving everyone unique jobs and then unfolds the mission... in real time. It's a cluster-fuck of confusion and attempted communication and panic and stress, and is a fantastic 4 alarm emergency experience.

You'll die in this game. Often. Frequently. The odds of you not failing are insane, since you have literally seconds to figure out how to program moves to overcome each threat or challenge.

And then you have to waggle the mouse on the bridge every other turn or the entire ship shuts down when the screen saver kicks in.

[Manxome]

I agree, I love Pandemic something fierce. It's quick, it's elegant, it's maddeningly frustrating, and it's *easy* to adjust the difficulty all the way up to "are you fucking insane?" levels.

How do you figure? One of my complaints with Pandemic is that I can barely even tell the difference between "easy" and "heroic" difficulties. In fact, if someone sets up the game without telling you which difficulty you're playing on, there's a good chance that it will be impossible to deduce (even with perfect memory, perfect logic, and perfect knowledge of the rules) until the game is mostly over, because a lucky shuffle on hard difficulty is indistinguishable from an unlucky shuffle on easy difficulty until very late.

Of course, I also feel like the only time I lose Pandemic is when the game does something stupidly unfair, like taking a city from 0 cubes to outbreak in a single turn, so maybe I can't tell the difference because of the way I'm mentally filtering the data. Also note I don't have the expansion; I understand that adds another difficulty level.

[RobbyPants]

I agree, I love Pandemic something fierce. It's quick, it's elegant, it's maddeningly frustrating, and it's *easy* to adjust the difficulty all the way up to "are you fucking insane?" levels.

How do you figure? One of my complaints with Pandemic is that I can barely even tell the difference between "easy" and "heroic" difficulties. In fact, if someone sets up the game without telling you which difficulty you're playing on, there's a good chance that it will be impossible to deduce (even with perfect memory, perfect logic, and perfect knowledge of the rules) until the game is mostly over, because a lucky shuffle on hard difficulty is indistinguishable from an unlucky shuffle on easy difficulty until very late.

Of course, I also feel like the only time I lose Pandemic is when the game does something stupidly unfair, like taking a city from 0 cubes to outbreak in a single turn, so maybe I can't tell the difference because of the way I'm mentally filtering the data. Also note I don't have the expansion; I understand that adds another difficulty level.

When I play with four epidemic cards, I almost never lose, unless we're deliberately playing sloppily. Playing with five, I feel I win around half the time, or a bit more (probably not 75% of the time). My wife and I have tried playing with six epidemic cards five or six times. We only won once. Twice, we got very close to winning (within a turn), only to have everything completely screwed up by an Epidemic and the following infection phase. We haven't tried seven.

The notion of knowing how many you are playing with without being told is rather strange. There's enough overlap between what could happen with four or five epidemics that you can't tell how many are in the deck solely by how things are playing out on that one particular game.

Sure, it's anecdotal, but I've noticed a difference after many games.

[fectin]

@Robby: people are very, very good at pattern recognition.


I don't agree that Betrayal is only good for 8 playthroughs, but since I've only played about 5, I'm not really equipped to argue the point.
I do think the betrayal mechanic is fantastic though.

[TheFlatline]

I agree, I love Pandemic something fierce. It's quick, it's elegant, it's maddeningly frustrating, and it's *easy* to adjust the difficulty all the way up to "are you fucking insane?" levels.

How do you figure? One of my complaints with Pandemic is that I can barely even tell the difference between "easy" and "heroic" difficulties. In fact, if someone sets up the game without telling you which difficulty you're playing on, there's a good chance that it will be impossible to deduce (even with perfect memory, perfect logic, and perfect knowledge of the rules) until the game is mostly over, because a lucky shuffle on hard difficulty is indistinguishable from an unlucky shuffle on easy difficulty until very late.

Of course, I also feel like the only time I lose Pandemic is when the game does something stupidly unfair, like taking a city from 0 cubes to outbreak in a single turn, so maybe I can't tell the difference because of the way I'm mentally filtering the data. Also note I don't have the expansion; I understand that adds another difficulty level.

You do realize you're supposed to separate out the city draw pile (not the infection deck) into equal piles and shuffle the epidemics into each pile and then assemble the deck right? The difference between 4 and 7 epidemics is *huge* in frequency.

And if that isn't enough for you, go grab On the Brink, which is a fantastic expansion. It adds a bioterrorist game mode (kind of meh), but more importantly adds *another* epidemic card if you're fucking masochistic enough, and also adds mutating viruses that do funky shit to change the gameplay and virulent diseases which can undo your cures and shit. It also adds new roles that are pretty interesting. It's generally considered an excellent example of game expansion since it really kicks the game up a notch.

Plus, the old school version came with petri dishes to store all your virus cubes in.

[TheFlatline]

@Robby: people are very, very good at pattern recognition.


I don't agree that Betrayal is only good for 8 playthroughs, but since I've only played about 5, I'm not really equipped to argue the point.
I do think the betrayal mechanic is fantastic though.

If we're going with traitor mechanics, one of my favorite games of all time is still Battlestar Galactica. Yes it takes 2-3 hours to play, yes it's exhausting at times, but goddamn I love that game.

[Manxome]

You do realize you're supposed to separate out the city draw pile (not the infection deck) into equal piles and shuffle the epidemics into each pile and then assemble the deck right? The difference between 4 and 7 epidemics is *huge* in frequency.

Yes, I'm aware you space out the epidemics. My game only came with 6 epidemic cards, though, I think you're confusing it with the expansion.

So on easy mode (4 epidemics), the first epidemic is somewhere in the first 12 cards, the second is somewhere in the next 12 cards, etc. On heroic, the first epidemic is somewhere in the first 9 cards, etc.*

So suppose someone sets up the game following the heroic rules, but lies and tells you that you're playing on easy. When will you figure out he's a liar? The first epidemic won't tell you; you could potentially get that on the first turn no matter what difficulty you're playing on (fun trivia: it is theoretically possible to unavoidably lose on the first turn, on any difficulty).

If you were playing on easy, the second epidemic would be somewhere between card #13 and card #24, but on heroic rules it will be between card #10 and card #18; if you draw it as card #10, #11, or #12 (and you're counting), you'll know something is wrong, but if you draw it as #13 or later, it could just be luck of the shuffle. So there's a 1/3 chance you'll figure it out on the second epidemic, if you're counting cards--but it's more likely that you still can't tell.

Then there's a 3/4 chance that the third epidemic will tip you off--but it's still not guaranteed, and by that point you're well into the game, and could plausibly already have the first cure.

That's the difference between minimum and maximum difficulty. If they only lied by one difficulty level, it's entirely plausible that you could finish the game before seeing anything that proved them a liar.

Even if you do see an epidemic card a couple turns earlier than you should, how much does that increase the difficulty? It means future infections will revisit previous cities, which makes it easier for one of them to outbreak, but also means you don't have as many different cities you have to move between, so you can treat them more efficiently. Epidemics also increase the rate of infection, but you need a lot of epidemics to increase it once.

It seems to me that the main difference is that the game has a higher probability of screwing you in a way that is both unfair and unpreventable--e.g. an epidemic that puts 3 cubes in a virgin city then instantly infects that same city before you're allowed to react, an epidemic that puts 3 cubes in a city that already has 1 cube from an earlier outbreak, two epidemics on consecutive turns with unlucky infection draws in between, etc. Those kinds of things are definitely more likely with more epidemic cards, but there's also no viable way to prevent or counter them, AFAICT.


*Calculations assume a 3-player game, and that when piles are uneven due to rounding you put the larger piles on top.

[duo31]

Gears of War is a fun squad based co-op game. Difficulty is high though, which is probably why i like it.

[Chamomile]

I'll revive this thread rather than making a new one since my question is tangentially related.

As I mentioned earlier I am in the process of working out a hypothetical board game. Specifically, I've been trying to make a Buffy the Vampire Slayer board game, because I've been marathoning Buffy lately and it occurs to me that as an episodic adventure story strongly focused on protecting a single town from otherworldly invasion, Buffy is a strong candidate for being turned into a cooperative board game in the vein of Arkham Horror. Maybe if I finish it I'll scrub off the copyrighted details and try to actually do something with it, but mostly I'd just like to actually play the thing.

I haven't actually finished the rules yet or even run into rules questions I can't solve, mostly because the rules are half-finished and mostly hypothetical, so what I'm actually here to ask about is names for stuff so that I can finish up the rules and then present them in completed form to ask why they're awful. So here's some things that need names:

1) Right now there's something called "bonds" which are your health. So if Buffy is friends with Willow that makes her more durable, and if a bad guy punches her really hard the bond with Willow could be depleted (not because Willow is suddenly not friends with her anymore, but because her friendship with Willow is no longer enough to keep her going on its own). Then if you're in the same location as another character you can refresh the bond by taking an action to do so. So after beating the bad guy everyone goes and has a party at the Bronze to restore their health.

There's a lot of problems with this, though. First off, "bond" implies that it's a two-way street but it isn't, necessarily. As an example, Buffy has a bond with Xander but Xander doesn't have a bond with Buffy. In fact, Xander has lots of one-way bonds, people who gain health from him but whom he doesn't gain health from. And as my stumbling over this explanation has probably demonstrated, "bond" is a terrible word for conveying this concept. There's also the fact that most characters have a "bond" that is school/work, so that characters will have to study and stuff to maintain it, and a lot of them also have a "bond" with fun which can only be restored by doing something fun, which is why you typically do your big recuperation party at the Bronze rather than, say, the Vacant House where Buffy just hacked a giant praying mantis to pieces, and "bond" isn't a very good word for describing these, either.

2) As part of the work/school mechanic, characters can attempt a skill check to get something which right now I'm calling "day tokens" because they represent your "day job," y'know, sort of. One of the random event cards you can draw will require certain characters to sacrifice a day token (i.e. "Pop Quiz" and Buffy, Xander, and Willow all have to sacrifice a day token). If they don't have any day tokens to sacrifice, their bond with school/work is broken rather than just depleted, and they take a day token and flip it over to its failure side. At that point their school/work bond can't be restored until they've completed enough actions to get rid of all the failure tokens and get a day token.

Both "day token" and "failure token" sound kind of lame and don't do a very good job of describing what the token represents. This isn't as big a deal as the bonds, but I'd still like better names for them.

Also, while I welcome criticism and comments on the mechanics I've described, advance warning: I don't expect an in-depth discussion of a game that only I know more than a handful of details about will be very fruitful, and it'd probably be better to delay that discussion until I've got a finished draft to post.

[Voss]

How does the bond thing work with someone like early seasons Cordellia? She either has super-mega health because she's tied into almost everyone, or almost none because she's a superficial bitch and none of her ties are worth squat.

From you're description I'd lean toward the former since they sound almost parasitical, especially with the Xander example, which is sort of fitting since he generally gives a lot more support to the rest of the cast than he receives. Fits the Cordy issue as well, since she was originally the anti-Xander.

[Chamomile]

I have no idea how Cordelia's going to work. The base game that I'm trying to draft as proof-of-concept only has Buffy, Willow, Xander, Giles, and Angel as playable characters, and the Master and his Order of Aurelius are the only villains, so basically at "release" it's season one only. Once I get the basic mechanics working right it should be easy to add in more villains and protagonists (and I have a few notes sketched out for about six other antagonist organizations and close to a dozen extra protagonists for just the season 1-3 game alone). So the upshot of that is that I don't have to worry about Cordelia just yet, even though she (and Jenny Calendar) did feature in season 1.

But I haven't got the slightest clue what Cordelia could do. She's got basically no skills relevant to monster hunting and she doesn't pick any up until she joins/founds Angel Investigations. It's hard to justify her as a support character the way Xander is, because there's not really any way to justify her propping up the morale of any character besides Xander, Wesley, and maybe Anya or Harmony. Speaking of Harmony: She has the same problem, except I can safely axe her from the finished product and probably no one will care.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Cordelia is the classic 'victim' character. You can totally turn that into a usable power set. Give her the ability to make monsters chase her around the board, and she becomes a tool for managing the enemy. Give her the ability to make monsters target her preferentially, and she could be a fragile tank. Give her the ability to drag other characters towards her location (they follow the screams) and she's a mobility aid.

[TheFlatline]

Here's a question. Several cooperative board games, especially those that are some variant on a standard RPG scenario, involve the possibility of death. But it's well-known in board game design that a good board game keeps all players playing until the very end. Is there a way to keep a player playing after their token is dead?

It's far from assumed that player elimination is something to always be avoided.

Generally these days it is avoided, but plenty of new games retain it.

The problem with player elimination is *when* it can occur. If it can occur early/midway through the game, you need to have short games. If eliminated players have to wait longer than 30 minutes or so, they're going to be rightly not happy and go do something else.

[fbmf]

Given the choice between the Pandemic expansion and Ticket to Ride (basic game), which would I rather have?

Game On,
fbmf

[Zinegata]

Given the choice between the Pandemic expansion and Ticket to Ride (basic game), which would I rather have?

Game On,
fbmf

Pandemic, unless you want kids to play with you regularly in which case Ticket to Ride is better.

[Zinegata]

Also, I'll just note that if Pandemic's theme seems a bit dry for you, there's basically a reskin of Pandemic for the fantasy setting called Defenders of Realm. Nicer pieces, but needs much more table space.

Forbidden Island is actually in many ways also a Pandemic reskin - just simpler, lighter, and smaller.

[...You Lost Me]

Pandemic: On the Brink is extra double hardcore mode. If you're really into Pandemic, get the expansion and have a blast, but if not then you should just get Ticket to Ride.