Origin Story is a competitive trick-taking game for 1-4 Players. It has a Super Hero theme, as people grow into their Hero forms over 5 rounds. At its core, it is a trick-taking game: Players gain tricks for victory points, gain powers for special abilities, and emerge slowly over time. The player with the most Victory Points after 5 rounds wins.

We played Origin Story, admired how well it works, especially with the powers, and fervently decided none of us ever really wanted to play it again; there was waaaaaaay too much direct and indirect take-that.  We all felt the same way:   “A Super Hero game should be cooperative, not competitive!  That doesn’t seem very thematic!”   Rather than just be big cry-babies, we decided to do something about it! Over a month or so,  we developed some simple rules to make this cooperative.   These rules probably need a little more play-testing, but frankly, we all enjoyed the game a whole lot more with this cooperative mode.

Communication

We loved the cooperative trick-taking game  Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game! It inspired us to make these rules!  See our review here!   It just works so well as a cooperative trick-taking game!  Just like LOTR, the Origin Story cooperative game keeps the basic limited communication rules; you can’t ever talk about what’s in your hand.

About the only rule in LOTR that we didn’t like was that you couldn’t really consult each other about which characters to take; there’s not SUPPOSED to be any conversation about who takes which character, because it might give away info about your hand.  It doesn’t really give away that much, and we really enjoyed the discussions and interactions that happened, so we inserted a house rule saying we COULD discuss the characters in the LOTR trick-taking game.

So, in Origin Story Cooperative Rules, players are allowed to discuss who should go into Hero mode and Secret Identity mode; you may have full conversations.   The Origin Story cooperative game encourages a little more discussion than the competitive mode, but to be clear; you still can’t communicate what’s in your hand (unless you are forced to by a power).

Ruleset

Thematically, a Super Hero should be cooperative.

See rules below. The current version is 1.0.0. As we get feedback, we may update this.