Cooperative Game Design

[Dominicius]

So recently I've been thinking about some unexplored venues with boardgames. I know that with most card games, you get this competitive ruleset where one of the major skills to cultivate is the ability to "read" your opponent and use their patterns against them ie poker.

But recently I've actually noticed a new type of card game getting proposed, where you are not actually competing but cooperating and the success of said cooperation hinges on how well you can predict what your partner will do (both of you are working with imperfect information in regards to one another).

For those of you who played Grizzled, that is the sort of stuff I'm talking about.

So now I'm wondering, what other examples of this sort of thing exist out there? Is it a valid option to pursue or is it a dead end? Can it be applied to other mechanics beyond card games? All discussions on this topic are welcomed.

[angelfromanotherpin]

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamemech ... ative-play

[Dominicius]

I guess I did not make myself clear here. I am specifically talking about games where you need to work together but you are also working with imperfect information.

AKA you do not know the contents of each others hands and need to use intuition and deduction to work together partner/partners.

[angelfromanotherpin]

AFAICT that's about half of such games.

[Josh_Kablack]

Hanabi
The Game
Mysterium

Are the three examples I have personally played. The main lesson is that you as designer need to be very clear on what sorts of communication is allowed and what sorts are prohibited.....oh and be aware that players will bend the rules. You have Hanabi declaraction such as "the first and the *THIRD* card in you hand are blue" and I've seen a ghost player in Mysterium just hand a psyshic player all their current vision cards as a way to affirm a correct speculation.

[deaddmwalking]

Bridge.

I don't really know how to play, but it's insanely popular. You and your partner are competing against another partner. You have to 'bid' based on how many points you think you can capture and part of that is based on cards your partner has that you can't see.

[SlyJohnny]

Mysterium is a pain in the dick if you get a dumb ghost. I've played that a few times with my group, and you can pretty much tell whether you have a shot at the end game in the first round or two.

Pandemic flirts with this by having a rule where you can't openly show your cards, only say what you have. It encourages communication, at least around tables that don't just ignore the rule entirely.

Battlestar Galactica isn't exactly what you stated, as there's a traitor or two for at least part of the game, but you draw a Crisis card every turn, and everyone pitches in skill cards to prevent the crisis from occurring. The crisis card says what colours/skill type can contribute to resolving the crisis, and how many points worth of these cards it needs. Colours not listed that get thrown in anyway count as negative points. Sometimes there's a positive effect for throwing in X more cards than you need to simply prevent the crisis.

Players can't state exactly how many points they intend to throw in to help resolve a Crisis, only that they "can help a little" or "can help a lot". Cards are put in face down and shuffled, and two of the cards are drawn from a "random" pile that contains two cards of each colour type. But as every character gets a different array of cards each turn- and as there are only two "random" cards drawn, from a stack that eventually depletes to the point that you can guess what's still there- it's possible to make educated guesses about who put in what, and who is the likely source of any attempted sabotage. If there are three bad cards in the crisis pool, only two of them could've come from the random deck, and if they're all red/piloting cards and purple/tactics cards, it's probably either a Pilot or a Military Leader character who's responsible. That sort of thing.

[erik]

Dead of Winter is semi cooperative and has hidden cards which gets rid of quarterbacking issues.

I totally didn't realize pandemic cards should be hidden. Ew.

Bridge totally has cooperative play with hidden information, tho that goes for most partner card games. The biggest nuances are in the bidding since that is your best friend way to describe your hand to your partner. You basically agree on conventions where bids mean specific things. I enjoy playing largely due to miscommunications since most of our group doesn't have it down 100%. When things go catastrophically wrong is the most fun.

[Blade]

A cooperative game needs an obstacle.

That obstacle cannot be led by a player, so it has to be described by the rules so that the players know how it will react. So either you've got a one-shot game (kinda like a CYA book where you discover as you go and replayability is low) or you've got an opposition that's a known quantity. In the latter case, your game is then more or less a puzzle/resource management game where you have to find the optimal way to use what you have to overcome the obstacle.

The problem is that spending hours going through the combinations to find the optimal one is not really a fun time. So many games will add stuff to spice it up.

Randomness is an obvious candidate, but it has the drawback of possibly leading to too easy or too hard situations, or leading to a game where only the dice rolls/flipped cards matter.

Other games will add obstacles to the cooperation. The imperfect information is one of them. As Josh_Kablack wrote, you have to be very precise on what is allowed or not, since there isn't an opponent to prevent you from bending the rules too far and ruin your fun.

And finally other games use stuff like limited time coupled with very complex mechanisms, which force the player to rush with imperfect solutions instead of taking all their time to find the good algorithm. This also forces good group dynamic and communication, but can be very stressful.

This covers most of the cooperative games I've played or read/heard about.

[codeGlaze]

Dead of Winter is semi cooperative and has hidden cards which gets rid of quarterbacking issues.

Fuck I hate that game.
Even AFTER spending the inordinate amount of time needed to really chew on the rules and get everyone familiar with how to play... it's a slog to get through.

[erik]

I like slogging and learning games, so maybe that's why I liked it. DoW story time tho.

First time I played was with my brother who I see 1 week a year over christmas/new years. He was of the mind that we didn't need to read rules, could just play and figure it out. It was impossible to intuit though and I had to read. The second game went way smoother.

Last month he messaged me to apologize for being a crab-ass at me during the game. He tried playing it with friends and I don't think they ever grokked it.

So yeah, it's complicated and you cannot easily figure it out just by playing and looking up rules as they come. But if you're willing to put in 20 minutes of reading then it ain't so bad. I think it would do well for about 62.5% of my gaming group. The 37.5% would hate it though.

[SlyJohnny]

Dead of Winter's not that complicated? You move, you search, you add zombies, noise tokens, etc...

[...You Lost Me]

There are definitely a lot of moving pieces to DoW. A game does not require a deep decision-making tree to be considered complicated. Hell, the fact that you have to put "etc" in the list of things to do every turn is a good indicator.

[PhoneLobster]

Mysterium is a pain in the dick if you get a dumb ghost. I've played that a few times with my group, and you can pretty much tell whether you have a shot at the end game in the first round or two.

Yeah so apparently a rabbit and a hat is not the magician, the rabbit and some background food stuff is not the chef, no its the rabbit the hat and a fucking garden path which means fucking alice in wonderland and that in turn means the fucking clockmaker because WAIT THERE IS NO FUCKING CLOCKMAKER IN ALICE IN WONDERLAND FOR FUCKS SAKE

[GâtFromKI]

Pandemic flirts with this by having a rule where you can't openly show your cards, only say what you have. It encourages communication, at least around tables that don't just ignore the rule entirely.

Space alert does also that. Except the players have a very limited time to play, so it makes sense to force them to communicate instead of just showing their cards. Space Alert is a game about communication and cooperation : you can say everything you want, but the time is limited and you have to concentrate on important informations. It answer the OP in the sense you can't possibly have perfect information in this game, but it's not because of stuff you're not allowed to say.

The problem is that spending hours going through the combinations to find the optimal one is not really a fun time. So many games will add stuff to spice it up.

Randomness is an obvious candidate, but it has the drawback of possibly leading to too easy or too hard situations, or leading to a game where only the dice rolls/flipped cards matter.

Other games will add obstacles to the cooperation. The imperfect information is one of them. As Josh_Kablack wrote, you have to be very precise on what is allowed or not, since there isn't an opponent to prevent you from bending the rules too far and ruin your fun.

Space alert is very easy, in the sense you can win every game by spending 30 minutes through the combinations. Except you only have 10 minutes. There is some randomness, but in my experience it doesn't lead to unwinnable situations, it's just used to make every game different. (there are also rules to make the game harder)

So another possibility is to make the timer the main opponent.

[SlyJohnny]

The mention of space alert has me thinking about Space Cadets. It's a team vs team game where you roll dice to do stuff on a ship, aiming to get the dice to fall in combinations necessary for you to raise a shield or assemble all the pieces of a torpedo, etc. The dice are parcelled out to the various subsystems by the guy doing Captain or Engineering, I forget.

Because you roll and reroll in real time, and because everyone controls a separate aspect of the ship, it's attack, movement, or defense (and because the other team are frantically rolling dice over and over to do the same thing), it quickly degenerates into an absolute clusterfuck. You call a STOP when you're attacking, but the other ship just moved, or Helm misunderstood the captain's command and you're not close enough, or your torpedoes are only loaded in the aft launchers, etc.

It's not that the information is hidden, it's that everyone is yelling and trying to do semi-complicated tasks from the same pool of resources. Get eight or ten guys around a table in two teams, add alcohol, and serve.

There are definitely a lot of moving pieces to DoW. A game does not require a deep decision-making tree to be considered complicated. Hell, the fact that you have to put "etc" in the list of things to do every turn is a good indicator.

I suppose so. I generally have more trouble keeping track of strategy in games with interlocking mechanics, rather than stuff like remembering to slap down a noise token for shooting a zombie, or expend a fuel card to avoid exposure, etc.

Yeah so apparently a rabbit and a hat is not the magician, the rabbit and some background food stuff is not the chef, no its the rabbit the hat and a fucking garden path which means fucking alice in wonderland and that in turn means the fucking clockmaker because WAIT THERE IS NO FUCKING CLOCKMAKER IN ALICE IN WONDERLAND FOR FUCKS SAKE

You! You know my pain!