Team games

This is an intriguing topic. I immediately thought of Alpha Centauri (PC game) with its factions, meeting a party mystery. If you had a murder mystery, for example, the "factions" would be the detectives, the suspects and the by-standers. Each faction has a code of honor that would dictate their actions (if people played their roles in the proper spirit.) The suspects and detectives have obvious motives, but if you could come up with something interesting for the by-standers to accomplish, you

Brykovian
An excellent table top territory game with all the features you mentioned already exists, "Diplomacy". It

Two or more players can decide to join up for the win. This helps shorten the game when it

the best team player game I've played
is actually a simple card game.

The people who taught me how to play it called it Kemp.
tis for 4 players or perhaps 6.

everybody has a partner that sits across from them.
Object is to collect 4 of a kind. 4 kings, 4 eights, etc.
Once you have 4 of a kind, you have to let your partner know
without anyone else knowing.
Because your partner has to say Kemp for your team to win.
If the other team suspects they can make you loose.

So anyway following this model, the game play is so
that each person is busy doing their OWN thing.

You can't talk cause the other players are listening
and watching.

your team will do better if you can read each other
and cooperate. Ultimately you NEED to cooperate to win.

I believe that is the core to a good team game.

Each player should, ideally, have a way to contribute to the players´ overall success. using theLOTR model, each player could, for instance, have a special ability, or hold their own set of cards from which they can play to influence the groups´ position.

Players in a cooperative game should be able to work as a team toward a common goal, not just as a set of individuals. This could mean some way of helping a comrade out in a crucial battle, or a way of revealing, in some controlled fashion, some secret information that you´ve learned that can help another player. A simple example of this that comes to mind is the card swapping that goes on between partners in some trick-taking games. Note that I´m talking about ways of helping people out that don´t include just looking at everyone´s hand and pointing out to them on the board what you think their "best" move is.

And finally, all of this led to me thinking about cooperative/competitive games, a.k.a. team games.

Any ideas on where to start? Sports themes seem obvious, but I´m afraid I can´t think how to make them work well. The only other one that has popped into my head is a competition on a factory floor between two assembly lines or something.

Hey Randy,

Cool thoughts. I agree about LoTR...I found it pretty unsatisfying (I think we're in the vast minority, though).

About a year ago, I started working on a fully co-op card game that implements a lot of the features you mention. I've playtested it a few times since then, and it seem to work well.

Here's the basic design and what I learned:

Theme: tongue-in-cheek horror. Each player takes a character card (Ash, Buffy, Celina, Mac, Ben, or Shaun -- all main characters from relatively cheesy horror flicks). These characters are all "camping" when the dead come back to life. They make their last stand in an abandoned cabin, trying to survive until morning. This certainly gives everyone a reason to cooperate!

Gameplay: you play against a 6 minute timer. The first 1/2 of the game is "daytime", the second half "night". Basic gameplay is: on your turn, draw 1 zombie (if day) or 2 (if night) and add it to your "zombie group", then play as many normal cards as you have health points (max 3). Your short term goal is to kill, stun, or dodge zombies to avoid damage. The long term (team) goal is to kill all zombies before morning. Normal cards come in several flavors -- attack, defense, heal, and special. Each character has a special ability that makes him or her more effective with some of the cards. On your turn, you can draw normal cards from any of 3 piles. You draw 1 card at a time. If you don't like it, you can discard it and draw again. If you like it, you play it right away. You can draw as many times as you like until you've played all your cards or decided that you'r done. There are some nuances to these rules, but that's basically it. Any zombies in your group that aren't killed or stunned at the start of the next turn will attack you and do 1 damage apiece.

Here's how these mechanics address your points from above:

Each player must make their own decisions. Groupthink and tabletalk should not dominate the play of the game.
Since you're playing against a timer, tabletalk stays limited: "Don't use the shotgun -- I need it!", and "Oh--use the med kit and heal me!" are about the extent of the planning. Also, since you don't hold a hand, it's impossible to do extended planning (i.e., no "well, I have two moves, but we might need those, so let's use Rob's combat card instead"). However, you will see players avoiding a draw from a pile with a card that fits another player's special ability.

Each player should, ideally, have a way to contribute to the players´ overall success.
Every player can kill zombies -- though some are a bit better at it under certain conditions.

Players in a cooperative game should be able to work as a team toward a common goal, not just as a set of individuals.
There are several ways to help others in the game: ranged weapons like rifles and shotguns allow you to attack zombies in other players' groups; the 'Shaun' character can use defense cards to protect other characters (other characters can protect only themselves); players cannot use "heal" cards on themselves.

Since zombies attack first in a round, it becomes vitally important for players to protect each other, as it's sometimes impossible to incapacitate all zombies in your Group during your turn. I've seen many games end badly when one person kept forgetting to attack a zombie in the group belonging to the next player.

This type of team play is critical to success in this game. In one playtest session, 3 of the 4 players acted as a team, but the last guy had to be the hero, and every time his turn came up, he burned through cards trying to get the best attacks possible. That group never came close to winning...

I hope this helps somehow. I realize this isn't exactly the kind of game you had in mind (killing zombies is a long way from a sports game), but it has a lot of the elements you suggested above.

I hope you post the results of your research when it starts to come together.

Cheers,

K.

I've pretty much found LotR to always devolve into "1 player and 3 others to hold cards". Which has led me to (similarly) believe that there needs to be something else other than just "everyone strives for one goal." There IS some alternate rule for LotR that allows for some individual score based on "things not used" if the player's win, but seems to be against the spirit.

One approach might be like this upcoming game:Shadows over Camelot.
Where everyone is cooperating for a common goal, BUT one player MIGHT be a traitor waiting for the right time to screw over the entire eterprise.

And then there is always:
Betrayal at the house on the Hill Where players are sort of working together until something bad happens.

Another approach that I've got some slight handle on would be something "Survivor-esque," where are working together to, well survive (be it a deserted island, a "lost" island, a dungeon, spaceship, haunted house, whatever), by playing cards to finish goals out of their hand. However, at certain points in the game, all hands are revealed, and the player with the worst hand left is killed, booted, kicked, removed from the game. So, while it is in your interest to "keep the tribe" going communally, it might not be in your BEST interest to help out too much, since you want to try keep your hand better than the rest of the players.