Mechanics in Cooperative Games

I'd suggest that you also look at Ghost Stories and Red November. Ghost Stories uses a little bit of everything, and Red November is (from what I can tell) "use more action points for better dice rolls".

Ultimately, all games come down to some level of resource management, whether they are cards, tokens, or random chance elements.

I also thought of making an cooperative investigation game. To realised that it would be easier to play with a game master ( who play the bad guys) to keep track of all the hidden information that the players should not know. So it will be turned in a semi cooperative game like fury of dracula.

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that most, if not all, co-op games you're familiar with use a deck of cards as the primary "driver" for the adversarial events in the game.I'm assuming that you're asking if there are other ways to drive adversarial events. Sure there are...
* Dice rolls (and other random number generators)
- Cross-index player rolls for movement or success with a chart.
- Make rolls on a table of events.
* Player success & behavior
- Have the game trigger specific behaviors based on where the players are in the game.
* Alternating rewarded human control
- Periodically, a player controls the adversary. The controller gets an inordinately high reward for doing well with the adversary.
* Nomograms
- A while ago, another poster talked about the use of task-specific charts as a means of creating rich A.I. behaviors in board games, and we tried applying it to one of my co-op games: Space Monster: www.invisible-city.com/play/507/

Oh! Look at the time. Gotta go!

I'd submit that BSG isn't really cooperative. I've played it twice, and there was only one segment where there were no Cylons. That segment sucked epicly. It was No. Fun. At. All. BSG is a bluffing and political game. Cooperation is an element, but it's not any fun when there's no traitor.

As far as preventing backbiting, I've had a game like this in the bash doc (I keep a big list of undeveloped ideas) for a couple of months now. My thoughts on preventing backbiting were to make it so you only needed a bit of cooperation to win. I thought to make people form teams, race other teams to the end of the game while trying to make sure they personally ended in better shape than anyone else there, so when everyone gets to the last room and there's the giant fight over who gets out first they can win it. If everybody doesn't lose if somebody turns griefer, you don't get so many griefers. The other thought I had was to eliminate people who are doing poorly. Player death is a regular occurrence, but it's not permanent unless you die (to put it simply) twice in a row. The game is set in a big nasty trapped building, (a la SAW and no end of other similar stories,) and a team will be given endless opportunities to butcher opposing players, and will often have to sacrifice team-mates to complete an objective and open a door. Players come back with a cripple token, which they can remove at a handful of med-station thingies. A cripple token makes you move at half speed (a real problem in a race) and if you die with one, you are dead for good. A cripple with no team can do a very limited amount of damage to the other players, moving at half speed with no support. A cripple with a team will not grief, because they can still win, and it's in the team's interest to get that player to a med-station, because until they do the cripple is slowing them down. The only player who can't plausibly win is a dead player, and they can't do squat, because they are dead, so you get no griefing there. If a team is losing by a fair margin, they'll probably try to kill off the other team rather than catch up, but that's half the point, so no problems there.

I copied that directly from the doc. Thought it could use a bit more explanation. I've more-or-less given up on the real-time element, because real-time elements are kind of irritating, and the cripple tokens behave as I described before the quote, because they are too nasty in the original notes.

This brings up what I don't like about Pandemic as I've played it. It is basically a solitaire game dressed up to look multi-player.. Having taken the word of the person who owned the copy we allowed people to announce what was in their hands. In other games where the rules try to limit what information players are allowed to share it goes on anyway through excessive hinting and convoluted statements. When everyones interest are the same there is no one to object to rules violations that work in the players interest.

This is why you need traitors, preferably more than one.

I realize that you posted this nearly a year ago - but I have an old game by Sid Sackson called Kohle, Kies & Knete (I'm the Boss) that required cooperative play in order to be successful. It essentially is a negotiation game. Maybe not exactly what you were thinking - but I've always found it to be one of the most interesting games ever designed.

I have thought about this type of thing (Cooperative genre) a lot, and have posted some thoughts on my game design blog in the past. I think that a lot of the current coop games out there are in a category which I call Solitaire By Committee. I believe the whole point of that category of game is for the game to be playable by only 1 person, but rather than play solitaire, you're supposed to discuss your options with your teammates and come to a consensus as to what the best course of action is, then do that. So just as the name implies, the game is solitaire, but the decisions are made by committee.

One down side to this is that one dominant, stubborn, or loud player can simply take everyone else's turn for them, which can be no fun for some players. The best solution to this is probably to not play SbC games with such a dominant alpha-player if it doesn't suit your groups play style. That type of player will simply want to know all the information, then make all the decisions - either because he's good at it, or because he thinks he is. That's just the nature of that type of player.

Another complaint about SbC games is that they're not really cooperative. A friend of mine refers to those games as "Collaborative" games, not "Cooperative." A truly cooperative game would involve players making their own decisions, but their incentive would be a winning result for the whole team. It's a very elusive thing, and as yet I have not seen a game on th market which is truly cooperative.

I HAVE seen a variety of SbC games, each with a gimmick which works to alleviate some of the alleged problems with a Solitaire by Committee game...

Space Alert has a timer, so it's extremely difficult to micromanage everybody else's turn. You simply don't have time.

Pandemic and Lord of the Rings make you hide your cards so that you have to talk to your friends in order to come to the best course of action.

Ghost Stories takes no steps whatsoever to dissuade a player from playing the whole game by themselves.

Shadows over Camelot has a traitor, so if you listen to one player too much, it might turn out they're not on your team.

Battlestar Galactica straight up tells you that several players are not on your team, so you need to be careful who's advice you listen to.

Red November has some mechanism whereby any player can turn into a traitor - I'm not familiar with that game so I don't really know how it works.

I have put some thought into making a truly cooperative game, and as yet I haven't come up with much. The best I've got is that the game could have 2 phases - a Strategy Session in which the team discusses their strategy - this would play out like a standard SbC game - and could be dominated by an alpha player; followed by an Individual session in which each player would play their own little mini-game, the result of which would feed back into the main strategic goal of the game.

An example a friend and I came up with the other night was that maybe each mini-game is different, in one case you're trying to find your way through uncharted territory to some location, and your mini-game involves taking cards with paths on them and trying to line them up in a way that you can navigate from one end to the other. Another player may be trying to hack into a computer, so his mini-game involves some sort of solo codebreaking mechanism. A third player is having some sort of fight with a character in the game, so his mini-game involves sorting a set of cards and playing them on top of each other in such a way that his icons come out on top more often than the opponents' icons. All these mini-games would be played simultaneously with a short (1 minute?) timer.

One thing I think would be really neat is if the min-games were related in such a way that one player could get to a point in their mini-game where they need input from another player, and the other player responds with "just a sec, I've almost got it!"

Seth, if I take your point to its logical conclusion, it seems that any coop game where a player's moves are visible to the other players and where players are not expressly forbidden from table talk is by definition "Solitaire by committee" because there is at least the theoretical possibility that one dominant player could boss the other players around.

I quite like the solution you propose, of having players doing things simultaneously, effectively "hiding" their positions from each other. And the real-time element could make for an interesting and lively game, as you suggest.

Another "solution" could be to simply hide the players' positions from each other in some way. For example, picture a game that was played like Scotland Yard, but everyone is on the same side and there's some advantage to deducing where the other players are so you can show up to help them, etc.

A third "solution" is to forbid table talk. Simple enough, but boring. How about instead, imposing a consequence on table talk? Envision a game where players are trying to complete some mission, but the adversary has spies that listen to them. Picture this: there is a microphone in the center of the board, and every time the players talk, the microphone records them and a computer uses the information that it gleans from their conversation to influence the way it plays against them. For example, if they say "let's attack the power generator", the computer opponent deploys guards to the power station to protect it.

Ok, so obviously, that's absurd and likely way beyond what the technology can do currently. But how could game mechanics approximate or emulate an idea like this, where there's a price or consequence to table talk?

To me, this could be the most interesting solution to the "SBC" problem of all, as the bossy, boorish player who just can't resist telling everyone else how to move will actively be shouted down by the other players, as his constant "suggestions" will incur costs and penalties for the other players; it would therefore actively discourage the very thing you dislike, rather than simply making it difficult or illegal.

-Jeff

Another idea along similar lines, although probably harder to execute, could be that each round, one player is "bugged" by the enemy, so his conversations are overheard and/or his actions are tailed by the enemy. Maybe the game has a mechanic where players need to take composite actions -- ie they must work together to get through a locked door or something -- but being in the same spot as the "bugged" player incurs some risk/consequence; and, you don't actually know who the bugged player is. It's, I suppose, a variant on the traitor concept. Maybe the bugged player changes at various points during the game.