Recently, I have been working on my own co-op card game (called, interestingly enough, “CO-OP: The CO-OP game”). I have been getting lots of playtesting on my game from many, many groups.  Some feedback is better than others, but in general, there is always some nugget that’s useful. (“This card needs to be fixed”, “This text in the rulebook needs to be moved”, “This rules should be re-worded”, etc.). All very useful.

The problem is what to do when you have contradictory feedback. Basically, a lot of the contradictory feedback I’ve seen boils down to “I have too much choice” or “I have too little choice”.

The basic game hasn’t changed much since GAMA, but a lot of tweaks have made it better. The main negative feedback I have gotten from some playtest groups is “there’s not enough to do, and that made it less fun.” This kind of feedback definitely resonates in the side of “there’s too little choice”. Below is some discussions of problems and solutions, what worked and what didn’t for this problem. This is all in the name of making games more fun!

1) There used to be “bad news” cards where players could lose turns.

Losing turns in a thing of the past (but see below). I should have listened to James M. from Minion games. (see link)
http://www.jamesmathe.com/game-design-for-dummies/

James basically expounds that players should never lose turns in a game. And he’s mostly right (again, see below). So, in my game “bad news — lose turns” has been replaced by some other “bad effects”,  such as disallowing a particular type of action. That way, players can still do SOMETHING on their turns.

As my friend CC said, “It’s no fun when you don’t get to do anythingon your turn.” Touche’.

However, as an interesting counterpoint, there was contradictory feedback on this point from another playtest group:

“It doesn’t matter if you lose a turn,
since you decide as a group who gets to play and who doesn’t.
It’s a team effort, so it’s not as big a deal as in competitive
games. Part of the co-operative experience is figuring out who’s
going to ‘take it’ for the team.”

That was basically my position on the “lose turn” issue for a while:  hard-core gamers seemed to get that in a co-operative game (every so often), someone has to “take it” for the team.   BUT, at least as seen from my playtests, casual gamers don’t like losing  turns. They think it’s less fun.

So, for the most part, I got rid of all cards where you lose a turn.   I can’t argue with all the playtests.  (I kept just one turn loss “bad news” because it was very thematic; I still like the idea that somebody “takes it for the team”.  I think that idea is okay in a co-op game, but it appears I am  definitely in the minority).

2) The hand limit was too small and inconsistent.

The hand limit used to be 3 or 4 depending on the number of players. After lots of playtesting, it was clear the hand limit needed to be upped: it’s now always 5, no matter how many players.

There’s two reasons this is better:

1.  Fewer rules means fewer ways for players to get confused; there’s exactly one hand limit, no matter how many players.
2. More options. If you have more cards, you have more options on your turn.

Upping the hand limit gives the players more options, so they felt like you can do more on their turns. That made it more fun for them.

3) BUT … there is still a hand limit.

We playtested without a hand limit, and it was a disaster.

The cards grew quickly in the player’s hand! Physically managing that  many cards was NOT fun. HINT: I am trying to make the game MORE FUN!

And there were too many options: of the 16 cards, which one to play? Players have to read them all and then decide … and that takes time. So people are waiting (and waiting) for a player to play, and that  waiting makes it less fun.  REMINDER: I am trying to make the game more fun.

And the game was too easy. If it’s too easy, who wants to play?

For all these reasons, there still is a hand limit.  Too little choice, there’s no fun because you can’t do anything.  Too much choice, and it’s no fun because of the overwhelming  amount of physical and mental information. Five cards seems a good balance.

4) Too many options is even worse in a CO-OPERATIVE game.

“What?” You ask? “How can too many options be a problem? The whole point of a co-operative game is to explore the problem space and come to a consensus. More options seems good!”

Go back to the “no hand limit” issue. If just one person has to read 16 cards and decide, that’s already annoying. But if 3 more people have to help decide, then you have to read all the cards aloud, decide amongst each other, and everyone will have different ideas. It will take *much longer* to go through the choices.

That’s another reason to be very careful with too many options:  you want to avoid the Alpha Player problem.  (The Alpha Player Problem is where one person takes over the game and essentially tells everyone what to play, thus making everyone else become or feel irrelevant).  As long as the game is flowing quickly, it’s harder for an Alpha Player to jump in and take over. As long as someone can play fairly timely, the Alpha Player tends to lie dormant. The Alpha Player usually only appears when there’s indecision. By limiting the number of options, the game flows quicker, limits indecision, and fends off the Alpha Player.

5) The FROLIC action is never used.

(The FROLIC action is how you cheer people in the CO-OP game, but it has some limits). It seems sad (no pun intended) that a game option to FROLIC and have fun isn’t used very much!

So, note that all of the changes from points (1)-(4) make the game easier.
There are more choices, and fewer turns are lost, so the players get a lot more done. So, we have to adjust the game difficulty so it’s not too easy. How? The standard way is to add more cards to the bad news deck. This is undesirable because it makes the game longer: the game has been designed to be about 40-45 minutes on purpose! My very first playetest showed how important it is to limit the length of the game or players lose interest quickly.

There is a better way: Start the players at DREARY instead of OK. That way, players are
(probably) forced to used the FROLIC action at some point during the game. It’s sorta like losing a turn, but it just forces you to spend a turn doing a FROLIC action. And there are other ways to move up from DREARY to OK, so it doesn’t have to be that!  There are strategically many ways to do that.

So, this is a case of win-win:

1. We can adjust he difficultly without increasing the length of the game
2. We can force more variety on actions by making FROLIC more likely
3. It’s more thematic: the players start the game “bummed” because they are in a bad situation they have to get out of!

Conclusion

So after a bunch of feedback, I think is game is more fun: I have removed lost turns. I have upped the hand limit (but not too much, and still keeping the hand limit). I have kept the game balanced WITHOUT making it longer (by trading lost turns for more FROLICs). These three minor changes seems to address a lot of the “you can’t do enough and it’s less fun”.

After all these changes, I got some other feedback that goes the other way: “By drawing a card each turn, you have less reason to MEDITATE  (the name of the action for drawing cards), and spend a turn drawing cards. You might be able to create a nice tension by not getting a card unless you specifically MEDIATE.” I think this falls in the direction “there is too much to do”, so limit what the player can do. (This comes from someone I really respect as a gamer: he knows his stuff and he is a hard-core gamer).

I think this is a great idea, BUT it completely contradicts all the playtesting I’ve done. Almost all of the negative feedback is of the nature “There’s too little to do” (which I thingk I have now fixed).  I am afraid this change (don’t always draw a card) would cause the “too little to do” problem to re-emerge. I think casual gamers would HATE that rule, but hard-core gamers would love it.

What to do with contradictory playtests?

1. Go with the majority playtests: What do most people say and do?
2. Incorporate it in as an option
3. Ignore completely
4. Rework mechanics

I think the right thing here is to do (1) and (2): Make the default the current way it is right now, but add an optional “expert” mode where players don’t always draw cards! That way the casual gamers (who  won’t read all the rules anyways) play the game they will like, and hard-core gamers (who will tend to read all rules and variants) can try those out.
It’s almost like I co-operated with all my playtesters to find the best solutions which address their concerns.

 

I was happy to see that Zephyr: Winds of Change  funded recently!  Like Venom Assault, it just barely funded in the last few hours of the Kickstarter!  I am very excited to see how this game turns out.

Another co-operative game on Kickstarter is on the RADAR: The Dresden Files co-operative card game.  I am very excited by this one: I never read the Dresden Files, but I have listened to just about every one of them as Books on CD: They have a sense of humor, good pacing, and drama.  I will say I almost gave up on the series after the first two books (Man, Harry was whiny and I started getting tired of it).But, the characters grew and evolved and, frankly (in the later books), the stories are pretty amazing.  If the game catches the spirit of the game, I think it real be real fun.

One thing I didn’t note until I looked closer at the Kickstarter: the amount of shipping goes DOWN for each tier they get to!  Right now, it is only $4 for shipping (it started at $10)!  And it’s only about 10 days into the campaign!  So it is possible this will ship at no extra cost if the Kickstarter makes it to a certain level. Just an FYI.  (Because my first thought was that this is an expensive Kickstarter and then adds $10:  With the cheaper and cheaper shipping, it’s nice).

 

In this entry of Co-operative Gestalt, we’ll take a look at some co-operative board games either currently on Kickstarter, or have finished fairly recently.

1) Zephyr: Winds of Change by Portal Dragon. As of this writing, it is about half-way to being funded, about half-way through its period. There is a really neat physical mechanic where you can change the “background” of a character card and change it up. Looks very promising.

2) The Daedalus Sentence: Escape from Space Prison, by Eagle and Atlas Games. Funded, and did real well! It also has a really cool physical mechanic, with concentric rotating rings. It is a bit pricey (about $100) but they are saying it’ll have $130 MSRP, so get it now. If the gameplay is good, coupled with a coo mechanical device, this could be real fun!

3) The Red Dragon Inn: Battle for Greyport by SlugFest Games. Set in the world of the Red Dragon In games, this is a deck-building card game where you recruit members of the time to fight off the big bads. The Red Dragon Inn games seem to have a humourous take, so I am hoping this will be be a touch of silly as well. It funded. About $40 for base.

4) Venom Assault by SpyGlass Games. This is a “GI-JOE” co-operative deck-building game. The art is very comic booky (in a good way: think Jim Lee or Byrne in the early days) and looks real fun. This game BARELY funded! About $35 for base game.

5) Mythos Tales by 8th Summit. An mystery game: Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective meets Arkham/Cthulu mythos. About $40 for the hard cover. When it is realeased to stores, apparently it will have a soft cover, so only kickstarters and a few people will get the hardcover. It funded.

6) Sentinels of The Multiverse: Oblivaeon Expansion by Greater Than Games. Seriously, you must have been living in a hole if you didn’t hear about this one! It was a huge kickstarter garnering $1.5 million dollars, with all sorts of options and foil cards.
I adore Sentinels of the Multiverse, and glad to see it did well, but they say this will be the last expansion.

7) Nemo’s War by Victory Point Games. This is reprint/redo of an old game by Victory Point games. It didn’t originally come with a co-operative mode, but in this redo, it does! (Once they reached $63K, they added a co-op mode) It also has a solo mode that looks fun. If you passed this up because it wasn’t a co-op game, check it out! It is! It funded, and was about $56 for base game.

8) Spirit Island by Greater Than Games. It funded quickly, and has some great art. It’s the “anti-Settlers” game in many ways! It’s co-operative instead of competitive, and players play against the Settlers instead of being them! The art was a major plus for this game. About $49 for the base game. It funded.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gtgames/spirit-island

Unfortunately, all of these games are a ways off until they are delivered (sigh, I ordered all of the above!), but I will start reviewing them as they come in!

Enjoy, and be on the lookout for great co-op games on Kickstarter!

My friend Joe threw the thimble across the table at his brother Max. Max was buying up all the property and very slowly putting Joe out of business. I was staying afloat but very bored as I watched Max slowly win. We all knew Max would win, but the game just keeps going and going and going … , and of course, Max was being a jerk about it.

I am talking about, of course, Monopoly. It’s one of the first games we learn as kids. Then we learn (from history and the Sherman Anti-trust act) that Monopolies (in general) are evil. But of course, every kid has already learned this lessons from the board game anyways: If real-life monopolies are anything like the board game, then they bring out the worst in people: greed, jerkiness, and mean-spiritedness.

And so, when families ask which board game people want to play, the mom reminds us that “Last time we played Monopoly, Joe threw the thimble at Max, so why don’t we play something else.” As my friend Joe says, “If you want your family to hate each other, get mad at each other, and general be mean, you play Monopoly”.

When I get together with my friends, I want to have fun. I want to feel closer to my friends, and I want to work together to overcome something.

This is why I like co-operative board games.

As a group, I can remember many times when we barely defeated Asathoth in Arkham Horror, or played that 6 hour game where we just barely won. It’s a badge of honor, it’s a shared experience we all survived and can remember later on in life. It brings us closer together.

And this is why this blog is called “Co-operative Gestalt”: A Gestalt is “an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts”. A co-operative board game is more than just the game: it’s the experience and the memories. A co-op board game is more than just a board game and it’s more than just a co-operative mechanic. It an experience that brings you and your friends together.

Welcome to Co-operative Gestalt: where we explore all the great things about co-operative board games.

We have entered a Renaissance for Co-operative Board Games!

In the last decade, Co-operative board games have really taken off and become very popular!  There used to be just a few co-op games in my collection: Arkham Horror,  Pandemic, or Shadows Over Camelot. And my friends and I played them all the time. We’d lament “Don’t you wish there were more Co-operative games?”.

And now there are. There are a LOT.

The purpose of this blog “Co-Operative Gestalt” (or “Co-Op Gestalt” for short) is to explore the co-operative board game universe. We’ll talk history, mechanics, design, new games, old games, new kickstarters, and anything related to co-operative games in general.

Why am I starting this blog? If, as I stated in my intro, we are in a Renaissance of co-operative board games, why do we need a place to talk about them? Honestly, I am surprised how little I find about co-operative games when I Google “co-operative board games”! I find a few great videos (from the Dice Tower and a few others), a bunch of dated top 10 lists, and a few links here and there. But that’s it!.

What I DO NOT see when I Google “co-operative board games”:

1. What are the newest, coolest, hottest co-op games?
2. What co-op games are currently on Kickstarter?
3. How do I design a co-operative board game?
4. What are some interesting “new” co-operative mechanics?
5. What are some older co-op games that I may have missed?
6. What do people think of co-op game X?

In general, this is my space to talk about one of my favorite subjects: co-operative board games. And I will try to hit all of the topics above.  (And Yes, co-op games are far and away my favorite type of board or card games. For a while, I would buy ANY game that purported to be a co-operative game. And some were great, and … some weren’t.  It actually got too be too expensive to do that! Maybe you were like me and just wanted a place to read about some current co-operative games!)

My plan is to write every so often and talk about co-op games.

What do I mean by Co-Operative Board Games?

This is one of the nicer entries I’ve seen on classifications of all “co-op” type games.
https://blog.wethemeeple.co/2015/11/18/your-guide-to-the-best-cooperative-board-games/

Basically, as they discuss there are 4 different types of co-op type games:

• All vs. The Game
• All vs. One
• All vs. The Traitor
• Teams

When I say “co-operative board games”, unless otherwise stated, I am referrring to to “All vs. The Game” type of board game (also known as “fully co-operative games”). This seems
to be common parlance, as you will hear people talk about games like Traitor Mechanic: The Traitor Mechanic or Battlestar Galactica as Traitor games rather than co-op games.
So, welcome to “The Co-operative Gestalt”! Why do we call it that? Watch this space!