ok so i've been thinking about cooperative games... non predatory games...
i came up with this on the bus ride home...
road trip. everyone playing is in one camper/ bus/ RV on a road trip. it's a board / card game. in the deck are road side attractions http://www.roadsideamerica.com/
with appropriate states and costs AND "fun" or perhaps "memory" values...
perhaps other cards could be places to stay, hitch hikers, money coming in (tax returns... money from parents... etc...) etc etc etc...
so it would cost a set amount of money to enter a state and a set amount to stay in that state per round... (roughly taking into account travel expenses... hotels, food whatever.. abstract and quick)
it's a sort of casual voting for "where we going next?" sort of thing...per round people play road side attrctions that could net them more "fun" or "memories" and vote on where to go based on payout of fun versus money to get there...
you must balance all this with the ability to get "back home" from anywhere without running out of money. if you can do this then you ALL WIN and figure out how much fun or how many memories you had.... if you can't then you ALL LOSE as you must hunker down and get a job to get back...harsh.. game over dude...
perhaps game variants (or additional points) for how many states you see... this sort of thing....
anyway i checked out "road trip" games on the GEEK and found a few but they almost all seemed to be races or competitions somehow... this would be a coop game...
what do you think? different enough? compelling? boring? something? nothing?
For me there's something oddly compelling about this - probably because I grew up in Pennsylvania and grew up visiting:
http://www.roadsideamericainc.com/
Anyway, I think in order to grab on to something that makes people want to play, there has to be something unknown between the players - for example, I'm designing a "building" game which is cooperative but has each player not knowing what piece the other will play next.
The goal is to get a "structure" built before either 1) time runs out (number of turns) or 2) an impasse is reached.
This way, it creates tension much more than people simply agreeing on a mutual move might.
So my suggestion might be to have each player select a route and an attraction, and where they agree they go... this way, you might have one player wanting a shorter route but a more "expensive" attraction, the other may want to get further but spend less... I dunno... also, if the prices for gas/attractions is set, there is a lot of fun that will be lost, I think..
Again, unknowns can really make or break a game - traffic, gas prices changing over the trip, hotel vacancy... attractions closed on Sundays...
I love actual road trips, though, and I think there is some potential here if it's handled right!