One of the games I'm designing is a deck builder. In this game, there are "enemies" that come into the "shop" area, similar to how they come up in Ascension. The twist is that in my game, once per round after the last players turn, the "enemies" all attack. The attack is basically a given stat on each enemy card, totaled up for all enemies in play, and that much damage is done to each player. It's not a heavy number, in nearly all cases it's 1 to 2 damage per card (with an extremely small number of cards doing more than this), and the total damage that can be done is limited to the number of cards in play. This is a simplistic explanation, of course. So the players can attack each other, or they can attack the enemies to clear them out prior to the enemies' attack each round. I'm working on putting in a second way to win, beyond just being the last one standing: what is currently the strongest "enemy" I'm turning into a sort of "boss", and a player defeating this card would be an alternate way to win.
I know that player elimination is generally frowned upon, but the enemy attack mechanic I believe (and have found) helps keep the playing field relatively level, and usually once one player is eliminated, others are eliminated shortly thereafter - usually within a matter of a turn or two (so within a handful of minutes). At any rate, the ability for the cards to attack once per round created a possibility for all players to be defeated simultaneously, leaving no winner. In this case, in my current rules, the "enemy" wins. And in the way I'm working the new idea in, specifically the "boss" enemy wins.
I've play tested the game maybe 10 times at most at this point, however until Saturday night, I hadn't had this actually happen yet. Although I kind of like the "nobody wins" mechanic in the game, the players did not - they wanted some kind of secondary method of determining who won. Even if my alternate new rule with the secondary win possibility had been in place for this play test, it wouldn't have helped - the "boss" card never came up in play. I'm early enough in an alpha prototype of the game that I'm taking all constructive criticism to potentially need to change the game, but this one made me pause, I'm not sure I agree.
My question to you all is, what do you think of having a "nobody wins" possibility in a deck builder type game? Does this exist in any other non-cooperative games that I can't think of or am not aware of?
Personally, I don't mind a "nobody wins" scenario. I guess in my mind, if I'm not winning, I'm OK with nobody else winning. I may be in the minority on that, though? I agree that a backup points system might cause a sabotage that would lead to avoiding killing the boss. But what if maybe the backup point system was based on killing the "enemies", including the boss? Instead of the killer of the boss necessarily winning the game, maybe killing the boss ends the game, and the boss grants a large number of victory points? So the paths to victory would be:
A) Last man standing
B) If all are simultaneously defeated, winner has the most victory points, which are awarded by defeating enemies
C) If the boss is defeated, winner has the most victory points, which are awarded by defeating enemies including the boss
Do you think this would settle the no winner concerns without confusing things? My mind immediately also asks, "If I'm now adding victory points to the game, should other cards give victory points beyond just the enemies?" I feel like it would be much simpler if it was just the enemies, but...