Design of Co-Op Board Games and Card Games

[DragonChild]

This is a general thread to discuss the design of co-op board games and card games, which has been on my mind a lot recently. First I'm going to talk about the ones I've played.


Arkham Horror

The mold from which the others are cast, Arkham Horror is the go-to co-op game for most people. The big problems I have with the game from a design standpoint are:

-It takes up too much space.
-There are too many unnecessary decks of cards and tiny tokens and such.
-Not enough "events" occur during game (the street locations and monster hunting are at fault)
-The game can be way too damn long

In short, in making a new game, Arkham really feels like the game to start as your model. Different enemies, ancient ones, items, characters and most importantly goals - clue hunting, gate closing, monster fighting - really add some variety.

Forbidden Island

This is a very basic, very light game about collecting artifacts on a sinking island. The big problem is that it really descends into "The most experienced player tells the others what to do and you win or not based on that". It's not that fun after a few plays once it's solved. The reason for this I think is below...

Pandemic

Running around the world curing viruses. Pandemic I think also just falls over and dies from the "one person plays as leader" mechanic. While popular, I can't really recommend it.

Castle Ravenloft and such

D&D flavor. Different adventures. All sorts of monsters with awesome minis. PCs that vary from game to game. By all rights, this should be an amazing game. But it's not. It falls down and shits itself, and I think I know exactly the reason why - every PC is trying to do the exact same thing; slowly move forward, and kill every enemy you can. There's no ways for PCs to really "work together" by splitting jobs, and at no point do you feel like you're getting ahead, or growing powerful, not even when you level up.

WoW TCG Raid Decks

These are actually lots of fun. You make a WoW TCG deck, and the raid deck is basically a "boss monster" everyone fights against. There are different difficulties to try that add in new monsters and unique mechanics. I really like these, although there are a few problems. First, being primarily a PVP game, a lot of cards just aren't appropriate to use here. Second, the difficulty is a bit weird, and very slippery slope. You get more resources each round, so get bigger creatures each round. The boss gets to play more cards and hits harder when he damages somebody. So basically the entire difficulty is "Do you take damage in the early game" - if you manage to do a strong defense early on, you basically steamroll. If you take some hits early, it's more of a rough fight. Still, I like the concept a lot.


So, some things I think are important for a co-op game.

Different PCs: There have to be different PCs, or characters, or decks, or whatever to use. This adds a huge amount of replayability, and also neat flavor and character.

Different jobs: Once the game starts, there needs to be different roles for each PC to fill. Arkham and WoW TCG, the two "best" on the list, both fill this requirement, while the games that feel a bit boring and bland don't.

Player actions need to be unreliable: If player actions are "unreliable", this cuts down on micromanagement of the entire group by one player. What do I mean by unreliable? Either there has to be some chance of failure such that it's the player's choice if they want to play the odds or not, or there has to be some cost (such as playing a card from hand that you could be saving), or some uncertainty as to what options you'll have next turn. This is important to use with different jobs, though - in castle ravenloft "which of two attacks do I use on the skeleton" isn't interesting when it's that same choice over and over.

Both challenge and power need to ramp: The games seem most fun when things get worse and worse, but you also get more capable of handling it due to better gear, stronger resources, or whatever. It adds a more natural story path through the game.


Thoughts? What co-op games do you find good/bad and why, and what would be in your ideal co-op game?

[shadzar]

are you talking about something like HeroQuest?

[...You Lost Me]

I agree.

Also I recommend Sentinels of the Multiverse (again). I think it follows with everything except the unreliability of abilities.

[DragonChild]

I agree.

Also I recommend Sentinels of the Multiverse (again). I think it follows with everything except the unreliability of abilities.

I have been meaning to try this game out, although I'm a little iffy on buying it. Don't you draw and then play cards? If so, I'd consider that unreliable abilities in the sense of you're spending resources you may need later, as opposed to Forbidden Island/Pandemic where you know exactly what you can do this turn, and the next, and so on.

[...You Lost Me]

You get a hand of hero cards to start and play 1, draw 1 every turn. I'd seriously recommend buying it, or at least getting some people to try out the Vassal mod.

[Username17]

I really like Pandemic, because it extremely faithfully recreates the feeling of being part of a disaster response team. You're given a shitty situation, and you fight back by holding meetings and assigning heavily limited resources. It is the most simulationist game I have ever seen on any topic, and it's over for good or ill in about half an hour.

Yes, you can just have one person tell every other player what to do and solve the game that way, but if everyone at the table knows what they are doing it genuinely doesn't degenerate into that.

-Username17

[Morat]

See, you missed Arkham's biggest problem. Yes, it's bloated and fiddly and takes forever, but the really annoying bit is that it's a co-op game without cooperation. Everyone has the same goal, but you fight alone, you encounter strange happenings alone, and you take portals to other worlds alone. Even if you're in the same square with another player, a monster will attack only one player until it or the player is defeated. If it wins, it will then attack the other player at full strength. The best you can do outside of the final battle is to pass items and cash off to each other.

It's also almost too random. Random-draw yourself some reasonable weapons and you can really get ahead of the game. Get food and tomes for your early stuff and some of the more brutal monsters and it's just a frustrating slog. A really deterministic game collapses if That Guy decides to run the place, but a game that random has issues with anyone being able to make the right decision. You can do the "right thing" and be punished severely or the "wrong thing" and be greatly rewarded.

[Koumei]

I really like Pandemic, because it extremely faithfully recreates the feeling of being part of a disaster response team.

Especially the bit where everyone goes "Fuck Africa, that's too hard! OH NO, THERE ARE WHITE PEOPLE IN DANGER, QUICK!" Somehow they managed to recreate that in the game without specifically including a rule stating "Fuck Africa".

[DragonChild]

I really like Pandemic, because it extremely faithfully recreates the feeling of being part of a disaster response team. You're given a shitty situation, and you fight back by holding meetings and assigning heavily limited resources. It is the most simulationist game I have ever seen on any topic, and it's over for good or ill in about half an hour.

That observation from you really means a lot given your experiences. Interesting.

Yes, you can just have one person tell every other player what to do and solve the game that way, but if everyone at the table knows what they are doing it genuinely doesn't degenerate into that.

Unfortunately, this doesn't match what I've seen very much. I expect different groups, play styles, and experience levels are to blame here.

See, you missed Arkham's biggest problem. Yes, it's bloated and fiddly and takes forever, but the really annoying bit is that it's a co-op game without cooperation.

This is the first time I've heard that complaint. Usually I don't expect players to directly add together in co-op games, but instead work towards the same goals.

[Wrathzog]

Yeah, a lot of the cooperation I've seen in Arkham comes out from discussion about strategy as opposed to being emergent from the gameplay. Asides from some obvious stuff like, "Let's meet up here so I can give the old guy this spell I picked up and I'll take that Axe off his hands."

[Bihlbo]

The best co-op board game I've ever played is Atlantis Rising. Each character you can play as has such a different role that after playing a couple of times you know exactly what your role is going to be based on which one you choose. It's exciting, suspenseful, and really hard. It involves a ton of player interactions and it's hard to find a boring enough moment to divert your attention away to your food or those pesky brats your wife keeps popping out. The only downside is that it takes up a little more room than it needs to, thanks to the board pieces being oversized. Well, it probably has other downsides that I haven't devoted the time to finding.

[fectin]

Betrayal at House on the Hill?

[Manxome]

I question whether unreliability of player actions has anything to do with the micromanagement problem; people can demand that you do the best action even if it's only statistically the best action. I think this is mostly a player personality problem, but it can be mitigated when players genuinely don't know which of several options is best--which can be a result of good balance (several options are viable), poor clarity (you can't tell what the heck's going on), or an information differential (if players cannot share everything they know with each other). Hanabi is a very interesting example of that last one--you hold a hand of cards facing away from you, so everyone can see your cards except you, and a legal move is to play a card (blind) or spend a resource to tell another player about his cards (pick a number or a suit, and point out all the cards the player has with that number/suit).

You also sidestep this whole problem in real-time games, of course, but that stretches the definition of "board game" somewhat (Space Alert is a real-time co-op game I played once that seemed potentially interesting, but I only played it once--real-time board games are a nightmare to teach).

If you're convinced that the problem with Pandemic is just that your actions are reliable, you could try Defenders of the Realm--its mechanics are very similar to Pandemic, except you have to roll dice to treat infections kill monsters and cure diseases kill bosses. I don't particularly recommend the game on its merits, though (it's expensive, takes up too much space, and doesn't seem different enough from Pandemic to me that you'd want to own both unless you're a huge fan).


I love variable player powers in almost any type of game, but I don't think there's anything magical about cooperative games that makes them mandatory there. I can be assigned to deal with a problem because I'm in the right place or my turn occurs at the right time rather than because I'm extra-good at it. In fact I'm not convinced the player differentiation in Arkham Horror is all that significant in the first place (it's been a while, but I recall card draws being much more significant).


Ramping things up over the course of a game can be a nice way to build tension, but I don't think it's essential, either--and I'd rather play a game that doesn't attempt to do this than a game that attempts it but does it badly (I've seen games do it very badly indeed). In most cases you can increase tension just fine by starting players with a buffer and gradually depleting it, so they lose the flexibility of ignoring or postponing problems as the game nears its end. I think Ghost Stories does an excellent job of this, and it's one of my favorite co-ops. Though I've also seen games screw this up by letting players replenish the buffer and then balancing the game such that good play lets you replenish it faster than you use it (on average), which thoroughly kills the tension.


I think Morat's hit on something regarding player interaction: if players don't help each other in some way, it starts to feel like a solitaire game. Of course, there's nothing wrong with solitaire games, I play solo a lot, but if you specifically want a cooperative feeling, players helping each other out seems like an important factor.


If you like Arkham Horror but you think it's too long and too fiddly, you should try my co-op game, Darkest Night. It was inspired in significant part by AH, but it plays in half the time. Also, every character has a unique deck of power cards, which should scratch your "different PCs" itch.

[Korgan0]

I've heard good things about Mage Knight, but I've never played it.

[Stubbazubba]

I've the most experience with Shadows over Camelot, which has different characters, unreliable abilities (you draw cards in Camelot and then go to a quest to play them, 1 round at a time, while the enemy is moving on each person's turn, as well), and limited power/challenge ramp-up (you can complete 3 quests to pick up magic items, but each of those quests being completed also increases the power of the opposition). The jobs, however, are all fairly similar; get a run 1-5 to kill the Saxons, get two pair to kill the Black Knight, get three three-of-a-kinds to kill the dragon, etc. It can also degenerate into "one player tells everyone what to do," but there's a rule against sharing what cards you have, so that mitigates it somewhat.

[Username17]

Betrayal at House on the Hill?

The different missions vary wildly in difficulty, interestingness, and fairness. At the same time, the game has a fair amount of replayability for exactly that reason: the different scenarios are often different enough to hold one's interest. So sometimes the betrayal happens and the traitor simply slaps everyone down and sometimes the betrayal happens and it's shit simple to solve, but to a limited extent that's OK because it's different each time.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is probably good for about eight play throughs, which is better than most games.

-Username17

[koz]

Has anyone here tried Mansions of Madness? I actually think it's one of the best games I've played in a while (although one mission is a horrible grind-fest with a very weird and counter-intuitive way to play it). It is easy to learn, has a range of strategies and seems pretty balanced mechanically.

[Manxome]

I wouldn't call any of Betrayal at House on the Hill, Shadows Over Camelot*, or Mansions of Madness "cooperative games". They're team games: you have allies, but you also have enemies.

*Shadows over Camelot has a cooperative variant.



I only played Mansions of Madness once, but I didn't care for it. The bad guy had the option to respawn his main monster every turn if he wanted, which meant it was impossible either to get away from it or kill it no matter what you did; combat was tedious, requiring you to dig through a combat deck for a specific kind of card for every single attack (and the cards were structured in such a way that you couldn't separate them in advance, even if you were willing to keep track of a million different decks); the puzzles bogged the game down; there didn't seem to be much strategy, or even much ability to know whether your actions were helping your hurting your own cause (depending on secret set-up options, getting to the last room in the first scenario can either be a prerequisite for winning or actively hurt your chances of winning). The whole thing seemed very "wander around; random crap happens."

I haven't investigated carefully how balanced it is, but I've seen several different people recommend that the keeper should pull his punches to ensure that everyone has a good time, which makes me suspect the answer is "not very."

[Morat]

I've heard good things about Mage Knight, but I've never played it.

I've only played it a few times, but it really didn't wow me. One of the major mechanics is WoF. I have no problem with that, but the randomness isn't "Which attack can I make this round?" It's "Do I get to attack or move?" And movement costs seemed stupidly high given the roughness of the terrain. I can spend three turns powering through this swamp at 4 points a hex, or I can spend five turns going around.

So you explore a new tile and it's full of stuff you can't beat, but one of your buddies can. Problem is he's off on the other side of the board, and by the time he gets here and kills some stuff, the game is pretty much over. I'm sure that if we knew what we were doing it might have worked better, but play was like slogging through molasses to an uncertain reward, so it's pretty much been shelved for Netrunner, Race for the Galaxy, Eclipse, and the occasional game of Arkham. And Republic of Rome, if we ever actually finish that monster.

[RadiantPhoenix]

I have been meaning to try this game out, although I'm a little iffy on buying it. Don't you draw and then play cards?

Technically, you play cards, then draw cards (with "doing stuff" in between) -- this is something that a lot of players get confused about, because it's different from Magic.

I definitely enjoy it, but after the first fifty or so times you play it, you start wanting to limit yourself to doing so sparingly.

[DragonChild]

I will agree that games with traitor mechanics are outside of what I'm looking for / talking about. It's a neat mechanic, and there are fun games, but it's just not the same thing.

Likewise, I have a strong hate of any game that doesn't allow free sharing of information. The only game I have seen with limited information sharing I like is Space Alert, but only because it's a short period of time thing.

The best co-op board game I've ever played is Atlantis Rising. Each character you can play as has such a different role that after playing a couple of times you know exactly what your role is going to be based on which one you choose. It's exciting, suspenseful, and really hard. It involves a ton of player interactions and it's hard to find a boring enough moment to divert your attention away to your food or those pesky brats your wife keeps popping out. The only downside is that it takes up a little more room than it needs to, thanks to the board pieces being oversized. Well, it probably has other downsides that I haven't devoted the time to finding

I've not heard of this one, I'll have to check it out.

You also sidestep this whole problem in real-time games, of course, but that stretches the definition of "board game" somewhat (Space Alert is a real-time co-op game I played once that seemed potentially interesting, but I only played it once--real-time board games are a nightmare to teach).

Space Alert is... interesting. My problem with it is that it seems to have a victory chance of about 3%, and that's maybe being generous. It's more frustrating than fun.

I love variable player powers in almost any type of game, but I don't think there's anything magical about cooperative games that makes them mandatory there. I can be assigned to deal with a problem because I'm in the right place or my turn occurs at the right time rather than because I'm extra-good at it. In fact I'm not convinced the player differentiation in Arkham Horror is all that significant in the first place (it's been a while, but I recall card draws being much more significant).

Card draws are hugely significant in Arkham, but you also get some card draws at the beginning of the game, and many are persistent. That is a type of player differentiation - "everyone gets three random magical items" works even if you don't hand out classes and such.

Ramping things up over the course of a game can be a nice way to build tension, but I don't think it's essential, either--and I'd rather play a game that doesn't attempt to do this than a game that attempts it but does it badly (I've seen games do it very badly indeed). In most cases you can increase tension just fine by starting players with a buffer and gradually depleting it, so they lose the flexibility of ignoring or postponing problems as the game nears its end. I think Ghost Stories does an excellent job of this, and it's one of my favorite co-ops. Though I've also seen games screw this up by letting players replenish the buffer and then balancing the game such that good play lets you replenish it faster than you use it (on average), which thoroughly kills the tension.

This buffer mechanic is how WoW TCG raid decks work. If one of your heroes (basically the "you" in magic) has enough damage on them, the boss powers up. You can mitigate this by playing healing spells, armor, or characters that can protect your hero. It has all the weaknesses you describe, though - if you can go about 3 turns without the boss powering up, they likely never will, leading to a stomp.

Ghost Story is a game I want to try, but the rulebook is... kind of awful to learn from when I sat down to a demo of it, and I'm wary of buying it for that reason.

I definitely enjoy it, but after the first fifty or so times you play it, you start wanting to limit yourself to doing so sparingly.

50 playthroughs for a game is really fucking good, in my experience.

[Manxome]

Ghost Story is a game I want to try, but the rulebook is... kind of awful to learn from when I sat down to a demo of it, and I'm wary of buying it for that reason.

The rulebook is kind of bad due to translation, though I believe more recent versions are better than the original.

The actual mechanics are easy though. Once someone knows the rules, it's easy to teach others.

[name_here]

I don't know that the micromanagement problem is solvable at a design level. There will be better and worse options in a given situation, so the person who can tell them apart will tell the other players what to be doing unless information sharing is so limited players just have to pray that other people will be able to do things that synergize with what they are doing.

[Username17]

I don't know that the micromanagement problem is solvable at a design level. There will be better and worse options in a given situation, so the person who can tell them apart will tell the other players what to be doing unless information sharing is so limited players just have to pray that other people will be able to do things that synergize with what they are doing.

I'm not sure what you mean by "micromanagement". Cooperative boardgames traditionally suffer from at least two things you could mean by that:

• There being a lot of fiddly tokens and cards and stuff that players have to move around and remember each round.
  and
• The game being reducible to solitaire, as one player can give orders to all of the other players and tell them what to do, making the literal presence of the other players wholly optional.

The first one may not be completely eliminatable, but it's certainly reducible through solid design. Any time you can combine widgets or reduce accounting steps, your design is reducing micromanagement in that sense.

The second is more problematic. Fundamentally, you need to make it so that the players have distinct goals or distinct information spaces in order to eliminate the "follow the leader" problem. Traitor mechanics do both, but make the game not strictly co-op. Personally, I think the easiest solution there is to give out individual "and" goals. That is, there's a group goal and a player goal, and if the group goal is achieved, then every player who has achieved their personal goal wins. That would seem to set up the requisite informational and objective differences to make the different players feel like they weren't simply hand puppets of the player with the most game knowledge while still putting all players formally and actually on the same side.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Mutant Chronicles, Siege of the Citadel did that.

As a boardgame dungeoncrawler, it wasn't truly co-op and you have a rotating player controlling the antagonistic forces arrayed against all other players.

However the allied forces have a co-operative Primary Mission and each allied player also has a hidden Secondary Mission. While the Secondary Missions were never outright hostile agains allies, they did result in some dickery. For a made-up example: If the primary mission is to kill the dragon, and the session ends when the Primary Mission is fulfilled, then secondary missions such as "get the princess out alive", "deal the killing blow" and "recover the jewel of the Mississippi", will encourage various player to stall completion of the Primary Mission, or to prevent stalling before a win.