This is a reprint of an article written in October, 2007 for first publication in the March 2008 issue of Knucklebones magazine; it was the final issue. Because of its origins, this article is more introductory and (hopefully) more polished than many of my online writings. Despite the original source of this article, this blog is in no way associated with Jones Publishing or Knucklebones Magazine.

Since I wrote this article, I’ve spent much more time extensively analyzing co-op games. A series of co-op interviews talks with designers from the genre while a partial history of the genre begins to trace its evolution. I’ve also co-authored a complete but unpublished book on cooperative design with my friend Christopher Allen, which I hope will see print in 2015.

Most games are about competition. However, in the last twenty years, a small but increasing number of games have instead focused on the opposite type of gameplay: cooperation. There’s still competition in these games, but instead of working against each other, players tend to work against the game system (sometimes embodied by a singular player). They must either achieve victory together or else fall down ignobly to defeat.

Because of this unique cooperative play style, these games allow for a degree of socialization that’s unprecedented in most strategic games. Players talk together about the best way to overcome the challenges that they face. They pool their thoughts, their strategies, and sometimes even their resources in order to try and reach a shared victory.

Besides having unique gameplay, cooperative games usually can support more players than your typical strategy games, often allowing seven or more participants. This allows for even more socialization and cooperation, multiplying the fun of cooperative games.

Following is a discussion of many of the most popular and best designed cooperative games. They are divided into three types: those games where everyone cooperates; those games where everyone works against a single overlord; and those games where everyone works against a hidden traitor.

Core Cooperation

Basic cooperative games involve all the players working together to try and defeat the game system.

Arkham Horror (Fantasy Flight Games, $49.95). In its classic incarnation, published back in 1987, Arkham Horror was one of the earliest cooperative games. It placed players in the roles of investigators of H.P. Lovecraft’s horrific Cthulhu mythos. Strange interdimensional gates were opening across the witch-haunted city of Arkham, and unless they were closed in time, all of existence was endangered.

In 2005 Fantasy Flight Games brought Arkham Horror back, polished and up-to-date with the newest ideas in game design. Still, investigators must collect equipment, find spells, battle monsters, and carefully coordinate their actions to close the gates to other dimensions.

Arkham Horror is less social than much of the field because players often go off on their own to accomplish group goals; nonetheless ultimate victory only comes about when players work together. In addition, it’s a long game, taking 3-5 hours to play. On the plus side, Arkham Horror is colorful and evocative. It’s also been supplemented with three expansions—Curse of the Dark Pharaoh, Dunwich Horror, and The King in Yellow—with a fourth, Innsmouth Horror, due out around now. Max Players: 8.

Lord of the Rings (Fantasy Flight Games, $49.95): A cooperative game by master designer Reiner Knizia that tells the story of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic fantasy novels can’t help but be great. In Lord of the Rings players work together to destroy the One Ring by traveling across Middle-earth, following the path of the trilogy of books. The core gameplay centers on the careful allocation and use of cards, which are required to move across the landscape.

Of the various cooperative games, this is both one of the most social and most brutal. Players are all constantly working together, with no room for a player to play solitaire. The game is also quite hard, with victory being all the sweeter for its rarity.

There have been three supplements released for the game, all of which integrate well with the original: Friends & Foes, Battlefields, and Sauron. The last notably allows a sixth player to enter the game, taking the “Overlord” role of Sauron and working against the other players. Max Players: 5 (or 6 with Sauron).

Against the Overlord

Lord of the Ring’s Sauron supplement isn’t alone in allowing one player to take on the role of an evil Overlord. A few other games have supported that type of play from the start. Despite the singular competition that this entails, the core gameplay of these releases still remains cooperative. In some ways the Overlord player takes on the role of the adversarial game systems of the basic cooperation games. He may not to get to win as much as the other players, but he still gets to enjoy doing his best to make them sweat.

Betrayal at House on the Hill (Wizards of the Coast, OOP): This horror game, where players investigate a haunted house, is very different from any other cooperative game because the play abruptly shifts halfway through the game. That’s when the “haunt” begins, and one of the players is randomly picked to begin working against the rest of the group.

These haunts are heavily thematic, providing lots of color for the game as mad scientists, aliens, mummies, and other monstrosities suddenly invade the house. The haunts are somewhat poorly balanced and of varying quality, but there’s enough variety to allow for a lot of fun sessions. This game is now officially out-of-print, as Wizards of the Coast remaindered it and many of their other board games in late 2006, but it still shows up very cheap on occasion at various stores. Max Players: 6.

Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Fantasy Flight Games, $79.95): In this fantasy game with thematic similarities to Dungeons & Dragons a single player takes on the role of a game master, laying out a dungeon dictated to him by a selected scenario. He also chooses how to move the monsters and what other surprises to spring upon the players. Meanwhile those players take on the role of a group of adventurers, all trying to fight through the dungeon to accomplish a specific goal.

Although a long game at 3-4 hours, Descent is surprisingly spry, with players constantly moving, while still coordinating their individual tactics into a strategic whole. It’s also expensive, but that’s because Descent comes with a huge set of cardboard dungeon tiles and plastic monsters, all of which provide for an evocative experience. As with many other Fantasy Flight Games, it’s been supplemented, with three additional sets of monsters and dungeons out to date. Max Players: 5. 

Fury of Dracula (Fantasy Flight Games, $49.95): In this classic vampire game one player takes on the role of Dracula while the others play the four investigators hunting him across Europe.

Uniquely among cooperative games, Fury of Dracula is a true investigative game. While Dracula secretly makes his way across Europe, the investigators must try and pick up his trail and slay the vampires that he leaves behind in his wake. Ultimately they must confront Dracula himself; if they can do so by day, they will likely find victory, but if instead Dracula comes upon them by night, all may be lost.

Although it supports 2-5 players, Fury of Dracula plays best with exactly five, so that each player only need take on one role. Max Players: 5.

The Traitor Within

A relatively new development among cooperative games is the idea that there’s an Overlord player who is trying to stop the rest from succeeding, but he’s hidden from sight: he could be anyone, and thus one of the players pretending to “cooperate” is actually trying instead to bring everyone down.

Some of these games even support two or three traitors, but they nonetheless still fall into the category of cooperative play for the type of gameplay that they mold. Although players always know that someone is working against their best interest, they still socialize and cooperate; they just do so with a suspicious eye toward everyone else.

Saboteur (Z-Man Games, $14.99): This is only marginally a cooperative game; the play is less social and more individual than most due to the possibility of there being up to three traitors. The good dwarves all try to mine for gold while keeping an eye out for saboteurs, while the saboteurs try and foil those attempts subtly—and then more explicitly when the good dwarves come too close to winning. Max Players: 10.

Shadows Over Camelot (Days of Wonder, $50.00): This is the game that really defines the genre of the “traitor within.” The players are together trying to save Camelot by completing a series of quests. However one player may be a traitor who tries to purposefully fail at quests.

Unmasking the traitor is an integral part of the gameplay and results in a constant suspicion underlying the cooperative advice and discussion. Of course, there’s nothing more embarrassing then losing the game due to a series of false accusations before learning that there wasn’t a traitor in the game at all. Max Players: 7.

Werewolf (Traditional): This is a widely-played traditional game with versions currently available from Asmodee (The Werewolves of Millers Hollow), Looney Labs (Are You a Werewolf?), Mayfair (Lupus in Tabula) and probably others. It’s also called “Mafia.” Two players in the game are secretly werewolves, and everyone else tries to find them out by lynching villagers one at a time.

There can be problems with players being eliminated early on, and Werewolf is much less a strategic game than anything else discussed here, but it’s nonetheless an interesting example of the cooperative genre that will appeal to many social game players. Uniquely it not only supports a large number of players, but in fact requires at least 7 or 8 to get going. Max Players: 15+.

Appendix I: Cooperative Origins

Cooperative games ultimately share a lot in common with adventure games, which themselves sprang from the roleplaying field. This overlap probably comes about due to similarities in the goals of the three types of games. They’re all about not just playing a game, but also sharing a social experience, where the whole group ultimately has fun together, absent any individual’s successes.

Two of the earliest professional cooperative games were also adventure games, further highlighting this shared ancestry. Chaosium’s Arkham Horror, produced in 1987, was based on their investigative roleplaying game, Call of Cthulhu. Similarly Games Workshop’s HeroQuest, first released in 1989 and now long out of print, was a Dungeons & Dragons style adventure game.

Today most cooperative games continue to be released in the classic adventure game genres: fantasy, science-fiction, and horror. By lucky coincidence, the last is a particularly good genre for cooperative games, because terrifying forces of evil are great foes for all the players to work against.

Among the cooperative games not covered in depth here that fall into these genres are: the small press game Vanished Planet (Vanished Planet Games, $29.95), a classic science-fiction game; Last Night on Earth (Flying Frog Productions, $49.95), a recently released horror game; and E.T.I. (Eye Level Entertainment, $36.96), a brand-new science-fiction game.

Appendix II: The Boundaries of Cooperation

So what makes a cooperative game cooperative? The boundaries, as with any definition, are somewhat fuzzy. Herein cooperative games are considered to be those that encourage a very social, talkative gameplay where all the players work together against some foe. This explicitly excludes a few closely related sorts of games:

Pure social games are those where there is no competitive gameplay at all, not even working against a game system. This is a pretty rare type of game that includes The Ungame and Family Pastimes’ “talkie” games, all of which feature as their main goal just talking and learning about other players.

In partnership games players work together, usually in two groups of two. This is a common play style for traditional card games with Bridge being the most notable example. Although bidding and card play can allow for some messages to be sent between players by standard conventions, that communication is constrained enough for them not to be truly social games.

Team games are games of all other sorts where players work together, but their primary goal is to defeat other teams of players. This category includes most party games. One type of team game, the “traitor within” is, however, considered a cooperative game because of the specific gameplay it engenders, as noted previously.

Appendix III: Company Profile: Fantasy Flight Games

Minnesota-based Fantasy Flight Games gets an unbalanced amount of attention in this article not because of any personal preference, but because they’re one of the biggest publishers of cooperative games.

The company originally grew out founder Christian Petersen’s love for European comics, and thus it’s not surprising that when Fantasy Flight turned to board games they began publishing many titles in the genres of fantasy, science-fiction, and horror — the same genres that naturally led to cooperative games.

Fantasy Flight Games has reinvented cooperative games for the mass-market by mining the rich grounds initially uncovered by roleplaying companies such as Chaosium and Games Workshop in the 1980s. They’ve republished Chaosium’s Arkham Horror and Games Workshop’s Fury of Dracula, as well as producing Descent, effectively an heir to Games Workshop’s HeroQuest.

Ultimately, however, it’s fantasy, science-fiction, and horror which are Fantasy Flight’s biggest focus, with cooperative games being a byproduct of that. Besides the games mentioned herein they’ve published non-cooperative genre games of all sorts including Marvel Heroes, A Game of Thrones, and War of the Ring.

Appendix IV: Company Profiles: Family Pastimes

Although most designers and publishers seem to see cooperative games as merely one of many possibilities, Jim Deacove of Canadian publisher Family Pastimes approaches the medium with a singular zeal. He strongly believes in the benefits of cooperation over competition, stating, “Success doesn’t require someone else’s failure.”

Deacove goes further than other cooperative game designers by making his games pure cooperation, where players all work together to manage the problems presented by the gaming system, with no opportunity for singular glory. He contrasts his own games to the field by saying that other games “always offer a compromise, as if the inventors were afraid to give us a fully cooperative play experience.” Indeed, both Lord of the Rings and Arkham Horror have some rules to declare a singular winner, while Deacove notes that the traitor in Shadows over Camelot can “intensify/spoil the coop play experience.”

All told Family Pastimes has produced almost 100 cooperative games. Their best sellers are games for children or families, including The Secret Door, a Concentration-like game where players must discover which cards are missing from the set before time runs out, and Search & Rescue, a logistical game of saving park visitors before a storm descends. They also have a few more serious strategy games, such as Power Blackout and Diplo Mission.

Family Pastime games are generally simply produced — with their offset press, table saws, and other equipment all being in house — a fact which is reflected by the games’ low prices, most of which run just $10-$15. They aren’t available through some distributors, and thus if you can’t find them at your local shop, you should visit the company’s website .

Family Pastime’s games will appeal most to families who are looking for cooperative experiences to enjoy together.

I still use these general categories to classify co-op games, but I’ve added a fourth one “hunter games”, for those games like The Fury of Dracula, where the “overlord” is playing a more symmetrical role to the other players. The co-op book also excludes Saboteur from its co-op definition, defining it as a game that exists on the boundary, but which leans toward a variant of partnership play. —SA, 12/14/14.

Over the last decade, we’ve seen the evolution of a new genre of gaming: the co-op game. Because we’re still here in the early days of the genre, we’ve had the good fortune over the last decade (and to a smaller extent, since 1987) to really see the genre evolve. It’s something that I find really fascinating, as I see new games show up and introduce new mechanics to the melting pot.

As a result, I’ve decided to talk about that evolution over the course of two or three articles, wherein I’ll be approaching the topic chronologically, looking at the major games which have appeared in a variety of time periods and what they added.

I’m not necessarily saying that each game introduced the element in question, but rather it was the one that was important enough to imprint it on the gaming psyche. I’d love to hear your thoughts, about the games that I missed (though I went through several lists as I wrote this, so if I snubbed something, it was probably purposeful) and the gaming elements that I might not have considered.

Before I go any further, I should probably define what I mean by a co-op game. Broadly, I mean “cooperative board games”, where most or all of the players are trying to accomplish a group goal — and where they might either accomplish that goal or be defeated. As we’ll see, players may be fighting against either the game system itself or else a lesser number of opponents (usually one). The most well-know co-op games today are probably Arkham Horror, Shadows over Camelot, and Pandemic — so if you’re familiar with any of those, that’s what I’m talking about.

Part I: Honored Ancestors (1983-2000)

Scotland Yard (1983). In this game — the earliest major ancestor that I’m aware of for the co-op genre, Mr. X tries to elude all the other players, but in doing so leaves behind clues that those other players may use to deduce his location. They must then work together to capture him.

To a certain extent this sort of game stretches the definition of where a co-op game ends and where simple team play begins. However, I feel pretty comfortable saying that when you have one player against everyone else, that’s probably co-op. It definitely feels similar, as everyone talks about what to do about the bad player.

I really consider Scotland Yard a precursor to the co-op movement because it predates the other games by several years and because it comes from outside of the hobbyist market (meaning roleplaying and miniatures companies) that actually made co-op into a genre. Nonetheless, it’s a very important precursor because it defines the first major sort of co-op play: the players versus one opponent.

Arkham Horror (1987). Within the hobbyist field, Arkham Horror — where players work together to try and close all the gates in Arkham before the world is destroyed — is the primordial co-op game. It really pioneered the idea of players working against a game system that relentlessly marched forward. It also introduced the idea of there being a singular best player (“the first citizen of Arkham”) among the winners, something which hasn’t shown up very often among co-op descendents.

Seeing Arkham Horror as the first cobble in the co-op road is interesting, because Richard Launius very specifically tried to model the RPG play of Call of Cthulhu when creating Arkham Horror, which would mean that role-playing games are also an important ancestor in the evolution of co-ops.

Though it was clearly ground-breaking, Arkham Horror — and the other co-op games of the first wave, from 1987-1992 — aren’t necessarily direct ancestors of that which came afterward. There was such a big break after them, that it’s really what came in the 2000s that drives most modern co-op game design. However, I do believe that Arkham Horror affected the gaming gestalt, I know that it influences the co-op work being down at FFG, and I also think it offers a clear definition of the first major stream of co-op design: where players fight against the system.

The Fury of Dracula (1987). Meanwhile, Games Workshop was simultaneously working to bring Scotland Yard‘s sort-of-mostly-co-op play into the hobbyist market through a release called The Fury of Dracula. Here one player takes on the role of Dracula, who moves secretly, while the others try to deduce his location, then to defeat him. Which all sounds kind of familiar.

Overall, The Fury of Dracula is an interesting design, but its biggest contribution to the co-operative gaming is probably bringing that core idea of one-against-many into the hobbyist world, since its mechanics mostly have to do with secret movement and other stuff not relevant to the discussion of co-op play.

Werewolf/Mafia (1987?). I find it pretty astounding that you could go back decades previous to the 1980s and not find much that you’d call co-operative play, then in 1987 three different games all pushed the same idea. The dating on the public-domain Mafia game is actually more up-in-the-air than the obvious publications of Arkham Horror and The Fury of Dracula, but the most recent research seems to say that it was being developed in 1986 and played in 1987.

With all that said, I don’t think that Mafia is a co-op game. Sure, two or more Werewolves can work together ever so slightly, but the amount of tactical choice is so limited and the amount of information you have is so low, that there’s not really cooperation here, just mob mentality.

However, games outside a genre can still introduce interesting evolutionary elements to that genre, and I think that’s exactly what Mafia did. It introduced the idea of hidden roles which have not only allowed for the creation of other pseudo-co-op games like Bang! (2003) but also turned the evil player of The Fury of Dracula into the hidden evil of more recent co-op games.

HeroQuest (1989). Just as Arkham Horror tried to model Call of Cthulhu play as a board game, HeroQuest tried to model Dungeons & Dragons play. The result was a different sort of co-op game. First up, it adapted the idea of a human adversary from The Fury of Dracula to the role of the gamemaster — but unlike more recent one-versus-all games he doesn’t necessarily have a lot of free will.

HeroQuest also shows off another potential difference in the one-versus-all gameplay (as opposed to system-versus-all). Where the system-centric co-op is about trying to hold off a constant deluge of terrible things, HeroQuest is much more about the players setting goals and trying to succeed at them. You can still get killed, but the game feels like it’s centered around the expectation of success, with some chance of failure, rather than the expectation of failure, with the valiant hope for success.

HeroQuest continued onto the 1990s with supplements, but then fizzled out, leaving another evolutionary dead-end … until (once more) the modern-day FFG releases.

After HeroQuest we moved through a decade in which co-op games were almost unheard of. I blame the miniaturization of Games Workshop and the CCG fever that subsequently hit the hobbyist market. Where a lot of roleplaying companies had previously been doing cutting-edge board game design, now they suddenly found themselves with other priorities. Then a decade later, you had a new style of games that was now evolved enough to take some chances … Eurogames.

It’s possible that those hobbyist co-op games from the late 1980s and early 1990s might have made a resurgence on their own under FFG, but as things actually occurred, I believe that the main force behind the co-op game evolution of the 2000s is Reiner Knizia.

Lord of the Rings (2000). Lord of the Rings is, in many ways, the quintessential modern co-op game. It marries a well-polished Eurogame system with the idea of that same system being a timer that the players must work against, thus forcing co-operation.

To a certain extent, there’s nothing new in Lord of the Rings. The resource management of the game and the tactical choices that it allows are fairly standard for Euros — and even relatively simplistic compared to many. However when united with co-op play, they produced something that was new and different enough from anything that came before, that I think it’s pretty easy to call Lord of the Rings the ancestor of at least half the co-op games that have come since (with the others instead harkening back to those games from the 1980s).

To be more specific, Lord of the Rings is a game that’s tighter, more strategic, more balanced, and shorter than most of the co-ops that came before it. Of course, it offered the typical Eurogame tradeoff in being somewhat less thematic.

With all that change, it really opened up the field for the new Euro-co-ops that have come since.

Conclusion

I’ve got more to talk about concerning co-ops. I expect to return to the topic in several weeks, when I’ll begin talking about the co-ops that have appeared after 2000. In the meantime, if you think I missed any honored ancestors that were developed in the 20th century or earlier, or if you think I missed anything these games added to the genre, let me know in the comments below.

While you’re waiting for my next article, you may also want to read my revent reviews: Small World: Tales & Legends, Railways of the World: The Card Game, and Bang!: Wild West Show. It’s apparently expansion and redevelopment season.

Author’s Note: This was the series that I was in the middle of when BGN died and I never got back to it at BGi. The two immediate adjuncts to this article are an interview with Richard Launius about Arkham Horror and a (rare) interview with Reiner Knizia about Lord of the Rings. Now that I’ve got a new blog begging for content, I hope to return with Part II of this article, which’ll cover the first generation of modern co-op games. —2/16/11, 6/21/12

Last month I started a discussion of co-op games with an article I called “Gaming Evolution: Co-Op Games, Part One: Honored Ancestors”. It talks about some of the primordial co-op games which helped to create the genre in the 1980s and 1990s. Before I move on to more recent games, I’m going to be publishing a couple of interviews with some of the designers of those co-op originators, to further document the games that the modern co-op boom ultimately looks back to as its foundation.

This month I’m talking to Richard Launius. He’s best known for his design of Arkham Horror. He was thus perhaps the first entrant in the “American co-op” subgenre of games which is best represented in the modern day by Fantasy Flight Games … who not by chance counts Arkham Horror among its stable of American co-op games.

At some time in the future, I’d like to talk with Richard more about his more recent release, Defenders of the Realm, but this time I focused on his original design of Arkham Horror, the revision by Fantasy Flight, and how the co-op genre has changed in the almost 25 years since Arkham Horrorwas first published. If you’re not familiar with Arkham Horror, you may want to look at my review of FFG’s second edition.

An Interview with Richard Launius about Arkham Horror

Shannon Appelcline: Why did you decide to use co-operative game play when you designed Arkham Horror?

Richard Launius: I actually stumbled into it. I thought the Cthulhu Mythos was a very rich storytelling world and at the time the only game experience available to it was through the role-playing game by Chaosium. I wanted to create a game that a group of people could play together without a gamemaster, or a single individual could play alone since much of my gaming at this time of my life was solitaire play. So, I started to bring the Lovecraft world into a board game with various locations and encounters that would challenge any number of players. The challenge was creating encounters that would act as a gamemaster in the game so the players could just focus on their play and their personal adventure.

SA: Were there any existing games or activities that influenced the co-operative elements in Arkham Horror?

RL: The primary cooperative elements were spawned from role-playing games, the most influential being Call of Cthulhu. I loved the idea of a group of players facing overwhelming horrors that slowly (and sometimes quickly) drive them toward the brink of insanity and sure death. Once the idea came to me that the board would act as the gamemaster in the game, the rest of the adventure elements begin to fall in place, and along with that more cooperative game play. I do want to give credit to the Charlie Krank, Lynn Willis, and Sandy Peterson at Chaosium as they tied many of the elements together in final development of the 1st Edition of Arkham Horror which prompted even more cooperative play related to the players collectively closing all of the gates for the victory.

SA: Is there anything in Fantasy Flight Games’ new edition of Arkham Horror that you particularly liked?

RL: Fantasy Flight Games brought so much to the Arkham Horror design both in terms of the graphic look of the game, and from Kevin Wilson who is just a fantastic person and game designer. Kevin’s changes to the monster movement, the sliding hero skills, and the further development of the Great Old Ones slumber and awakening abilities were amazing.

In my updating of the game from the first edition that Kevin was working from, I had already decided that I wanted a final battle with the Great Old Ones and had created it where different Great Old Ones could be used in the game, but Kevin really took this to the next level with slumber abilities effecting game play, not just the end game combat.

One of the other major changes that Kevin and Fantasy Flight brought to the game was prompted by Christian Peterson. Chris thought that we should do cards for all encounters (the original game used encounter charts) and while challenging at first because of the many locations, Kevin and I came up with the idea of placing multiple encounters on each card which has worked very well. The move to cards has enabled several expansions to introduce more story and challenges for the players.

SA: You’ve recently developed a new co-op game, Defenders of the Realm, released over 20 years after Arkham Horror. How do you feel like the genre has changed in those years?

RL: I am glad to see that the genre has grown over the years. For the most part I break cooperative games into 3 categories:

1) Cooperative Puzzle games like Pandemic or Space Alert. Cooperative puzzle games to me present one or more situations that must be resolved in specific time. Often these cooperative games lend themselves to an overlord or boss player directing the others on their turns. These type of games are challenging and interactive, but to me often the actions for each turn are more scripted than I prefer.

2) Cooperative Traitor games like Battlestar Galactica, Betrayal on House on a Hill, and Shadow over Camelot fall into this genre. Additionally the one against many fall into this category for me – games like Fury of Dracula, Middle Earth Quest, and Descent. While all are fun games, and the traitor aspect centers around cautious to paranoid cooperative activities, the true key to a successful gaming session is reliant on how devious the traitor player(s) or villain player manages the game.

3) Pure Cooperative like Arkham Horror, Castle Ravenloft, and Defenders of the Realm. Pure cooperative games rely on the players working for a common goal against a board and game system that will shift each game and while all of the three types of cooperative games are rich in theme and story, this is the cornerstone to play in a pure coop. For me, pure coops rely upon the world, theme, story and overall game experience to make the game both fun and challenging. They create an adventure in which the experience of playing it is more important than winning or losing.

While I enjoy playing all of the games listed above, and all 3 cooperative genres, it is the Pure Cooperative game that intrigues me the most. And as you know – this is just one person’s opinion, I am not criticizing any of these 3 Coop genres.

SA: How do you design pure co-operative games of this sort?

RL: I’ve developed the following cooperative design guidelines when I design games:

1) Create a challenging AI in the game to force players to work together on strategy and not one player becoming the overlord directing all players on their turn (puzzle solving). This means that multiple good moves appear for every player on their turn, limiting the advice to multiple strategies.

2) The Board setup and play should have a number of random elements that constantly change from game to game making each experience different for the players, even though the game mechanics stay the same.

3) While I do not lean toward a traitor element or one against many in cooperative design, I do like the idea of victory for all granting a champion player — the best of the winners. This element, depending on the type of players can make for interesting game play, but it should always be an optional rule.

4) I believe cooperative games need to be strong in theme, a story coming out of the game that the players create as they play. This story should be something that the players enjoy from the game that goes far beyond winning or losing – and something that is remembers by them long after the game is over. Therefore all my designs always start with theme and work from that foundation.

5) The game should be highly expandable — the ability to add more story and more challenges to the game for the players, keeping it a fresh and fun experience is essential to a cooperative game since it does not have the intellect and changing strategies launched by an opposing player to challenge the cooperative gamers.

6) Last, but not least — the game must be fun.

After I work out all the details above, I build the game engine and play it, then change it, play it and change and play it again and again until I reach the level of challenge and story I think the game needs, using the mechanics I think work best with the theme to deliver the experience I believe cooperative players want in their games. At least the experience I want in the game and I am thankful others want that kind of game as well.

SA: Thanks very much for the insights into the past and present of co-operative games!

Around the Corner

I have more to say on the topic of cooperative games, and I plan to do so over the coming months with more articles on their evolution and more interviews with top cooperative designers. If there’s anything you’d particularly like to see on the topic, let me know. I’d also be fascinated to hear how you differentiate co-op games. Richard’s puzzle games, traitor games, and pure co-op are not too far from my own classifications of Euro co-op, against the enemy co-op, and Anglo-American co-op. So, what other ways do you divide them up?

And with that said, let me direct you to my reviews of the last few weeks. Most notably given the context, you should take a look at a review of Richard’s newest, Defenders of the Realm. I’ve also recently reviewed: Charon Inc., Innovation, and Nuns on the Run.

Now go eat a turkey for me.

Author’s Note: This was the last article I wrote for BGN before that site died. The series continues with an interview with Reiner Knizia. —2/16/11

In previous articles in this column I discussed the primordial co-operative play board games, from 1987 to 2000 — starting with Arkham Horror and ending with Lord of the Rings — and I talked with Richard Launius, who helped to kick-off the co-operative game explosion for the late 1980s.

This week I’m talking with Dr. Reiner Knizia, one of the top designers of Eurogames, and possibly the best known board game designer in the world. Just like Richard Launius, he’s a foundational co-op designer, because he’s the guy that got co-ops going again over the last decade, after they’d gone moribund for almost as long.

By chance, Knizia’s Lord of the Rings has just been rereleased by publisher Fantasy Flight in a new Silver Line Edition, which means it’s smaller and cheaper.

With that said, let me offer special thanks to Dr. Knizia for chatting with me about co-op games, as he rarely grants print interviews of this sort.

An Interview with Dr. Reiner Knizia About Lord of the Rings

Shannon Appelcline: Though there were some co-op games in the 1980s and 1990s, they were mostly gone by 2000. What made you decide to design Lord of the Rings as a cooperative game?

Dr. Reiner Knizia: When Sophisticated Games approached me in 1998 about the design and development of a Lord of the Rings board game, the great opportunity to work with Tolkein’s ground breaking masterpiece started. The project was soon agreed, and then I faced the pleasant but enormous challenge to transform this epic work into a board game that would be playable in not much more than one hour.

When working with any licences, I believe that it is vital to remain true to the spirit of the licence. This was particularly important for the Lord of the Rings, as there are many millions of fans all over the world who have a – maybe only subconscious – but clear expectation that the board game should allow them to relive their adventures when they read the book.

Henry Kissinger said, ‘Foreign politics is mainly about leading the inevitable’. To remain true to the spirit of the book, I had to match the point of view from the book: we are the Fellowship! Of course, the Fellowship does not work against each other; they cooperate against the evil Sauron. I did not decide to design a cooperative game – it was inevitable! And suddenly, hair grows on your legs….

SA: Did any older games influence the cooperative design of Lord of the Rings?

RK: When I design games, I feel a great sense of urgency. I believe there are many great games in the universe for me to still discover and invent. I am not paranoid, but I know that there are many people out there who are trying to ‘steal’ my ideas even before I have had them….

As a consequence, most of my life is organized around exploring and developing new games. Playtesting is the life blood of game design; therefore we are playing every day. Funnily enough, with all this playtesting, there is literally no time left to ‘play games’. As a consequence, I really do not know many other games.

You can have anything in life, but not everything….

And now I will tell you a secret! Not knowing many other games is a big competitive advantage for me. Other game designers obviously cannot contain themselves and play many other games, claiming that this is important for market research. Of course it is mainly for entertainment! By doing so, they spoil themselves with other people’s ideas. I believe that the evolution of the human brain is not entirely geared towards game design: the design process requires a lot of decisions, small ones as well and big ones, how to handle and how to solve many of the tricky game situations. Now, the human brain has evolved to learn from experience. In game design this means that if you already know the solution another designer has applied to a similar feature, the brain irresistibly meanders towards this solution. As I do not know these solutions, my brain is free to develop my own innovative ideas…

So after this long introduction, returning to your question, the answer is simple and short: No!

SA: Were there any particular challenges in making a co-op game that you don’t see in more standard competitive games?

RK: When we say that we are playing together, we usually mean that we are playing against each other on the common platform of a game that we all enjoy. The competition amongst each other actually makes the game!

I remember very well when the Lord of the Rings board game was advertised as a cooperative game. Many journalists were doubtful about the play experience and the replay value. How can a game be exciting if we are all in the same boat and there is nothing to do? Well, the answer is that a game does not become cooperative simply by declaring it to be so.

In the Lord of the Rings, the players are given a common task that they must achieve, and they realize very quickly that they are doomed. The players realize that the task if essentially insurmountable, so competition and selfishness is replaced by a true spirit of togetherness against the common evil. The evil is me, or at least all the nasty obstacles I build into the game system to work against the players!

In a cooperative game like the Lord of the Rings board game I, as the designer, become much more a part of the game play. Now you may think that experience with the gameplay will make things easier. On the contrary, you will feel even more doomed! When you play the Lord of the Rings board game as a novice, you play turn by turn, being surprised by one obstacle after another that comes along. With more experience, you can much better foresee the consequences of your actions and all the future obstacles that you are kicking loose.

So how can you ever win? Firstly, the game allows the players to play on various difficulty levels. For cooperative games, this is always a good idea, as players of very different general play experience will take part in the game. Secondly, whilst developing a true sense of doom, the players also learn about more and more actions and reactions the game offers them to overcome the obstacles and to deal with the ‘evil’ game system. This will lead the players eventually to a true mastery of the game.

Most importantly, the Lord of the Rings board game is not won against other players. The winner does not triumph over the loser, but the game creates a unique team experience for the players that bring them together as human beings beyond the individual game. I find this aspect of the cooperative gameplay most fascinating and rewarding!

The big challenge when designing and developing cooperative games is, of course, to fine tune the balance between the feeling of doom and the abilities to overcome these obstacles for victory to create a highly exciting game with a great climax. If the game is too easy or too hard, this game experience will be lost.

That the game balance works in the Lord of the Rings board game is above all proven by one most remarkable experience I have made many times: the individual players are so engaged in the overall objective of destroying the Ring, that they are willing to make the ultimate game sacrifice. They are willing to be eliminated from the game and the future gameplay so that the rest of the Fellowship can achieve the common goal.

SA: When you released Sauron for Lord of the Rings, you introduced an active & intelligent evil that the players had to fight against. How did this change the basic formula for cooperative play in Lord of the Rings?

RK: The cooperative gameplay against the ‘evil’ game system naturally motivates a lot of discussion amongst the players. Again and again the players assess the current situation and discuss the most promising options to move ahead.

The main purpose of introducing Sauron as a human counterplayer in the second game expansion was to increase the feeling of doom even further. Now your enemy personifies around the table, sitting amongst you and listening into all your discussions whilst already planning his next counter strikes. How can you cooperate, which is so vital for the game’s success, if your overwhelming adversary is watching all your steps and listening to your every word? I believe this really captures the spirit of Tolkein’s masterpiece.

Conclusion

The element of this interview that I find the most interesting is Dr. Knizia’s description of his design process, most specifically that he doesn’t play other games. It certainly explains how co-op games could disappear for a decade, then reappear. If Dr. Knizia did play other games, we might well have never seen the field reemerge in the last decade!

If there are any other early designers that you’d really like to hear from, let me know, but my current plan is to move forward to the next stage of co-op designs in the near future, when we got a flurry of new designs in the wake of Lord of the Rings, at least one of which introduced a whole new subgenre.

As with its predecessors, this article is intended to talk about the games that I played recently which I’d never played before. Most of them are games that were published in the last year or so within the United States, but on occasion I play a “new to me” game that is quite older; they’re all listed here.

I usually write this article on a quarterly basis, since that tends to offer up a good selection of new games. However, my new game selection in Winter was quite poor due to a combination of sickness and vacation (fortunately, not at the same time!). So I didn’t write the article in April, as I usually would have … then got deluged by new games in Spring. So, I’ve got a lot to talk about this time …

Keep in mind these are not my assessments of whether the games are good or bad, but instead my assessments of whether they appeal to me. Generally, I like light but strategic games that are euro designs but that don’t feel like work to me. They’re in roughly descending order of interest.

The Great

Bora Bora (2013). In some ways this Stephen Feld game feels pretty similar to Castles of Burgundy since you’re (again) trying to make good use of die rolls to engage in a variety of tasks. Of course, I love Castles and so I’m thrilled to some of the same ideas in a fairly different game. I really like the tension of Bora! Bora! as you’re constantly fighting to fulfill tasks while keeping your eyes on piles of other potential victory conditions. There’s a lot to keep track of and thus a lot of different paths to victory.

Copycat (2012). I’ve already written A Deckbuilding Look at Copycat, which provides some in-depth analysis of this game. Basically, it combines worker placement and deckbuilding into a very coherent and enjoyable whole that simultaneously shows off the fun factor that Friese puts into so many of his games via fun theming and funny artwork. I have some concerns about the game’s ultimate replayability — but I probably wouldn’t say that at all if I weren’t comparing it with the rest of the deckbuilding field. Just looking at it as a euro, this is a great release.

Space Hulk: Death Angel — The Card Game (2010). I think that Corey Konieczka knocked it out of the park with this game because it managed to take a lot of the fun elements of cooperative games, and to squish them down into a fast-playing and claustrophic-feeling 30 minutes or so of gameplay. That’s fairly brilliant, and also very enjoyably adrenaline-inducing.

(As you’ll see, this is one of many new-to-me co-op games that I played in the last six months, all as part of a game design project I’m working on, which I hope to write more about later in the year.)

The Very Good

Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar (2012). This is a worker-placement game with a gimmick: you place the workers on gears which slowly increase the value of their actions over time. The gimmick works surprisingly well, as you’re constantly deciding which actions you really want from your workers at which levels. The game also works against some common strategies for worker-placement games, as you no longer necessarily want to place and remove your workers as efficiently as you can. The end result is not only innovative (thanks to the mechanics) and evocative (thanks to the beautiful board), but it’s also thoughful and fun as well.

Flash Point: Fire Rescue (2011). A cooperative game that follows closely on the heels of Pandemic, but this time you’re fighting fires and rescuing victims. It has a lot of the same advantages as its predecessor, including characters with great roles and a fun simulation system, here depicting the spreading flames. The result is a great new option in the co-op field, and I suspect the expansions give you all the variability you’d even need.

Romans Go Home! (2013).  This is sort of an auction game, where you’re playing cards openly; every round the player with the highest sum of card wins the current Roman fort, but loses his cards; while the other players keep their played cards out for future rounds. It reminds be a bit of Reiner Knizia’s Great Wall of China in that regard. Romans’ big twist is that the auction cards are all “programmed”. You lay out a set of cards simultaneously, corresponding to a set of forts that can be won, and then you reveal them one at a time. Special powers which can interact with each other in weird ways keep everything hopping. I generally love programmed games, and this one works quite well, offering a new twist on an old genre.

(I’ve actually played this game previously, in prototype form, but I played it for the first time in its published form in the last quarter. It’s also designed & produced by a friend, so caveat reader.)

Mansions of Madness (2011). An interesting variant on an Arkham Horror sort of game. You similarly have investigators moving through a scary locale, picking up equipment and exploring. The game feels somewhat less abstract than Arkham Horror because the location is so specific (a beautifully illustrated mansion). There’s also an interesting (and largely successful) attempt to create a real story, and the game plays in a much more reasonable amount of time. I think I’d generally play this instead of Arkham Horror given my current limitations of playing time.

Love Letter (2012). I always love a new filler, especially if it’s particular clever, and this one is. The concept is blindingly simple: you have a hand of two cards, and you pick one of them to use. Clever plays can knock other people out of the game, else you try to have the highest value card at the end. I’m not convinced there’s a lot of strategy, and the suggested game length runs a little long, but those are my only complaints.

The Good

Il Vecchio (2012). Another new worker-placement game — or perhaps, as one friend calls it, a “worker movement” game since you’re really moving workers around a map in order to take specific actions. This is a pretty abstract game, but one with lots of moving parts related to a variety of resources, which have to be used carefully alongside the workers that you’re moving around. It’s original and thoughtful but it really shines by the fact that it’s super-fast playing.

Tokaido (2012). An amazingly simple game of moving forward along a track to collect a variety of resources. The biggest catches are that you can never move backward and that other players can block your access to resources by taking the resources themselves. The result is surprisingly thoughtful, as you simultaneously try to maximize the number of things you can get while also figuring out when you need to jump ahead to grab something really important that someone else might otherwise take. I enjoyed it for the beauty of the components, for the lightness of the game, and for the depth that it still allows.

Las Vegas (2012). This new Alea game is super-light, but it’s still a very enjoyable filler as long as you play with the neutral dice variant. The basic concept is that you roll dice each round, then put some in an appropriately numbered casino. In the end, casinos pay out to the players who put the most dice there. Put that all together and you’ve got all the aspects that you want in a dice game: lucky rolls, unlucky rolls, forced moves, and pushing your luck. I regularly bring it around as a 15- to 30-minute filler.

Arctic Scavengers (2009/2013). I covered this one in more depth in A Deckbuilding Look at Arctic Scavengers. It’s a slightly simple deckbuilder, but it’s got some depth thanks to interpersonal conflict that’s pretty rare for the field, and that helps maintain interest.

Samurai Sword (2012). Take Bang! Apply Samurai theming. Release … except this new game does a bit more than that. It fixes the biggest problem of Bang!, player elimination. It also generally feels like it plays more smoothly and thoughtfully than the original. I think it’s a fine example of what happens when you  apply additional development to an already well-polished game, and I suggest it to Bang! fans — though I know some Bang! fans that didn’t like the changes.

Kola (2013). This is by the same designer as Romans Go Home!, so I’ve also played it in prototype form. This one is more of a pure auction game, using one of my favorite twists: the winning bid is the lot that’s bid on next turn. These games always offer a lot of tactical interest, as you have to think really carefully about what you’re bidding — because you may want to get the bid back or you might want to make sure that you don’t give away too good a set of cards. I’m less fond of the memory aspect, where you’re dumping cards into a pile that you’ll score at the end — like in Ticket to Ride: The Card Game or Mamma Mia! — but that’s a personal preference.

Elder Sign (2011). This was a pretty fun dice-rolling co-op where you’re trying to solve individual rooms by rolling the precise correct pattern of dice. There are a few ways to help out your fellows and there’s some slight character specialization in the game, so the cooperation works, perhaps better than in Arkham Horror (which this game is closely related to). On the downside, the theming comes across as paper-thin; this is mostly is an abstract, which is often a danger in dice game. In addition, the game is weighted to be way too easy. Still, a fun game.

Power Grid: The First Sparks (2011). I never liked Power Grid because there was too much effort spent constantly calculating — as you figured out costs, what you could spend, what you had to save to power your reactors, etc. First Sparks had a little less of that, with the excessive calculations only required at the very end of the game, and it plays faster, and it had fun theming. So, I liked it better than the original. However, that’s a big YMMV since I’m clearly not the Power Grid audience.

The OK

Cinque Terre (2013). There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this roundel-based pickup and delivery game where you’re constantly buying and selling stuff as you circle the board. It’s even got some clever logistics, including: pattern-matching for deliveries (almost like routes in Ticket to Ride) and very limited carrying capacity. However, I also found it abstract and repetitive. This kept the game from really sparking for me, which left it as a pure exercise in cleverness.

3012 (2012). I think this is a decently good deckbuilding game, as I wrote about more extensively in A Deckbuilding Look at 3012. However for me personally, it’s a little too simplistic to generate many plays (even moreso than Arctic Scavengers). Someone new to the deckbuilding field would have a totally different attitude.

Whitewater (2012). I might have liked this river rafting game better if I didn’t have a copy of Fast Flowing Forest Fellers. Whitewater goes to the same theme of rafting down a river with various currents and obstacles, but it’s a slightly more complex game, which isn’t usually what I’m looking for. Its big advantage is that it has a neat system where you’re simultaneously teamed up with two different players — which is clever and original — but I’d still stick with FFFF.

Credit Mobilier (2009/2013). To be honest, I think this one descended to just “OK” level because of it’s theming: it’s yet another RR game with stock, and I’ve seen a bazillion of those, so one has to really stand out now. It’s actually got some relatively clever mechanics where you roll dice and use those results to control your actions — not unlike the Stefan Feld games Burgundy and Bora Bora. It just didn’t have the same spark though; the logistical purchase and sales of stock felt very raw and, well, financial.

Zen Garden (2013). A tile laying game where you’re trying to form shapes in a rock garden. It was held back by components that made the game hard to play, and sufficient abstractness that I was never really drawn into the game.

The Meh

Tahiti (2012). A pick-up and delivery game that’s on the one hand pretty light but on the other hand has some rules regarding cargo and actions which are pretty complex. I would have rated it as an “OK” game if not for the endgame which can just drag on and on without there being a lot of choice.

Room 25 (2013). This is essentially Running Man: The Board Game. it’s got clever programmed movement, a fun premise, and some neat moving parts, as everyone struggles to get out of the deadly maze of rooms. Unfortunately, its eyes were bigger than its stomach and so it tried to be all sorts of games — and thus included rules for competition, cooperation, and traitors. The problem is that the cooperative game is way too easy and the traitor game offers no actual support for the traitor. I think the competitive game is OK, but after the earlier disappointments, I was less interested in it.

Star Trek: Expeditions (2011). A new co-op by Reiner Knizia and a game wit Star Trek theming … I really wanted to love it but couldn’t. The biggest problems were (1) an abstract and mechanical task resolution system; (2) a really small-picture planet quest that doesn’t take good advantage of the license; (3) a poorly considered victory system where results that should be losses are counted as wins; and (4) poor replayability.

Rune Age (2011). My last new deckbuilding game for recent months, and one that I’m waiting to play one more time before I finally assess it. It’s got some interested elements in it, including strongly themed, unique decks. Unfortunately, it was one of those games that was sufficiently awkward that it always felt like you were playing it wrong. Player elimination, a heavy push toward attacking, a ramp-down toward the end of the game as one of the resources becomes worthless, a lack of enough good cards to buy, and a dragging end game all contributed to its problems.

Veritas (2013). Yet another game that was spoiled by its ending (which seems to be the theme of my “meh” section this time). This game is largely an abstract with some very clever Mancala-like rules where you build up tokens in cities, then spread them across the board in an effort to gain majorities in various regions. We all enjoyed it for the first half of the game, but then the last half dragged horribly, with all the players taking and retaking the same cities turn after turn, no one scoring most of the time, and thus the stupid game never ending. After an hour or more, we were all sitting around the table praying that someone (anyone) would win.

To date I haven’t paid any attention to Kickstarters in this blog under the theory that it’s better to talk about games when they’re done and published. However, two current Kickstarters caught my eye, so I decided to give them some attention in this and an upcoming column. In each case, the Kickstarting publisher sent me a prototype and I gave it a play, so that I could write about it here.

Monster Mansion ( Kickstarter link ) caught my eye because it’s a new co-op game. Though I’ve only touched upon the category of games here, I’ve actually written a book on the topic with Christopher Allen that we hope to get to print next year. So, it’s a topic that’s near and dear to my heart.

Enter Monster Mansion. It’s a game where you’ve been dropped down into the basement of a monster-filled mansion and are trying to get out. All you have to do is make it through three dungeon rooms, get to the stairs, rush through three mansion rooms, then make it out the exit.

Easy enough? Of course not.

The Challenges

Each co-op game starts with a challenge system: the thing that endangers the players’ characters and pushes them toward losing the game. In Monster Mansion there are two sets of challenges: the monsters and the mansion (hence the name).

The monsters appear via encounter cards. Each player draws one at the start of his turn, which is a pretty classic methodology for “activating” a challenge system. Though most of the deck consists of monsters that the players have to deal with (or else slightly less dangerous traps), there are also quite a number of “whiffs” — and boy are players relieved when they draw a whiff instead of a monster. That’s exactly the sort of thing that you want in this sort of encounter draw, because it gives you excitement and variability.

The mansion is slowly unveiled over the course of the game as the players explore it. Almost every room is bad, so there’s less excitement here, but the different effects in different rooms keep players on their toes — and also gives them the opportunity to make tactical decisions as they move through rooms.

Overall, the challenge system for Monster Mansion is successful. The object of a good challenge system is to make it impossible for players to have all the answers as they rush through a co-op game, but to still reward them for being smart; Monster Mansion does a good job of maintaining that tension.

The Cooperation

The flipside of a challenge system is the question of how players work together, and Monster Mansion provides lots of opportunities here too. To start with, players can heal each other and they can assault the monsters who are bedeviling their friends. However, Monster Mansion’s cooperation goes beyond this by adopting another classic co-op methodology: each player’s character has unique characteristics that force them to work together. You want the bruiser to do the fighting and the healer to do the healing, so you try to arrange things so that happens. Character special abilities push this strategic cooperation even further. One player is great at providing luck to his fellows, another can take damage for his fellows, etc.

I had some concerns that the cooperation would be too total: it looked like players might end up grouping together and become too much of a gestalt. Fortunately, the natural flow of the game kept that from happening: one character (the “double trouble” twins) was great at rushing ahead because he had extra actions, while sometimes a player character would get killed and moved back to the last “save point”; the rest of his compatriots had to nonetheless keep pushing forward (or else go back for him!).

Despite the lack of specific cooperative systems, the general gameplay of Monster Mansion supported working together in a way that was meaningful, but not overpowering.

The Real-Time

All of this gameplay happened in real-time, with a clock counting off the minutes as you tried to get out of the mansion.

I recent wrote about real-time games because I enjoy them, but I have to admit that I didn’t have very high hopes for this game’s real-time play. That’s because it’s not really integrated into the gameplay. In comparison Damage Report (2014) precisely times every action that you take while Space Alert (2008) carefully doles out information as the time slowly runs down. In comparison, in Monster Mansion you can take actions as fast or as slow as you want, and the goal is just to get out of the mansion in time.

I think this lack of sophistication might impact the enjoyment of Monster Mansion in the long term (particularly if you get really fast at playing the game). Nonetheless, it definitely works on a first play. We became more and more frenzied as the timer dropped down and finally escaped the mansion just in time — with less than a minute left. We were excited, pumped, and definitely yelling. That’s why I like real-time games, and it worked here.

The Variants

I had concern with winning the game the first time out, as that shouldn’t usually happen with a co-op game. Fortunately, Monster Mansion has some very simple ideas for tuning the game to get it right for your playing group: you can change the timer or change the size of the mansion to make the game easier or harder.

The game also has a variant that we didn’t try out (because we didn’t have the 4 players required) where one of the players is secretly a VIP and another is secretly an assassin, trying to kill the VIP — which is what I call “traitor” gameplay, like in Shadows over Camelot (2005), Battlestar Galactica (2008), and others. And, there’s yet another “Hunger Games” variant where it’s everyone for themselves.

I have some qualms about games that try to be co-op games and traitor games and competitive games. Room 25 (2013) is a somewhat similar game that tried to do so, and I found that the competitive game was great, but the others fell flat. In this case, I enjoyed the full co-op game and designer assures me the traitor game is very fun as well … but I’ll leave it to other reviewers to cover that topic.

The Rest of the Game

I can’t really speak too much to the components of the game, because what I was received was a simply printed prototype. The art and layout were OK; if produced well, it could be a good publication, though the graphic design isn’t at the level to make it great. However, the theming is a lot of fun.

I do have two caveats to the game, which both come down to the fact that it was somewhat simple.

First, there are a lot of dungeon-exploration games out there, and this one isn’t that varied from the norm. There are rooms to explore and traps to get through and monsters to kill. One of the players was reminded of a very simplified form of Dungeoneer (2003) and I couldn’t disagree. What makes this one different is the real-time element, but that’s the only major difference.

Second, I didn’t find any of the actual mechanics to be that innovative. This is a simple adventure game with characters and monsters that have a few stats that allow them to fight each other.

Mind you, some of this might have been necessary to keep the game simple enough to play in quick real-time.

Conclusion

Monster Mansion has some of the co-op play of Betrayal at House on the Hill (2004), where you cooperatively explore an unknown and spooky house, some of the exploration play of Dungeoneer (2003), where you flip dungeon rooms up as you move, and some of the adventure play of Arkham Horror (1987, 2005), where you have characters with stats and can gather equipment. If you like some of those games, you’re probably in the right demographic for Monster Mansion.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for eurogamers, but I would probably recommend it for American players looking for some cooperative fun.

And here’s that Kickstarter again.

Matt Leacock is well-known as the designer of Pandemic (2007), Forbidden Island (2010), Forbidden Desert (2013), and related games. I interviewed him about his designs a couple of years ago, following the release of Forbidden Desert. Now that Modiphius Entertainment is Kickstarting his newest co-op game, the Thunderbirds Co-operative Board Game, I was thrilled to talk to him again, to see how it fits into his evolving design philosophy.

Shannon Appelcline: Between the Pandemic series and the Forbidden series, you’ve become one of our industry’s definitive co-op game designers. What led you to create this new Thunderbirds game for Modiphius?

Matt Leacock: Chris Birch approached me at Spiel in 2013 and pitched the idea of a Thunderbirds game. Growing up in the States, I had never seen the show but agreed to check it out. Chris is good at making a pitch and there was such enthusiasm and excitement in his eyes — I could tell he was passionate about the project. I went home and watched some of the shows and immediately understood the appeal. I also thought Thunderbirds and the world of International Rescue was a natural fit for a cooperative game, so I signed on.

SA: So how does the new game differ from your previous co-op releases?

ML: First and foremost, it’s set in 2065, in the world of International Rescue. The players take on the roles of this secret organization dedicated to saving people when all other means have failed. Fans of the show will be able to fly around the world in the vehicles they loved and recall their favorite episodes with each mission they attempt.

Mechanically it’s different from the games I’ve designed to date. Players assemble teams of characters and equipment in locations around the globe to complete missions which are resolved by the roll of two dice. Each turn they must weigh their odds of accomplishing these missions (short-term threats) against the overall long-term threat of their arch nemesis, The Hood, accomplishing his evil scheme. Players can invest time and energy assembling a crack team to increase their odds of success — but doing so takes time. In order to win, players will need to have a good sense of when they can go for the longer odds and when they can’t afford to.

The above said, the game shares some similarities to my other titles. It uses a familiar action-point allowance system (each turn the players have 3 actions to spend). And I’ve worked very hard to make the game as accessible as possible. While there’s a simple menu of actions to select from each turn, the choices the players have to make each turn can be quite involved and deep.

SA: The randomness of rolling dice to complete missions is a big change from the set results you find in your other games for removing disease, shoring up land, or digging up sand. Why did you decide to go this route in the new design? Was it just to introduce the calculation of odds that you mentioned?

ML: The dice help capture the excitement and unpredictability that the show featured and they form one of the central mechanisms of the game. You can add all manner of bonuses and re-rolls to the game (to mitigate risk) but doing so costs actions that might be spent elsewhere to complete other missions to avert other disasters.

The dice also move the overall game clock. One side of each die pictures The Hood and rolling it moves him along on his scheme. Players can take certain actions and save up Intelligence chips to re-roll those sides when they come up. But if you roll at longer odds and miss (and have to re-roll multiple times at longer odds in order to complete a mission) the odds go up that The Hood will advance on his scheme.

SA: It sounds like the Hood and his scheme form the central challenge of the game, taking the roll of impending doom that’s central to so many co-op games. Is just that clock that the players race against, or something more?

ML: The players actually spend the majority of their time dealing with individual missions, but the foiling The Hood’s scheme is how they ultimately win the game. As The Hood advances along his track, he triggers events (bad things) as well as disasters. The players need to avert each of the disasters before they’re triggered or they’ll lose, and if they can avert all three, they win the game.

SA: In Thunderbirds, it seems like you were working with a very rich thematic tapestry, compared to the somewhat universal ideas of your previous games. You already talked some about how that influenced your inclusion of a dice mechanic. Did it change your design process in any other way?

ML: I learned to stay flexible. The theme is very rich and provided many obvious hooks for the game, but it also provided constraints that (counterintuitively) got me thinking in new directions. For example, if I had designed the game from scratch, I might not have considered including a vehicle that didn’t move (Thunderbird 5 stays put in Geo-stationary Orbit). So, if anything, the theme required me to get a bit more creative than I otherwise might have been.

SA: Now that you’ve designed several different co-op games, do you feel like you’ve learned any core rules or requirements for their design? Or, alternatively, have your ideas about designing co-ops shifted over those several releases?

ML: Yes, I’ve become more conscious about elements that can make cooperative games better. When I designed Pandemic, I was doing this all instinctively. Now, I actively work different play patterns and mechanism into my designs upfront. For example, I try to create alternating upbeats and downbeats in my cooperative games, finding ways to introduce intervals of hope and fear in the players in order to amp up their emotional involvement in the game. Cooperative games need this since they don’t have a human opponent to generate this kind of tension. I also work to ensure that each player has a sense of autonomy so they feel that they are in control and that their individual actions have merit apart from the group as a whole.

All the above said, I want to make sure my design process doesn’t become to formulaic; I’d like each of my designs to stand on its own and contribute something unique.

Thunderbirds is available on Kickstarter until March 29, including lots of expansions and other cool materials.

Eric B. Vogel is the designer of multiple games, including two deckbuilding designs, Zeppelin Attack! (2014) and Don’t Turn Your Back (2015), that he’s discussed in previous interviews. This time around, he’s created his first cooperative game, based on the popular Dresden Files series of novel — a game that’s now available on Kickstarter.

I talked with Eric about the mechanics of designing a cooperative game in an email interview conducted over the course of April 2016.

Shannon Appelcline: Thanks for agreeing to talk about your new game design, Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game — or DFCO to use the abbreviation favored by your publisher, Evil Hat. It’s your first cooperative game. What made you decide to go with a cooperative design?

Eric B. Vogel: It was the publisher, Evil Hat Productions, who made the stipulation that they wanted it to be a cooperative game. That was not initially something I was happy about. I had done some development work on a cooperative game previously, but I had never designed one up to that point. So I started the project without any clear ideas for cooperative design. It took a few months of blind fumbling before I finally came up  with the core mechanic of DFCO.

SA: How did their decision to create a cooperative game make you approach the design differently?

EV: More initial flailing around for sure, but that was really because I needed to immerse myself more in cooperative design principles. Your book was quite helpful in that regard.

Once the basic mechanic of the eventual game was in place, the big difference was how much more work it was to balance than a competitive design is. With a competitive game, you get a useful amount of information from just one playtest. You see which player won, how, and by how much.  In a cooperative game you are trying to establish a win ratio, so you really need four playtests just to get one data point about how balanced the current iteration of the game is. Then you multiply that by all the possible variants of the game you can get from all the different scenarios and player decks, and you have an absurd amount of playtesting that needs to be done.  That took up the lions share of the about 1.25 years I worked on this game.

Matt Leacock once told me that he thought cooperative games were easier to design than competitive games, because they are easier to playtest by yourself.  I find that the opposite is true. If I am doing early playtests of a competitive design by myself, it is fairly easy for me to imagine what each “real player” would do because they should be acting in a straightforwardly self-interested manner.  In a cooperative design, it is hard for me to simulate they dynamics of a group of players.  Individual style of play matters much more to outcome, ironically.  At least that’s what  I find to be the case.

SA: Thanks for the kind words on the book by myself and Christopher Allen. Hopefully we’ll see it published sometime soon! As you know, it breaks cooperative design into two parts: the challenge systems that try to defeat the players, and the cooperative systems that players use to try and work together.

What’s the core of the challenge design in DFCO?

EV: Yes, I should add that I was lucky enough to get to read at your manuscript in a draft state.  DFCO has less of an active oppositional system, and more of a get-the-task-done-before-the-resources-run-out system, to put in the terms of your and Chris’s book. The players have to solve sufficient cases and defeat sufficient foes before they use up all the cards in their hand.  Fred Hicks said early on that he wanted some kind of pressure-element to be an aspect of the game, as a reflection of how most of the Dresden novels unfold: Harry is usually working against some sort of deadline.

Like most true cooperatives DFCO has logistics at its core.  The controllable aspects of victory have to do with mapping the optimal logistical path, and doing effective risk management.  Even with optimal logistics, bad die rolls and card draws still could bring you down.  Just like competitive games, cooperative games can fail by being either too random or too non-random.  Hopefully I got the balance right; early feedback suggests that I did.

SA: I find the randomness of DFCO’s challenge system particularly intriguing for the fact that the resolution often seems to come down to dice rolls at the end — though ones that succeed or fail largely based on how well you managed the logistics over the course the game. Why did you decide to end the game in this way?

EV:  In any game I design, I prefer it if all players feel like they have at least a hope of winning until the very end of the game. That’s not possible in every game, but it’s always the ideal I’m striving for. I thought that was especially important  in a cooperative game.

I’ve played a couple of cooperative games (don’t want to name names here), where there was a long period of the game in which it either felt hopeless to the players,  or like winning was a foregone conclusion. I really didn’t like the feel of that, especially in a longer game. In a competitive game if you’re out of it, you can at least affect the other players,  or just watch them slug it out. But in a cooperative game, a long dénouement just feels pointless. To have the game come down to an exciting dice roll most of the time, but one which varies between you having good odds of winning or a Hail Mary, was my solution to that problem. It was  also important that players could have efficacy over that final die roll.   Of course it is possible to win before the showdown rolls, but it doesn’t happen very often.

Also going all the way back to my first board game, Cambria, I saw that it was often better to end the game before all the elements of it were completed. It’s like ending a movie at the height of the  action. I didn’t want the players to have to get all the cards to win.

SA: Going back to my two core elements for co-op games, what was the core of the cooperative design in DFCO — the elements that allow players to work together as a team?

EV:  Probably the biggest thing is the need to alternate between making action points for the team, and spending the team’s action points to do things. That combined with the distinctive abilities in different players decks, and their limited information about what each can do. All those things together create kind of an interesting dynamic in the way people interact in the game.

So as a group  we look at the board, we identify the preliminary problems we have to tackle. Then people talk about whether they have the ability to tackle the problem, we try to figure out if one player can do it more efficiently. So maybe I need to generate action points on my turn so you can enact your part of the plan, that creates almost a sense of indebtedness, that makes you ready to make sacrifices to set me up to take an action later.

So it’s working together not just to take actions, but also formulating a strategy. I think that was what was really the important thing for me to try to get right in this game. It wasn’t so much a specific mechanic, or even the feel of the mechanics. I wanted the game to pull  for a more  collective decision-making process about what to do, a discussion where everybody was weighing in and not just following a leader. I didn’t want to force that with a lot of heavy-handed rules, I wanted it to tend to happen organically.

The alpha gamer dynamic  is what led me to initially not like cooperatives very much. You can make a game that gets around that problem by barring almost all communication, Like Hanabi.The problem with that is that the social interaction is a big part of what people like about cooperative games. So I guess I used my chops as a psychologist more in this design process,  at least to let me recognize when the game’s dynamic had achieved the end result I wanted. I am not sure I can tell you for certain what it is about the game that creates that dynamic. I just knew the dynamic I wanted to achieve,  or at least I figured that out somewhere along the way in the design process.

Sorry if that is an obscure answer.  I remember in film school, there were some films like Psycho, that you could just break down shot by shot and see exactly how technique produced a particular emotional impact, but there were other films, like Aguirre, The Wrath of God, where the images have this profound impact on you but it’s hard to analyze what the filmmaker is doing to produce the effect exactly. It’s a bit like that. The game elicits the kind of mood and behavior from people that I wanted it to, but I don’t know exactly how to break down how it achieves that affect from a technical standpoint.

SA: Not too obscure at all. It’s intriguing to hear about the mix of game design and psychology.

So is there anything else that you feel like you learned about cooperative games over the course of the design?

EV: I learned I liked them better than I thought I did.  That isn’t purely narcissistic, in the manner of “I like this game because I won.”  I just got to play a lot more cooperative games, so I found the ones I liked. I already knew I liked Hanabi. The Game is probably the only co-op I actively bring to game night and push. I’d like to come up with a slightly more complex game which has the same feel as The Game. The Captain is Dead is also one I really like, because of the way it integrates it’s theme. I enjoy Pandemic Legacy and the Pathfinder cardgame too, with the right crowd.  The Pathfinder card game was a minor influence on DFCO, not that anyone would be able to tell by looking at them both.  Sentinels of the Multiverse is not a game I have played a lot, but it is a good one, and it is Fred Hicks’ and Rob Donahue’s favorite board game of all time.  They  play it on their iPads constantly.  So it influenced DFCO by influencing their input on DFCO. That is how there came to be a SotM character deck as a KS bonus item in the DFCO campaign.

I also came to appreciate the vibe of cooperative games more.  To me they are almost a fundamentally different class of activity from competitive games, but they are another activity I enjoy.

I am not sure if I am ever going to design another cooperative game or not.  I try very hard not to repeat myself, so I would have to come up with a design that is fairly distinctive from DFCO.  I tried recently to design a Persian Wars cooperative game that had an active challenge system, really a robot that moves the Persian forces, but I found it to be a very complicated mechanic to enact in practice.  I may go back to that design someday. If DFCO is as successful as it looks like it is going to be, co-ops may be the only thing publishers want to see from me.

SA: I look forward to seeing whatever your upcoming designs are. Thanks very much for talking about your newest game and revealing some of the mysteries of cooperative design!

The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game has been very successful on Kickstarter, ensuring the publication of the game and supplements, and also offering a few exclusive benefits for backers. If you’re a Dresden fan, an Evil Hat fan, an Eric B. Vogel fan, or a co-op game fan, take a look!

Artwork courtesy of Evil Hat, used with their permission.

Dominion (2008) kicked off a whole new genre of play: the deckbuilding games. But it’s also created a few spin-offs of its own, with Orléans (2014, 2015) being one of the more far-flung examples.

Styles of Building Play

Though Dominion is all about deckbuilding, a few variants of that core gameplay have appeared.

Deckbuilding. Dominion (2008) debuted the core idea of deckbuilding play. Players start with a deck of mediocre cards that allow them to undertake actions. Over the course of the game players add new, better cards to their deck and remove old, worse ones. Each turn, they’ll randomly draw some of those cards; hopefully they’ll be a coherent set that allows them to take great actions.

Dicebuilding. Quarriors (2011) was the first dicebuilding game. Here players instead start with a handful of dice and buy new ones to improve their dice pool over time. The randomness of the play is moved: where in a deckbuilding game, players draw random cards, in a dice building game, players instead roll random results. This somewhat constrains the randomness: where deckbuilding games tend to be binary (you get a result or not), dice building games tend to have more nuance (you get a result, but its level of effect varies). Dice building games are also theoretically simpler than deckbuilders, as you can’t fit complex effects on a dice face — but Quarriors fought against this limitation by linking dice to reference cards, which was a bit exhausting.

Of course Quarriers also involved a bag: you draw six dice from up to twelve in the bag each turn. But, it’s better to keep that aside for the moment, as the use of a bag defines the newest sort of *builder game …

Bagbuilding. Bagbuilder games of a sort date back to at least Puzzle Strike (2010) and Quarriors (2011), but Orléans (2014, 2015) is the one that’s popularized and largely defined the subgenre. And, there’s a good reason for that: Puzzle Strike was pretty much cards in a bag, complete with complex text, while Quarriors was dice in a bag, complete with complex references. Orléans instead creates a different sort of game.

In the Orléans-style bagbuilder you’re essentially drawing resources out of a bag. They’re much simpler, one-note components — definitely not cards or dice with many complex powers.  In the case of Orléans they’re colored characters, but they could just as easily be square resource cubes.

Though this sounds more simplistic than the typical deckbuilders, you can create a pretty standard eurogame by building on this type of bagbuilder: imagine a Catan bagbuilder where you draw wood, brick, sheep, ore, and brick each turn, which you can then use to build roads, settlements, and cities. The big difference between the traditional Catan game and this sort of bagbuilder is that your resources are perpetual: they constantly recur in the ratios that they appear in your bag. Now imagine building any number of cube pushers using a bagbuilder as its foundation; it’s an interesting premise that supports a lot of possible designs.

Orléans: The Game

Orleans uses the resources of its bag building in a rather unique way. They’re collected together into formula, just like in Catan, but those formula are used to activate actions! Many of those actions are in turn used to generate additional characters (resources) for the bag, but they also offer various improvements — such as granting buildings, money, goods, or development points. A few other actions purely generate benefits, including the ability to move about a board of the French landscape and to build guild halls there.

The result is a dense and complex game. It’s a nice example of how to take the relatively simple results possible from bagbuilding and to use them as an engine that feeds the rest of a game’s design. Ultimately, it suggests that bag building works at the level of a cube tower or a color die. It’s a way to introduce random inputs into a game, but it’s one that has unique advantages because of the long-term ability to control that randomness, as we’ve seen in games dating back to Dominion itself.

Orléans: The Co-op

The first expansion for Orléans, Invasion (2015, 2016), contains a bunch of different ways to play the core game. However the highlight of the package is surely its co-op variant, the eponymous Invasion.

Any co-op game needs a hefty dose of randomness. It’s what keeps players on their toes and ensures that their cooperation is imperfect — because they don’t know the best answers and because their strategies might change over time. Most cooperative games achieve this uncertainty through a challenge system that spits out ever-worsening problems that players must deal with, lest they lose the game. Arkham Horror (1987, 2005) continually generates gates and monsters while Pandemic (2008) constantly spawns diseases.

Fewer games lay out known end-game problems that players must solve. Salvation Road (2016) offers one example: players must store up certain resources for the final journey; however, they’re still being troubled by constantly spawned problems along the way. Even fewer games depend on end-game problems without also troubling players along the way. The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game (2017), or DFCO, is one: it lays out a tableau of problems to deal with by game’s end, then generates its uncertainty through the imperfect interactions of the players themselves.

Invasion also falls into the last category. At the start of the game it lays out certain resources that players must gather and certain actions that they must take before the end of the game. It very cleverly aligns these cooperative goals with the goals that players have already worked toward, more organically, in competitive games. So players are still building guild halls, collecting goods, and such, but now with specific cooperative goals in mind.

So how does Invasion keep things uncertain and cooperation imperfect? Part of that comes from those same imperfect player interactions that you find in DFCO — or in any other cooperative game where players have strong control over their own resources and actions. But part of it comes from the uncertainty of bagbuilding itself. It turns out that the unknown of drawing blindly from a bag is exactly the sort of uncertainty that makes a cooperative game work really well too.

That’s probably why cooperative games have been playing with deckbuilding mechanics for a while, with Runewars (2010), Legendary (2012), and Pathfinder ACG (2013) being a few of the better known examples. However, the mixed reviews of the cooperative play for Legendary and Runewars shows that converting a competitive design to cooperative play can also be pretty tough. By thoroughly embracing all of its competitive scoring elements* and by taking advantage of the bagbuilding to sow uncertainty, Invasion gets it right.

* Actually, some of the players will find some of Orléans’ typical scoring elements mostly useless, depending on their own needs. And wool and cloth can end up being almost totally useless in a game. But for the most part, players do in Invasion what they did in Orléans, just with more precise, carefully laid out goals.

The Good & The Bad

The Good: Orléans makes surprisingly minor use of its bagbuilding. The ability to add resources to the bag (through purchases) and to remove resources from the bag (through sending characters off to stultifying meetings) is all there, but it’s downplayed. Players could easily stumble through the game with a badly designed bag and they might not realize how much it’s holding them back. They’ll just be forced to hold characters from one turn to another and to make moves that aren’t what they really want to do. This is a nice change from a classic deckbuilder where a bad draw can result in a totally wasted turn. Meanwhile, the bagbuilding is just one cog in Orléans‘ machinery. Put both of these elements together and you end up with bagbuilding mechanics that are seamlessly integrated into the overall game, creating a cohesiveness that you don’t always find in classic deckbuilders that try to go beyond their deckbuilding core.

The Bad: Because of the simplicity of its bagbuilding and its resources, the variability of Orléans is a little low. This is exacerbated by the fact that the multiple paths to victory in the game are a bit of an illusion: you often need to push forward on all of the paths in order to do well. Fortunately, the Invasion supplement offers solutions to these issues. Not only are there a lot more ways to play, but the core co-op game actually makes it so that a player really can independently concentrate on one area of advancement, as he works on just a portion of what the team needs.

Conclusion

There were a few bagbuilding games before Orléans, but Orléans shows how to do it right, with the draw of simple resources that fit into more complex machinery, and with the ability (but not the necessity) to improve the draws from that bag. The result feels just as natural as drawing a card or rolling a dice, but it allows control and development over time, creating a whole different sort of gameplay.

I’ve co-authored a pretty extensive book on the design of cooperative games. (It’s currently seeking a publisher.) As a result, I’m usually quick to suggest a new co-op game hit the table … and a lot of them did this Spring. Sadly, I thought most of them were bad!

in any case, this is my listing of new-to-me games played this Spring. As usual, they’re evaluated by my personal likes, not their intrinsic quality. 

The Very Good

Kingdomino (2016). This Bruno Cathala game is a short and simple filler. You essentially draft domino-tiles, with your draft order based on the quality of your last tile: the better the tile you pick, the later you’ll go in the next draft!

The object is to build your tiles (which depict terrains and victory point multipliers for those terrains) into huge groups to score maximal points.

There’s not a lot of complexity here: you take a tile, your place a tile. Nonetheless, the game is a lot of fun and places very nicely fast. This may be because I always like creative games of this sort. However, there’s also just enough choice to keep the game interesting. It’s a fine little filler. (In fact, it almost made my great listing.)

Master of Orion: The Board Game (2016). This is a Card Game really, not a Board Game. And to be honest, it’s not very original. You use cards to generate resources, then you use those resources to build cards. There’s a little more going on than that, as you can attack other players, you can contract an ambassador, and you can trade your resources. But the heart of the gameplay is pretty staid resource and card management.

So, why does Master of Orion: The Card Game rate near the top of Very Good? It’s got great, colorful theming. The play is very tight with you never having enough of any resource you want. It offers the opportunity to build engines and walk down different paths of development. It plays quickly. And that’s all packed into a short, simple game.

My first game unfortunately had an anticlimactic end when one of the alternate endgame conditions suddenly got triggered. I’m hopeful that’s not a common problem, but if players were watching for it more, it would be less problematic.

The Captain is Dead (2017) — Co-op #1. This is a new AEG version of a game that was previously self-published through The Game Crafter by one of the co-founders of The Game Crafter. It’s an action-point-based science-fiction co-op game that feels like a lot of others in the genre. Bad things happen to your ship, and you try to fix them using limited resources, while at the same time working to fix your Jump Drive, which will let you win the game. Despite that sameness, it’s my one good co-op from the quarter.

Where the game really excels is in its colors and theming. The actions are all beautifully themed and there are almost twenty different roles, each of which has powers that feel appropriate. As a light but evocative co-op, this is pretty terrific … but don’t expect it to add a lot to the field. (Oh, and the co-op works fine, with lots of tactical cooperation balanced by lots of personal agency.)

Near & Far (2017). This adventure game has a nice bipartite play structure: you either lounge about town collecting a variety of resources or else you go out adventuring across the wastes. The core mechanics are very tight, which is of course what you want. You never have enough coins or gems or food or hearts or movement, and so you’re always struggling to figure out how to get everything simultaneously. Yay.

However, the real strength of the game is an its evocative theming and setting, something that the designer has apparently developed across several games. You get fun characters and objects, but the best theming is in the “quests”, which you read aloud from a book, then determine which skill roles to make. The write-ups are short and quite often funny. They’re really quite delightful.

I also loved the “map”, which may be the coolest game board concept I’ve ever seen. The maps all come in a book, and you just flip open the book to the map you want to play, and away you go. Because they are all in a book, there are a lot of maps.

There’s apparently also a “campaign” version of the game, which allows you to give characters keyword attributes and presumably advance through all the maps. I suspect that would be a lot of fun for long-term play.

Ascension: Gift of the Elements (2017). Yep, yet another Ascension set. In many ways, it’s much less ambitious than recent sets, like Dreamscape (2015), which introduced a whole new deck of cards, and War of Shadows (2016), which gave cards dark and night values. The mechanical innovation of Gift of the Elements is quite simplistic in comparison: there’s more ability to trash cards, which goes hand-in-hand with the fact that you can dump worthless monsters into peoples’ decks.

But with that said, Gift of the Elements feels like a nice back-to-the-basics version of Ascension. The cards feel fairly classic, but with enough variety to be interesting. It even revisits two of Ascension’s more innovation expansions: events and transformations. And they work together: the events can be transformed, which is pretty cool.

So, though not earth-shattering, this is a very solid new set.

The Good

Pergamon (2011). An older-but-goodie game of set collection that has several interesting mechanisms. The goal is to collect sets of artifacts, but they’re not standard sets: they’re made up of tiles, each of which shows half of two artifacts. You try to put together a string of matching artifacts to put on a show, but it’s made more difficult by the differing quality of artifacts, the upcoming bonuses, and of course the desires of the other players.

The rest of the game is simple economics: you have to earn money to buy the tiles. This is done by an interesting mechanic where a slightly unknown amount of money is laid out each round, and then each player chooses a position on a track that trades off selection order, selection variety, and money. There’s a bit of press-your-luck on both sides as you’re betting on what other players might take on one side and how much money there might really be on the other.

Overall, Pergamon is strong in large part for how innovative it feels. This isn’t just a retread of old euro-mechanics, but instead a set-collection and economics game that is pretty different from what’s in your collection. On the other hand, it also shows its age: this is a lot more abstract than most modern euros.

Troyes (2010). Another game that I’m way behind playing. This is a dice-based resource-management game. You roll dice, and then you use them to build stuff, to take control of various spaces, and to take actions. The dice-rolling and usage is reminiscent of The Castles of Burgundy (2011), actually out a year later: you get to take some actions specifically on the dice you roll, though other actions require you to total good sums.

The thing that impresses me the most about Troyes is its excellent dice control: you get to manage your luck by paying the coin resource to buy dice from other players or the influence resource to change your own die rolls. You can further control dice rolls with certain actions.

The rest of the game is a little more mundane (and a little too mathematical), but this is still a nice game that will probably stay in my collection as a complement to Tournay (2011).

Orléans: Invasion! (2015) — Prosperity Variant. The core play of Orleans: Invasion! is the eponymous co-op variant, and I think it’s well-worth buying this expansion for Orléans (2014) for that alone. But the game also has two other major variants and some solo play. Prosperity is the other multiplayer variant; it slightly changes the play of the original competitive game.

And it’s basically OK. It offers a major new action, the Carpenter, which also provides a major new way to earn points. I think that the original Orléans suffers a little bit from players needing to do a bit of everything. So, it was nice to have a new path-to-victory, which will let players spread out a bit more. But, I could do with it or without it. I’d be more likely to play with it with a regular group and less likely with new players.

Saga of the Northmen (2016). A majority-control game in a tiny little box. The gameplay is pretty simple: you play cards, you place cubes in the associated regions, and you draw cards. The twist is that there are actually two levels of majority control. If you win a Norsemen region, then you can send those cubes on to neutral regions and fight for the plunder there. And it’s all all-or-nothing, which really feels like the Northman way! Things are many even more tense by trade route cards which encourage you to take over certain Norsemen regions and neutral regions simultaneously. All-in-all, there were a lot of levels of play in what I thought was going to be a short, simplistic game. Still, it’s sort of abstract and old-school too.

Portal of Heroes (2015, 2017). This card game is an AMIGO release, just rereleased in the United States by Mayfair. It’s a pretty simple set-collection game. You acquire fairy tale and fantasy heroes, then you collect numbered cards needed to “activate” them. Most of the characters give you victory points when activated, and many give you special powers as well, adding a bit of an engine-building aspect to the game.

Overall, this is a simple and simplistic game, but the set collection is tense and the special powers are funny. It’s a nice filler, and probably one that works better with fewer players (which reduces the chaos of gameplay).

Phalanxx (2016).  Bernd Eisenstein has a gift for designing games that are innovative and nonintuitive in the best possible ways. That’s produced some very interesting games, some weirdly uncomfortable games, and some that just don’t work. Phalanxx falls somewhere in between, but trending toward good not bad.

It’s a game that’s hard to explain. You have cards, which you can play by meeting a variety of conditions. The requirement system is unique and my favorite part of the game. You also have dice, and they’re used for a variety of purposes. They can benefit you by giving you starting money and meeting card requirements, but they can also penalize you by making it harder to take actions on your turn. On your turn, you take one of four actions. If you rolled too low, then you engage in dice manipulation, while if you roll higher you get to add troops to the board and play cards.

As a whole, Phalanxx feels like a challenging (and interesting!) tactical puzzle. You’re constantly working to manipulate your dice and resources so that you can play cards. That works very well. But the game also has several issues. The board combat in particular is troublesome: if the leaders pounce on the losers, the poor get poorer, while if they instead fight their competitive opponents then they set up a weird back and forth where no one wins.

I think there are a few different great ideas in this game, but I’d need to play it more to be convinced they really gelled.

The OK

The Colonists (2016). This is a bulky and complex resource-management game. It doesn’t really do a lot new for the resource-management sphere: you move a pawn around to select actions, generally gathering resources and using them build buildings, create improvements, and engage in diplomacy. There’s some engine development and some clever tactics.

Despite that basic (but large and complex) resource-management structure, The Colonists does stand out in another way: scope. The game can be played over up to four eras, with new technologies and more complex rules appearing as the game goes on. This is quite exciting: you can really develop both your little town and the overall world over the course of an extended period of play. I love the creativity and the evolutionary growth.

The catch is that “extended period of play”. The game box says 30-240 minutes. I think it’s more like 1-8 hours, with one hour being a two-player game spanning one era and eight hours being a four-player game spanning four eras. If I could sit this in a corner and play out an era with my friends every few nights, this would be a pretty amazing game. But I can’t see playing it for the full length in one sitting, and I think the one-era play is somewhat less satisfying. So, it’s probably got a somewhat limited audience, but if you’re that audience, it’ll be the best game ever.

Broom Service: The Card Game (2016). As ridiculous as it sounds, this is the third variant of the Witch’s Brew (2008) system: a card game variant of the board game variant of the original card game. It uses the same classic system of playing cards bravely or cowardly, but this time around it’s a set-collection game. You’re trying to build large sets of specific colors and/or sets that match special goal cards. There’s nothing wrong with this game, but it’s simplistic without much new or interesting in it either.

Personally, I rate the three Witch’s Brews games in order by their box size: this new card game is the least, while the board game Broom Service (2015) is the best.

Cosmic Kaboom (2016). This is a pretty basic flicking game. You flick discs around to hit planets and earn cubes. When you have enough you earn a bit cardboard ka-boom that you flip to destroy planets. After you’ve destroyed one or more planets, you’re back to earning cubes again. The player who destroys the best planets, while not having his own destroyed, wins.

There’s not a lot of depth here, but as with any good flicking game, it’s a lot of fun. You can have bad flicks, good flicks, or even run the table. And this sort of excitement is usually what makes a flicking game worth playing.

The Meh

Masmorra: Dungeons of Arcadia (2017) — Alliance Rules, Co-op #2. This is a very well-produced adventure game that is otherwise quite simplistic. It comes in competitive or co-op variants, although the co-op seems mainly like an afterthought. Which is a pity, because that’s what I played.

Each character has very nicely detailed characters with fun special powers and there’s also a good dice-rolling system which determines if you can move, attack, defend, or magic. (It’s what I call an icon-based action-point system.) You explore a dungeon which is revealed over the course of the game. There’s a lot of evocative stuff here. Yet somehow it manages to fall pretty flat.

I think that’s because you get to the actual gameplay and it’s quite simplistic. You explore largely identical rooms. Monsters appear. You fight them. You get experience and level up. Then next turn you do more of the same. The leveling up and expansion of your character is cool because it introduce new die-rolling opportunities, but the rest of the game feels like a grind. It’s way too long with way too little happening. I suspect the competitive rules will be somewhat more fun than the cooperative rules, but the cooperative rules just didn’t excite.

Attack on Titan (2017) — Co-op #3. The first of two co-op games that my groups refused to finish because it just dragged on and on. This one is a pretty simple tactical combat game that has pretty cool tactics as you leap up through the air to reach the ever-greater heights needed to kill the giant you’re fighting. It’s all based on rolling dice and getting various icons which enable different actions. (Yep, that’s another icon-based action-point system.) It’s got some pretty good cooperative play too, as you need to coordinate where characters are, what dice results everyone receives, and what the group “tactic” is (which allows for a super-special result if people are positioned just right).

The problem is, that at least for the Destructive Titan we were fighting against, you can tread water turn after turn after turn. The players damage the titan; he heals it all. The players get into perfect position to kill the titan; he knocks them all down. You can play really defensively, which just makes the treading water worse. This type of never-ending play is a particularly bad problem for a co-op, because it’s not pushing the players toward loss, but they’re not moving toward victory either.  Different titans have different abilities, and it appears that some of the others are more likely to move the game along, but this guy was borderline broken, at least for the style of play of the folks at the table.

We gave up the game about an hour in. It’s likely the titan would have eventually triumphed, maybe on the next turn, maybe in 30-60 minutes more.

One other co-op problem: the titan (evil overlord) player has limited choices, and so probably won’t have as much fun as everyone else.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Board Game (2016) — Co-op #4. The second Buffy game with this same name. The difference is that 16 years later, cooperative games have become very popular, so this one is a co-op. Sadly, it’s not a good one.

On the plus side, Buffy nicely abstracts down its system, providing for some pretty simple play. You slay vamps and demons to protect “townies”, you collect a couple of cards to kill a monster of the week. You lather, you rinse, you repeat.

The fatal flaw of the game, and it really is pretty fatal, isn’t even its cooperation: it’s the “luck” system. As I’ve said before, there’s nothing long with luck if it’s controlled. But, it’s not controlled here. Whenever you fight a monster of the week or a big bad, you have a 2-in-3 chance of winning, determined by the totally random draw of a card. There’s no way to increase your odds, no way to reroll, no way to spend extra resources. It’s just a flip of a (three-sided) coin. You might as well be playing Candyland for the amount of control the players have in these crucial confrontations.

Yes, my impression of this game is affected by our very bad luck. But we were starting to get disgruntled pretty early on, after the third time we failed to kill the monster of the week. And the odds of that are just 1/3*1/3*1/3 or 1/27, which is about 4%. Having every 25th game be that initially frustrating is a bad design (and we only got more frustrated over time). We finally gave up on this 40-60 minute game after more than two hours of play had gotten us to the point where we’d be halfway done with a good card draw. Then we gave up. (Afterward, we learned that the card draw would have failed, meaning that we really did still have two-thirds of he game to go, though we probably would have lost before the six or seven hour mark that we were trending toward.)

There’s also a lack of tension and a lack of overwhelming decay; as in Attack on Titan, this can keep you treading water. There was also a simplicity of play that often left us feeling that we had no particularly good actions. Oh, and the rule book was not good.

It is great to see so many co-op games coming out, but bad to see so many poor designs.

Koans I-III can be found in The Tao of Board Gaming I (December 2009). Koans IV-VI can be found in The Tao of Board Gaming II (April 2010). Koans VII-IX can be found in The Tao of Board Gaming III (October 2012). Koans X-XII can be found in The Tao of Board Gaming IV (May 2014). Koans XIII-XV can be found in The Tao of Board Gaming V (December 2014). Koans XVI-XVIII can be found in The Tao of Board Gaming VI (April 2016).

XIX. The Buddha Nature of Cooperative Games

One day a seeker came to speak with a lama about the Buddha nature of cooperative games.

The seeker said to the lama, “You know, I really don’t think I like these new co-op games that everyone is loving nowadays.” The lama asked why, and the seeker replied, “I’m not sure they’re really fun. We’re playing, but like in Pandemic we’re always afraid that the next card we draw is gonna kill us. It’s like we’re all totally scared instead of kicking back.”

“That is true,” said the lama. “Reiner Knizia, the Boddhistattva of reincarnated cooperative design, said that co-op players quickly realize they are doomed. It reminds us that suffering is a part of life.”

“OK,” said the seeker, “but it’s lots more than that. We do stuff in these co-ops and it’s just ripped away from us. Like in Flash Point we put out the flames, then they come roarin’ back like a mack truck.”

“That is true,” said the lama. “Matt Leacock, the Boddhistattva of Eurogame cooperative design, said that he actively tries to include upbeats and downbeats in his games. This reminds us that the suffering of life comes from us trying to cling to the impermanent things that we enjoy.”

“Whatever,” said the seeker. “So we come to the end of the game, and most of the time we lose. How fun is that!?”

“That is true,” said the lama. “Richard Launius, the Boddhistattva of American cooperative design, says that he tries to make the experience of the game more important than winning or losing. This reminds us that we conquer the suffering of life by accepting loss.”

The seeker said, “So you’re telling me that co-op games are great because they have a Buddha nature? Because they incorporate suffering, because the embody impermanence, and because they embrace loss?” When the lama nodded, the seeker said, “So what good are they? We could get all of that out of our crappy lives.”

The lama smiled and for a moment adapted the seeker’s vernacular and aphorisms. He said, “It’s like this, man: practice makes perfect.”

XX. Moments of Time

A gamer had fallen in with a group of euromonks, who enjoyed to play games created by German and French designers, and sometimes even American designers who pretended to be German. He had gamed with them for several years and enjoyed many rich games such as Terra Mystica, Caverna, Orléans, Viticulture, and Terraforming Mars.

But then the monks fell into the thrall of microgames, such as Love Letter, Coup, and Battlecruisers. The gamer enjoyed these new games at first, but after three weeks solid of microgame play, he began to yearn for furnished caverns, for wine presses, and for purposefully created greenhouse effects. So when Love Letter came out for the fourth week running, he wailed, “Can not we play one of our more complex favorites?”

One of the euromonks asked, “Do you find any singular turn of Love Letter less tense than in your favorites, such as Orléans?”

“No.” the gamer said. “I still agonize over who to select when I play my Baron.”

The euromonk continued, “Do you find any moment less exciting?”

“No.” the gamer said. “In fact my turns come much more quickly, because the game plays so quickly.”

“And,” the euromonk concluded, “Do you find any moment less joyful?”

“No.” the gamer said. “In fact I may have more joyful moments because I’m given the opportunity to win every five or ten minutes.”

The euromonk noted sagely and said, “If Love Letter delivers just as many minutes of tension and excitement and joy, then clearly it is just as good of a game.”

“I guess.” said the gamer, as he picked up the deck of sixteen cards, shuffled them, and dealt one to each player for the new round of play. “I guess I just get tired of all the setup.”

XXI. The Student of Dao’s Final Test

After ten long years of study, a student of Dao decided he was ready to graduate from the School of Dao Gaming. To do so, he was required to take a final test, which was to play a full campaign of Pandemic Legacy.

He was soon joined by three other would-be graduates of Dao Gaming, and they began to play.

The first crisis occurred when the student was forced to take a pen and write a name upon his character card. He dreamed momentarily of a pencil, or at least an erasable pen, but finally he marked down that name with indelible ink.

Afterward, the first game began, and some cities succumbed to plague while others enjoyed new growth. At the end of the game, this required the permanent affixation of new population numbers on the board. The student knew that he would be changing the game forever, and that it would never be as it once had been. But he remembered his lessons about the Buddha nature of life: that nothing is permanent, and that change is the only constant. So, he steeled himself once more, and did what was required.

As the second game began, the student felt like he was reaching enlightenment, seeing how the spirit of the game lay not in the box, but in the play.

But then, a new crisis loomed, when the student was instructed to destroy a card. He took it firmly in his hands as his fellow students looked on, but he found himself unable to tear it in two, unwilling to make that most irrevocable change.

So, he pointed across the room, and said, “Look, The Buddha!”

Then, when all the other students looked away, he slipped the card under the divider in the box. He felt that was surely sufficient, for the hidden card would never be used in the game again.

Thereafter, he returned to the School of Dao Gaming to begin his eleventh year of study.

For the last few years, I’ve been working on a book about the design of cooperative tabletop games with my co-author, Christopher Allen. We’ve recently finalized a contract with a publisher, and we hope to be offering the book to the public before the end of the year. That means that it’s our last chance to consider new co-ops before we lock the text down on July 1. So, this quarter, I played a lot of co-op games, and they’re all discussed here. (This isn’t the first time I’ve had a co-op heavy quarter, and it’s all been because of this book.)

As usual these ratings are my own feelings about the game, as a medium-weight gamer; they don’t necessarily represent the overall quality of the game. In fact this time, I’m well aware that I low-rated a few different games that are well-loved, and might be good designs for the right audience. And, as usual, these games are new to me, though a few are slightly older.

The Great

Robinson Crusoe (2012). Co-op #1. This is already a classic co-op — and a well-received one. After a play, I can see why. The heart of the game is serious resource-management play. If I wrote an elevator pitch for this game, it’d be, “what if Agricola were a co-op?” So you have to feed everyone, and that’s tough enough because it requires dangerous hunting and slightly dangerous gathering. But you’re simultaneously choosing a lot of other actions, such as exploring your island, building inventions, improving your shelter, and doing whatever’s required to finish the game successfully.

Robinson Crusoe is one of those games where you simultaneously feel like you need to do everything, and where you don’t ever have enough actions to do so — which is a tension that’s at the heart of many very successful designs. This feeds very well into the co-op system, creating a nail-biting game where things seem to be getting constantly worse, as your team becomes increasingly wounded and demoralized, but where you’re simultaneously advancing toward victory.

The game’s other strength is its great theming. Everything in the game feels very thematic, but to make it even better there are a half-dozen scenarios, each with a different setting. You can play anything from Swiss Family Robinson to a King Kong filming — and they all feel very theme-appropriate.

(The only deficits of the game are that it’s dense and long, so YMMV depending on what you think of that.)

The Very Good

The Quest for El Dorado (2017). This is Reiner Knizia’s newest racing game. He mostly designs light games nowadays, and this fits into that category, but it’s got enough variability and exciting play that it’s still quite enjoyable to play (and replay).

El Dorado is also a deckbuilding game: you’re buying cards that help you to move and to manage your deck. They can of course be used to purchase new cards as well. That goes hand in hand with a hexagon racing map where you’ve moving across lots of different terrain. If you build the right deck, you can take the shortest routes, but if you don’t, you’ll be taking the long route to El Dorado.

There isn’t a lot of variability in the deckbuilding, but that’s hopefully made up for by the variability in the map building. You construct a race course of five or six large hexes from about sixteen different possibilities. Different maps can have different challenges and encourage the building of different decks.

Overall, this is an excellent game if you’re OK with lighter fare — right up there with my other favorite Knizia race, Marco Polo Expedition (2004).

Sub Terra (2017). Co-op #2. This co-op is all about exploring a cavern, avoiding monsters, and making your way to the exit. Its most innovative element is probably its focus on cooperative tile-laying, and it works because you can get good tiles or bad tiles — so you’re always hoping for the best and then figuring out what you do with the worst. The draw of event cards each turn then causes the bad tiles to do horrible things, which is a great integration of the co-op and tile-laying systems.

Another fun element of this co-op is that it highly encourages you to split up, so that you can play through enough tiles, while simultaneously punishing you for doing so, if you get too far apart and can’t get everyone to the exit. There’s another great tension, where there’s never a “right” answer.

A lot of Sub Terra is deceptively simple, allowing it to play quite quickly, but there’s also some depth as you figure out strategies that take into account the various abilities of the players and the treacherous terrain of the caves.

Most importantly, Sub Terra is both thrilling and fun.

Dark Moon (2015). Co-op #3. This traitor game started life as a fan-made print-and-play game called “BSG Express” (2011), and that pretty accurately describes the foundation of the game: it’s the core mechanics of Battlestar Galactica (2008) pared down to their essential core. “What if BSG were a lighter game?” Some dice are thrown in too.

Dark Moon is fundamentally an action and response game. You take an action to try and improve the lot of the crew, then you have to respond to a task. If you succeed at enough tasks, you’ll eventually win the game. The catch is that some of the players are working against you!

The cooperative elements of the game are excellent, because they give even more cover for traitorous actions than Battlestar Galactica. Every turn you can put bad dice into a task and every turn you can choose bad tasks. The dice also add a lot to the traitorous play, because they make it possible for good players to look bad. Overall, it’s a strong design.

Compared to Battlestar Galactica, this is a tighter, simpler game, with all that involves. In other words, it doesn’t have the depth, richness, or complexity that makes Battlestar Galactica great — but it does offer very similar gameplay in a fraction of the game time, and it’ll be much more accessible to new players.

The Oracle of Delphi (2016). This Stefan Feld is a logistical design. You’re trying to do four different things: deliver some goods to temples; deliver some other goods to statue spaces; reveal some tiles of a certain type; and get lucky enough to kill some monsters. This is all done on big hex maps, which means that you need to be constantly thinking ahead to maximize your efficiency; like most pick-up-and-deliver games, the most efficient player wins. (I actually found the game on the border of what’s fun, because there’s so much careful planning, but I say the same of popular favorite Power Grid.) Of course, you can’t entirely predetermine your actions, as they’re partially dependent on dice, because Feld loves his dice. You have to roll specific colors to take a variety of color-coded actions.

As usual, Feld doesn’t leave you beholden to your dice. Not only does he introduce a resource to help you control your dice rolls, but he also offers “god powers”, which can give you big power boosts from time to time.These elements add a lot of freshness to the game, as does the fact that the board is very modular, creating variety from game to game.

Besides concerns about over-thinkiness, there’s also big opportunities for AP and downtime in The Oracle of Delphi. But, if you can get past that all it’s a pretty strategic game with some nice color that’s not quite like Feld’s other serious dice-driven games, such as The Castles of Burgundy and Bora Bora; I’m happy to have it on the shelf next to them.

The Good

The Gaia Project (2017). So I should start off by saying that I’ve never played Terra Mystica (2012), and this is the second release in that series of games. It’s a deep, complicated resource-management game where you’re balancing money, workers, and powers that can be used to expand your stellar civilization by terraforming planets, building mines, and upgrading them. There’s a technology tree and there are a lot of one-use actions that create a variety of options and some interesting contention. Generally, these are pretty standard elements for resource-management and civilization-building games. Nonetheless, there are some innovations: the power resource is particularly interesting because it has some management puzzles where you have to move power cubes forward twice in order to activate them; but you can throw out cubes at the first level of power to get others to the second.

The greatest strength of the game is its variability. You lay out a new board from hexes then lots of tokens are randomized, changing per-round scoring, end-game scoring, end-round powers, and other bonus tiles. I recently said that “variability is the new key [to game design]”. I was talking mainly about games that select their cards from a larger set, but this shows an even more expansive methodology for varying lots of different things in a game. Both The Quest for El Dorado and The Oracle of Delphi similarly showed big picture variability, with variable cards, boards, and victory conditions.

With all of that said, I did not love The Gaia Project and probably wouldn’t love Terra Mystica either. I’ve placed it down in “good”, because, as usual, the rating represents my personal desire (or not) to play these games as a medium-level eurogamer. So why didn’t I love what’s quickly become one of the hottest games of 2017-2018? Basically, it’s very long and it’s very prone to AP. That’s due to a high level of complexity and a lot of fiddly resource maintenance. I’ve seen almost all of it before, and I just don’t feel that it needed a 2-3 hour game to play out these particular mechanics. At half the length, it would have been great for me without losing anything.

Obviously, YMMV; obviously, many folks’ mileage does vary.

Exodus Fleet (2017). I just got done saying that there really aren’t pure auction games any more, yet that’s pretty much what this is. You’re trying to build up a fleet of ships, complete with purple passengers. You do so by choosing one of five different actions, four of which result in auctions. Through them you gain money and a variety of cubed resources, which you use to win future auctions and to pay for actions. There’s also a bit of tableau management that feels a bit like Race for the Galaxy (2007) as you build ships that give you benefits when certain actions are selected.

The various auction, action, resource-management, and tableau-building aspects of Exodus Fleet give it some nice depth, while keeping the auctions front and center. Unfortunately, the auctions are also the weak part of the game. They’re simple once-around auctions that heavily favor the last few players and they get a bit repetitive over the course of the game. Still, the resource-management can be thoughtful and the tableau building can be fun.

SteamRollers (2015). This was the game that really got me thinking about elevator pitches, because it’s: “What if Age of Steam and The Castles of Burgundy had a baby, but it turned out to be a casual game?” I think the description is pretty apt: in SteamRollers you draft dice and then use them build track, improve your engine, move goods, or take special powers. Like any good dice game, it rewards you for specific rolls (much like The Castles of Burgundy, you need specific rolls to take specific actions), and like any good dice game, it allows you to control you luck (using those special powers).

The game plays pretty well as a reinvention of Age of Steam. The idea of grabbing goods before other players do and moving them along purposefully inefficient tracks based on your engine size is pretty much taken precisely from the classic Martin Wallace game. In fact, SteamRollers may be the most interactive game I’ve ever seen that has the players quietly working along on their own game boards. However, the game is fairly simple and outlasts its welcome a bit by the time the game is over.

Aventuria Adventure Card Game (2016). Co-op #4. This is another roleplaying-based deckbuilder co-op, like the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game (2013), but it’s got a very different focus. For one, it tries to more fully encompass the roleplaying experience. That means there’s narrative text to read aloud and a real storyline to each adventure — albeit an entirely railroaded one. Beyond that, its focus is on a card-based tactical combat game, and this is quite well done. You alternatively lay cards down for their special abilities and to power those special abilities. There’s a nice power curve to the combats, and a nice feeling of dread early on, which the players then get to overcome as the combat continues.

Oh, and the deckbuilding is actually pretty minimal: just a card here and there at the end of combats. You’d have to play a lot of adventures for it to really add up. Are the narrative, the skill rolling, and the tactical combats enough to keep your interest? Some of my players like it more than Pathfinder ACG, some less, so it was at a similar level (albeit with weaker development).

Ascension: Valley of the Ancients (2017). It’s the 12th Ascension set! This one is another one with fairly minimal mechanical expansions. The big one is that there are Temples which you gain control of by spending new life and death resources. They give a slightly different path to victory, which is nice, but they also add a lot of chaos to the game, as the Temples can be stolen away by different players.

There are also some new keywords that relate to player discard piles: one goes off when a pile is empty and another when matching card types are in the discard pile. Generally, deckbuilder powers that require looking through the discard pile are a pain in the neck, but these mostly work.

However, my complaint with this set, and the one that keeps it at the bottom of my Good rating instead of the top is that the card quality seems to have gone down. These were the flimsiest Ascension cards that I’ve played with.

The OK

Mansions of Madness 2e (2016). Co-op #5. The second edition of Mansions of Madness is generally considered better than the first. And, I have to agree that some of the redevelopment is for the best. It seems to have a larger scope, in large thanks to lessons learned from the original Mansion’s supplements. And, it has a great system for wounds and madnesses that turns them into a whole game subsystem. The revamped skill system also feels better polished.

But the main change from Mansions of Madness 1e to 2e was the replacement of the keeper with a computer app, and I think that was much to the game’s deficit — and I say that having played it long after the troublesome bugs that early adopters complained about are gone. Yes, the keeper role of Mansions of Madness 1e had problems, as it was balanced in such a way that the keeper couldn’t play full out with breaking the game. That could have been balanced. But instead we have an app that’s worse in a lot of ways.

I should say flat out that I’m not a fan of app-driven games. They mean that some day your game’s not going to be playable because the app won’t get ported to newer smart devices. But even absent that theoretical concern, I found the app quite problematic in this game. Part of that is another philosophical issue that I have with apps: too often players are working with the app instead of interacting with the other players at the table, and that definitely happens here, especially for puzzles. But the biggest problem with the Mansions of Madness app is that it’s a halfway implementation: it tracks the exploration of a map in a slowly expanding way, which is marvelous, and it also tells you about bad Mythos effects and records your march toward victory. But because it doesn’t track player or monster movement, the monster movement ends up being a bastardized process where you hav to consult the app, then the board, then the app again, then the board again. You compare that to the singular ability for a keeper to make a decision and implement it in the original game, and you can see a big difference: you now have a game that’s fragmented by its app interactions.

Our five-player game of Mansions of Madness 2e, which the app said would last 90-150 minutes took five hours. I’m sure at least half of that extra time was lost due to app-driven inefficiencies. I can’t see playing the game again, despite the things it had going for it, though I could definitely see playing 1e again, despite its flaws.

First Martians (2017). Co-op #6. Speaking of rebooted co-op games, this is basically a reinvention of Robinson Crusoe, but with the systems redeveloped to be about building a Martian base that’s falling apart, rather than trying to survive on a jungle island.

The reason that I rate it so much lower than Robinson Crusoe is that it’s gotten much more complex. And I say that with Robinson Crusoe already being a tough, complex game. This one has more resources, a dizzying array of systems, and amidst all of that a rulebook that’s pretty vague about some of the complexities. This all makes the game run quite long, not anywhere close to the laughable 60-90 minutes quoted in the rulebook. (Our initial game was more like 150 minutes, following about 75 minutes of setup and teach.)

It’s too bad, because I love the idea of the campaign games and the legacy games that First Martians includes. I just don’t think I could bear to play this game five times through in quick succession. But maybe if you had a regular group that was really familiar with how it worked, this game would be OK.

Oh, and this is another app-driven game, but First Martians is a much better example of how to actually design an app that works well. The app is basically a replacement for several decks of cards, which keeps it nicely constrained, and keeps it from infringing too much on the player interactions. Mind you, I still managed to hit a wrong button once and couldn’t get back, so it hasn’t fixed all the problem with apps.

The Cards of Cthulhu (2014). Co-op #7. This is another Cthulhu co-op. The goal is to survive going through a deck of cult cards, which tend to generate gates, minions, and horrors. There are some nice interactions between these different sorts of cards and there’s an interesting dice and resource system that lets you dispatch these horrific problems. I was worried about the game’s simplicity, but it was fine for its length of play (though probably less fine for replays).

However, The Cards of Cthulhu has a serious problem as a co-op: it’s way too easy. It also isn’t really developed for co-op play. It seems pretty obvious that this was created as a solo game, as the cooperative elements aren’t particularly intriguing. (Oh, it plays fine, but it’s mostly about resolving a joint menace without really taking advantage of cooperative strategy; I mean there’s even the chance for player elimination!)

I also wasn’t that impressed by the production. The artwork is great, but the cards are flimsy, the rules aren’t that thorough, the player aid is super flimsy, and there aren’t enough components to support multiplayer play.

(Solve all those problems, and The Cards of Cthulhu could become a Good game.)

Mistborn: House War (2017). Co-op Adjacent. This is a competitive negotiation game that feels a lot like a co-op. That’s primarily due to its challenge system: every round new problems come out and old problems potentially trigger. Then you can try and expend some resources to solve problems, but you probably need help from others, which leads to the negotiation. That negotiation, focusing on resources and victory points, feels like it owes a lot to Cosmic Encounter (1977), though the mechanics and gameplay are largely different.

The game is very American. It’s full of take-that play. You can mess with people with cards, you’re encouraged to mess up negotiations, you’re pushed to lie, and you can also manipulate the challenge system to hose your opponents. That alone will tell you whether you like the game or not.

I obviously don’t have much interest in this very American gameplay, which is why it’s down here in the “OK” section. It’s the only game down in the “OK” session that I feel is purely about my biases, and not the quality of the game and its presentation. Other players would certainly rank it higher, though it has some issues of high randomness dramatically pushing the game one way or another and though it also has some issues with it being really easy to punish individual players, a common problem in take-that games.

I also know that I’m not alone in finding the theming of the gameplay problematic. It’s based on Brandon Sanderson’s fun Mistborn books … except you inexplicably play the bad guys. Most folks who liked the Mistborn books seem pretty nonplussed by the choice. (Which is too bad, the theming is otherwise pretty good.)

Apocrypha Adventure Card Game (2017). Co-op #8. Apocrypha is pretty much Pathfinder Adventure Card Game 2.0. While PACG is one of my top-five favorite-ever games, Apocrypha is pretty much … not.

I have to admit, I don’t love the theming. I find fantasy much more evocative than modern supernatural weirdness. However, I also don’t love the ways that the game system has been (fairly totally) revamped. Some of this may be the presentation. The rulebook was fairly horrible and the cards have all kinds of archaic icons on them. Whether it’s actually the case or not, that combination of elements makes the game feel much more complex than PACG.

Apocrypha also makes use of a lot of keywords, and though they could have made the game clearer (as is the case with classic Magic: The Gathering and with its spiritual successor, the Ascension Deckbuilding game), here it just feels like it straight jackets play. And all of these keywords and associated game jargon (and its wacky stuff like “gifts” and “fragments”) are just another thing that makes the game feel complex.

From the way the game’s laid out, as a sandbox rather than a linear story, I also don’t believe you’ll see the same great progression of characters that’s my real joy in PACG. Discussions of the game seem to back this up (but I did have to get that info from discussions, as no one in my group was willing to go back for a second try, especially when it would have replaced a PACG session).

It’s certainly possible that some folks will adore the changes (and especially the theming), that they’ll be able to dig through the artificial complexity of the rulebook and the keywords to find a gem, but the enthusiastic PACG players in my group were all at a loss as to why this one felt like such a drag in comparison. But it did feel clunky and kind of tedious to us.

The Meh

Mountains of Madness (2017).  Co-op #9. So Rob Daviau does still do non-Legacy games. This one is a Lovecraftian game based on the novel At the Mountains of Madness (1936). The gameplay is vastly simplistic: you flip over less than a dozen tiles and try to meet the conditions for each by playing the required cards as a group.

With that said, the cardplay is harder than you might expect. The group needs to play cards of a specific type within a very small range of value. And they have to figure out how they’re going to do so as a group with just 30 seconds of time.This real-time element is certainly the most exciting and interesting thing about the gameplay.

Oh, and there are genuine madnesses to make things even harder. These are problems that the players accrue as they fail. Each limits in some way what they’re able to say or how they’re able to act in the short discussions. The idea is frankly brilliant. It codifies the idea of madness into the game rules, instilling a horror that most games can’t. It also creates cooperation limitations, something that greatly benefits co-op games. Unfortuntaely, Daviau choose to make many of the madnesses funny or even embarrassing, requiring high fives, shouted exclamations, or other physical silliness. Not only does it not really match the feeling of horror that this game should evoke, but it also will deter many players.

You stack that on with the simplicity of the core game, and what could have been a Great game is kind of icky (and as I’ve learned since, kind of annoying to play near too).

For a while now I’ve been alluding to the fact that I’ve been working on a book on the design of cooperative board games, alongside my co-author, Christopher Allen. In fact, you can see the excess of cooperative games that we played in the run-up to the submission of our manuscript in the new-to-me posts for this Spring and Winter.

I am now pleased to announce that Meeples Together: How and Why Cooperative Board Games Work has been sent to our publisher, Gameplaywright Press, for the next stage of work, which is editorial. This is the start of a several month process, involving editing, acceptance of the same, layout, and ultimately publication.

If you’d like to keep informed of the book’s status, and to see our ongoing discussion of co-op gaming, please join us at either our Meeples Together FB group or @MeeplesTogether on Twitter.

Here’s a bit more on what the book itself contains:

Meeples Together is about those board games (and card games and dice games) where players work against a challenge system that’s run by the game itself in order to accomplish some goal and to not fall to failure. Arkham Horror was the first; Reiner Knizia’s Lord Of The Rings: The Boardgame then reinvented the category for the modern age of board games; and Pandemic was the first big, big hit. In recent years, the category has expanded to also include campaign-style co-op games like Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, Pandemic Legacy, and Gloomhaven.

The biggest problem with cooperative game design is the issue of the controlling player — or if you prefer, the alpha player. It’s such a big problem that some players won’t play co-ops because of bad past experiences with controlling players. Meeples Together, my upcoming book on cooperative game design, offers eight game-design solutions to this problem: play patterns that designers can include in games to deflate or deemphasize alphas.

However, there’s a flip side to this. Few co-op designers with perfectly resolve the controlling-player problem, and some with accept it as the price of creating the sort of game that interests them. In fact, some of my favorite co-ops like Pandemic (2008) and The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Games (2017) have styles of play where alpha players can rise to power. And I know, because I’m one of them. When I play these games I end up fighting not just against the challenges of the game system, but also about my own urges to tell everyone else what to do.

And fighting is the perfect word, because I believe that if you’re a cooperative gamer who suffers from alphaplayeritis, it’s your duty to make the game more enjoyable for everyone else by avoiding controlling the game as much as possible.

Here’s how you do so in 10 easy steps. (And if you’re not an controlling player, this really doesn’t apply to you!)

Be a Hear-O

Sometimes, the best way to avoid being that (controlling) guy is to use your supervillain powers for good: make it your priority to draw out the quiet players in the game, to help give them a chance to have some fun too.

1. Take a Breath. Whenever a decision point comes up in a co-op, you probably want to dive right in and start offering your opinions about the best strategies. Don’t. Instead, take a breath and see if someone else pipes up first. Allowing someone else to put ideas into the communal pool will help to make sure that you’re not the one calling all of the shots, because there will suddenly be other possibilities to discuss. (And if no one else offers up anything, then yeah, dive right in: you may be a super-villain, but you’re not superhuman!)

2. Shut Up. Similarly, if you’ve been happily discussing the possibilities of what everyone should do and someone steps up, then shut up for a bit. Don’t try and talk over them; there will be plenty of time to make sure your ideas are included in the discussions too (and if you’re a controlling player, you’ll probably make sure they are!).

Pandemic is one of the games where I really have to fight being a controlling player. That’s probably because there’s a lot of interconnectivity in the game, where players can use cards and research stations to quickly jet around the board. This makes it possible for anyone to do anything (at a cost), which seductively encourages a master planner to try and orchestrate everything.

Let the Wookie Win

So now that you’ve successfully gotten other ideas to the table, your group needs to decide what to do. This is where a controlling player will do his best to ensure that it’s his ideas to win out — which means that you’re also going to need to do your best to control that instinct!

3. Accept That You Might Be Wrong. Good cooperative games introduce choices that are both uncertain and difficult. In other words they ensure either that there’s no right answer or that the right answer is really hard to discern. You need to accept this as a controlling player and realize that other players’ ideas might have equal validity to your own — that the random card draws and die rolls of an uncertain challenge system can produce a variety of results, and that what one of your gaming partners is arguing for actually could be a right answer too.

4. Step Back from Disagreements. Sometimes you’ll really dig in because you’re certain you’re right, or at the least that your idea is addressing a more likely problem than those put forth by your fellows. But those fellows might be fighting like hell for those ideas. If so, you sometimes need to just step back. A controlling player often overvalues his own ideas; even if he’s not actively aware of that, he can acknowledge that it’s probably the case and give the other players some control by conceding even when he thinks he’s more right.

There’s No “I” in Cooperation

After a decision has been made, there are repercussions. The way those repercussions are handled can color how the cooperation works for the rest of the game.

5. Take the Good & Take The Bad. When someone suggested a choice that turned out to be good, make a point of complementing it. When someone suggested a choice that turned out to be bad, but it was bad just because of random bad luck that could have come out otherwise, don’t make a big deal about it, and if someone else does, point out that it was a valid option. This is all about enabling other people, so that they feel good about being part of the conversation, and so that they’re more likely to stand up to you if you try to become a controller in the future. (There’s one other possibility, which is that things went bad when the Wookie insisted on something that you knew was stupid. Here, it’s fair enough to talk about why it was a bad choice, but don’t rub it in or anything.)

6. Don’t Be Condescending. In fact, generally, you need to make a point of being really honest in all of the interactions where you’re trying to give other people more control in the game. If you come off as false, then you’ll sound condescending, and that’s as bad of a look as being an alpha player. So, try your best to see how other choices are good and how other people really contributed to the success of the group, especially when they did sp in opposition to you, and if you can’t, well … it’s better to say nothing.

Be All Individuals

A game can work against controlling players is by including strong specialization, where different players can do dramatically different things. A repentant alpha player can also take advantage of these special abilities to sow some player empowerment of his own.

7. Ask About Special Powers. One way to avoid being a controlling player is to highlight the things that you don’t know and that other players do. That notably includes special powers: those things that are unique to a specific character. (Yeah, you may actually know what every special power in the game is, but you need to presume that a player will have been thinking the most about his own power, and will thus have the best ideas for how to use it.) So, if you’re feeling that you’re controlling things too much, if you take a breath and no one jumps in, try asking a quiet player if they have any ideas about how to use their power to the group’s advantage.

8. Concentrate On Your Own Game for A While. Here’s the flipside: you can concentrate solely on your own game for a while. Concentrate on using your special power, and let the group know what you’re planning to do. You should get plenty of fulfillment out of that. But resolutely refuse to initiate conversations on the game’s wider strategy Hopefully someone else will jump in …

Pathfinder is much kinder to recovering alpha players. Players tend to head off in their own directions, draw their own cards, and have their own adventures. The need to control is lessened because there is less opportunity.

Be a Hero Too

Yes, all of this advice to date is about how you can step back and let other people have more fulfilling roles in the game … but that’s because you have a problem (you’re a controlling player). It doesn’t mean that you should never offer great ideas to the group, because that’s the whole point in co-op games. So make sure you also step up when it’s appropriate to do so.

9. Point Out Mistakes. Here’s the place where you should stand the firmest: when other players want to do something that is unquestioningly a mistake. This shouldn’t be a question of probabilities or different opinions, it should only be about actual factual mistakes, when other players don’t understand the rules or are making some mistake about the state of the game board. For example, if you know that Lagos will be in the next two cards because you’ve been counting the deck, and another player really thinks that Lagos won’t get hit by disease after his turn … you should fight against that assertion.

10. Reveal Your Revelations. Finally, you might be able to connect the dots in a way that the other players can’t: to see a pattern of cause and effect, possibly spread out over several turns that could lead to great (or terrible) results. It’s quite possible that this sort of long-term puzzling is why you became a controlling player in the first place. You should really try to point out these insights to other players … but if they’re not buying it, see above.

If you’re a controlling player, you ultimately need to take a step back and make it your personal goal to not just win the game, but to make sure that everyone else is having fun … and then still win the game if it’s possible.

Appendix: The Competitive Correlation

This article is all about a classic cooperative conundrum, but you should think about how not to be a controlling player when you’re playing competitive games too. It usually comes up when you’re introducing a newcomer to a game, or when you feel like you’re much more experienced that other players, even if they’ve played the game before. If you’re not a win-at-all-costs gamer (and that’s a whole other question of etiquette), then your temptation will be to offer advice, to suggest moves, and even to propose strategies.

Don’t do it. Or rather, do it only at a very minimal level where you might improve the other players’ experience by helping them feel more in control of the game without taking that control away from them.

It’s great to give advice before a game begins, particularly if you’re offering a few different options that the players can decide between. But then you should bite your tongue when the game actually begins, unless you’re explicitly asked. There’s one notable exception: if new players seem to be making a move that doesn’t make sense given the rules of the game, then try to figure out what they might be getting wrong, and remind them of how the game actually works. (“You do realize that ….” often results in a “NO!?”)

Beyond that, let them play their own competitive game, for better or for worse.

Meeples Together (which is now being funded on Kickstarter) breaks down the design of cooperative games primarily through the analysis and dissection of existing releases. These discussions form the core of the book, but specific games are also highlighted in individual case studies. Meeples Together contains 14 of these case studies, one per chapter, plus a few bonuses, but there are many othe cooperative games to study. This is one of them: a supplement to the material found in Meeples Together, in the same format as the case studies there.

Lord of the Rings is one the three foundational games for the co-op industry, alongside Arkham Horror and Pandemic. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in print when we finalized the text for Meeples Together. Thus, rather than including details on a game that players couldn’t currently buy, we instead substituted discussion of a game that was more readily available (Robinson Crusoe, as it happens). However, we wanted to make sure that Lord of the Rings was the first game we talked about outside of the book itself.

This article has been crossposted from the Meeples Together blog, which focuses exclusively on cooperative game design.

Lord of the Rings by Reiner Knizia

Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games (2000)
Cooperative Style: True Cooperative
Play Style: Racing, Resource Management

Overview

The players take on the role of hobbits who are trying to deliver the One Ring to Mount Doom. To do so they must advance through four scenarios boards. Along the way, they need to collect sufficient life markers to avoid being corrupted, and they must resolve other threats.

On a player’s turn, he either collects cards (resources) or advances the group’s shared tokens along four to five race tracks. One of the tracks marks the group’s progress toward completing the current scenario board, while the other tracks give players life markers or resources or else complete subsidiary goals.

Challenge System

The challenge system in Lord of the Rings is triggered through the revelation of Event tiles; a player flips up one or more of them at the start of his turn. These tiles can have a variety of bad consequences such as corrupting the hobbits, stealing resources, or advancing Sauron. The tiles can also cause the scenario board’s next event to occur, which tends to be bad as well.

The hobbits’ corruption and the events’ status are both measured on individual tracks, each of which is an additional gear in the challenge machinery:

The corruption track is a linear path, with the hobbits advancing from the left and Sauron from the right. As the hobbits become corrupt they move toward Sauron, who in turn may be moving toward them. This is the most obvious threat in the game, as hobbits are eliminated when they reach Sauron.

The corruption track tends to work well for a number of reasons. First, it’s an obvious and central focus of the game. It’s always sitting in the middle of the table, with large plastic figures calling attention to it, and so players never forget about the impending threat. Second, there are several optional ways to gain corruption — including the Ring Bearer using the One Ring, players choosing to move to “die roll” spaces, and players opting not to collect life markers. Thus, corruption becomes a resource that players must manage.

The corruption track’s largest failing is that it’s entirely binary: hobbits are either eliminated or not. Thus, any growing sense of doom is psychological; there are no decaying game effects that advance the feeling of a darkening world.

The event track is somewhat subtler than the corruption track. Each space on the event track tends to require something from the players. They might have to turn in certain resources, or they might need to have reached certain spaces on the board. If the players meet the requirements something good (sometimes) happens, and if they don’t then something bad (usually) happens.

The best element of the event track’s design is that it sends players running in a lot of different directions, as they try to simultaneously meet the criteria laid out by upcoming events while not sabotaging their own efforts to advance along the game’s central race track. This causes information overload in the game, as players try to remember too many things — which is ultimately to the benefit of a challenge system.

Overall, the complex and interrelated challenge machinery of Lord of the Rings works because players must simultaneously consider a number of different goals (avoiding corruption, preparing for events, and moving on the race track), some of which might be in conflict with each other — and they must do so without having enough resources for everything. The random draw of the event tiles makes it that much harder to plan precisely, as players never know which of these game elements may be the most important in the near future.

The challenge system’s biggest flaw may be that it’s too random. When a player draws event tiles at the start of his turn, he keeps going until he gets a “good” one. This means that bad results can be largely unbounded, and that a game that was going well can suddenly turn bad in one turn. Threat-focused games certainly want some swinginess of this sort, but it may be overstated in Lord of the Rings.

Challenge System Elements: Turn & Movement Activation; Arbitrary Trigger; Random Cascade; Decay; Removal Consequence; and Death Threat.

Cooperative System

Cooperation in Lord of the Rings comes mainly through the players deciding how to advance on the various race tracks; they must determine whether it’s important to finish the current scenario, collect life markers, collect resources, or finish goals required by upcoming events. Since the tokens moving along these tracks are shared, what one player does will directly affect the next player’s turn. This cooperation through manipulation of abstract game markers is pretty unique, even today — though Freedom: The Underground Railroad (2012) offers a more recent variant on the idea and The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game (2017) demonstrates a different way to cooperatively interact with a somewhat abstract playing field.

Beyond the shared movement of these tokens, there’s little explicit cooperation in Lord of the Rings. There is minimal ability to share resources, and there is minimal ability to help other players — except by leaving them opportunities on the shared movement tracks.

On the flip side, Lord of the Rings doesn’t do a lot to control communication. Players can freely discuss their cards, but may not display them to each other. Communication is more subtly obscured by the preponderance of information in the game, which makes it’s easy to forget something (usually an upcoming event), but that’s minor in the scope of things. In general, this open communication can trend the game toward controlling players and perfect cooperation, both of which are a real danger to Lords of the Rings. The fact that individual characters have little physical presence on the board probably makes the problem worse, as it lessens each player’s buy-in to the game.

Overall, Lord of the Rings has some intriguing cooperative elements, but also feels like a first-generation cooperative game (which it is). If designed at a later time it might have put more focus on enabling individual players by giving them more individual presence and by limiting their communication.

Adventure System

Among heavily themed co-ops, Lord of the Rings is somewhat notable for its lack of particularly individualized characters. Though each player’s character has a special power, they don’t necessarily come up a lot. Players also have no individual physical presence on the board, and their one-use cards don’t feel like equipment: though some of the cards are named for items, collecting them doesn’t really improve a “character”.

This lack of individualization is somewhat balanced by the existence of existential threats to the individual characters: hobbits each gain corruption and will need life markers to survive. This might cause players to strive for their own survival even when it’s against the best interest of the group. This support for individual greed can help to stave off the problem of controlling players, as it highlights a way that players might diverge from the group consensus.

Expansions & Variants

Lord of the Rings has a few major expansions that vary the game. Friends & Foes (2001) and Battlefields (2006) both add variability and new threats that must be dealt with — adding to the informational overload that’s at the heart of the game. Sauron (2002) is the most notable expansion, as it turns Lord of the Rings into an overlord game.

Final Thoughts

Though modern co-op games tend to focus more on cooperative mechanics, Lord of the Rings still works quite well as a cooperative game. It’s also a milestone in the genre because it introduced eurogame elements like fast play, resource management, and abstraction to the cooperative field.

Lord of the Rings’ euro-mechanics, its cooperative elements, and its challenge systems have been widely copied with one exception: its shared movement tracks remain a distinct and unusual cooperative element — one which also bears consideration by modern designers.

About the Author: Reiner Knizia

Reiner Knizia is one of the best-known German eurogame designers. As a doctor in mathematics, he tends to create games with a clean, mathematical basis. Some feel somewhat abstract, but others like Lord of the Rings (2000) are saturated with evocative color.

Knizia has been a full-time game designer since 1997 and has produced over 500 titles total, making him one of the most prolific game designers ever. His most prestigious games are Lord of the Rings, which won a Spiel des Jahres special award for best use of literature, and Keltis (2008), which won the main Spiel des Jahres award.  The authors of this book worked with Knizia to adapt four of his games to iOS: High Society (1995), Kingdoms (1994), Masters Gallery (2009), and Money! (1999).

Meeples Together is continuing to crowdfund on Kickstarter. It’s already blown through its first stretch goal, which adds a case study for Matt Leacock’s Forbidden Island to the book. We hope we’ll also be able to talk about his Forbidden Desert too, as our fourth stretch goal.

We wanted to add those two extra case studies to the book because they show the continuing evolution of a specific style of play that Leacock debuted in Pandemic. However, Matt Leacock is the main co-op designer of our time, and that means he’s branched out into other styles of co-op games as well. One of those is Thunderbirds, which we’re happy to discuss here as another bonus case study.

This article has been crossposted from the Meeples Together blog, which focuses exclusively on cooperative game design. There will be some original Mechanics & Meeples content next week (and afterward the Meeples Together and Mechanics & Meeples articles will interweave.)

Thunderbirds by Matt Leacock

Publisher: Modiphius Entertainment (2015)
Cooperative Style: True Co-Op
Play Style: Action Point, Logistical

Overview

The players take on the role of Thunderbird agents, who race around the globe in their Thunderbird machines to defeat the schemes of the Hood before it’s too late. However, Thunderbirds agents must deal with ongoing disasters as well! If they don’t, they’ll lose the game!

Challenge System

The challenge system of Thunderbirds comes in two parts, following a standard cooperative pattern that splits threats: disasters must be solved so that the players do not lose, while schemes must be foiled so that the players can win.

A disaster appears nearly every turn, based on the draw of a card. Players have a few turns to solve each of these problems. The longer a disaster is around, the closer it gets to the end of the disaster track; if it reaches the end, the game is lost.

The use of a track for these game-losing disasters is interesting: it’s really no different from any number of games (like Pandemic) that trigger a loss when a certain component runs out (in this case: when the eighth card is placed), but it displays this loss condition in a visceral way while simultaneously providing a visual listing of problems that the players may deal with. It’s a prime example of making choices obvious through great “menu” design.

Schemes in contrast are selected at the start of the game, but only the next one is revealed at any time. Though the players must defeat the schemes to win, they’re not just markers of victory; they can also be dangerous. That’s because the schemes are arranged along a “Hood track”, which the villainous Hood slowly advances along though certain disaster-card draws, certain die rolls, and even player choice — much as Sauron advances in the foundational Lord of the Rings (2000) co-op. If the Hood reaches an unfoiled scheme, the game is (once more) lost.

However, the Hood track does more than just mark another advance of Doom. The Hood track are contains hidden events between the schemes; when the Hood reaches an event, it activates, causing various problems for the players. This is a nice feature, because it interweaves the big problems with small ones. It also introduces uncertainty: though the players can brace themselves for an oncoming event, they’ll always be surprised by its precise (random) result.

Though the Thunderbirds challenge system often feels dangerous — like there’s impending danger that must be overcome — there’s not a lot of decay in it. Things can get temporarily bad if the Hood gets near an unfoiled scheme or if a number of disasters stack up, but there’s never a sudden ramp-up, and if the players overcome the current problems, everything is back to normal.

Despite the cleverness of both the disaster and scheme tracking, Thunderbirds generally has a simpler and more forgiving system than Matt Leacock’s Pandemic games.

Challenge System Elements: Turn, Action & Random Activation; Arbitrary Trigger; Interrelated Systems; and Skill Threat.

Cooperative System

The challenge systems in Thunderbirds are countered through logistical play. They require getting the right machines and the right characters to the right locations and then either making a die roll (for disasters) or expending resources (for schemes). Logistical requirements of this sort are a natural fit for cooperative games because they tend to focus on divided puzzles — a popular co-op pattern that requires players to figure out how to get resources that are split up among the team to the right places. Thunderbirds’ schemes create even more cooperative depth because they need those resources to be moved to different locations, requiring players to actively working together at different places on the board.

The movement system of Thunderbirds also creates some interesting cooperative puzzles thanks to the Thunderbirds machines. Players can jump from one machine to another over the course of a turn. Because some of the machines can seat two or more characters, this means that a player will frequently be joining with another player, as they move together in a single machine. This creates great tactical opportunities and also gives players the ability to work together for a time before once more branching off.

Adventure System

Leacock’s classic co-op Pandemic (2008) just touched upon the adventure game space through its use of unique character powers. Thunderbirds dramatically expands on that. Each character has a unique power, and each of them can accumulate bonus tokens that given them one-time abilities. Each of their Thunderbird machines has unique characteristics too.

Once again, it’s the machines that really stand out as an innovation. By giving characters two adventuresome characteristics, one of which is permanent (the character power) and one of which can be traded around (the machine powers), Leacock adds orthogonal depth to his adventure play.

Final Thoughts

By now, Leacock clearly knows what he’s doing when he’s designing co-op games, as Thunderbirds was his six major effort following Pandemic (2008), Forbidden Island (2010), Forbidden Desert (2013), Pandemic: The Cure (2014) and Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (2015). It’s no surprise that Thunderbirds makes good, polished use of some classic mechanics like a bipartite victory-vs-loss threat structure and a card-based challenge system.

However Thunderbirds also has some nice innovations, primarily focused on the famous Thunderbirds machines. They allow for a new sort of movement-based cooperation and also add to the depth of the adventure play. As such, they show how one little addition to a co-op design can add a lot.

“I’ve become more conscious about elements that can make cooperative games better. When I designed Pandemic, I was doing this all instinctively. Now, I actively work different play patterns and mechanism into my designs upfront.”
—Matt Leacock, Interview, Mechanics & Meeples (March 2015)

Meeples Together (which is nearing the end of its funding on Kickstarter) covers a whole spectrum of cooperative games. “True co-ops” are the heart of the book, but it also discusses traitor games, overlord games, and even the more classic style of team games — because they can all offer interesting design lessons.

Between Two Cities is a great partnership game because it goes beyond simple, static partners and instead forces players to “partially” partner up with two different people with varying goals.

This article has been crossposted from the Meeples Together blog, which focuses exclusively on cooperative game design.

Between Two Cities by Rosset & O’Malley

Publisher: Stonemaier Games (2015)
Cooperative Style: Competitive with Partial Partners
Play Style: Card Drafting, Tile Laying

Overview

Over several turns of play, each player drafts tiles in order to build the best city possible — or rather, to build the best two cities possible. In Between Two Cities each player is working in cooperation with the two players to either side, and he’ll be scored based on the worst of those two cities, so there’s no shirking either responsibility!

Cooperative System

Between Two Cities is ultimately a competitive game: only one player wins, while everyone else loses. However, it forces cooperation through a clever system of partial partnerships where each player has part of their score linked to a joint city created with another player.

any partial partnership games fail because they allow a player to focus on just one of his partnerships, ultimately consigning the partner that he’s ignoring to almost certain loss. Between Two Cities resolves that issue by scoring the worst of a player’s two cities, only using the score for the better city as a tie-breaker. The result is a game where a player does his best to ensure that his two partnerships are doing equally well.

Though the partnerships in Between Two Cities are both constrained and competitive, they still create real cooperation within the game.

That mainly comes through the building of the cities. After each phase of card drafting, each player ends up with two tiles, and he must decide which to place in each of the two cities. Though a player often know what he wants to do, he also engages in freeform negotiation with both of his partners. This results in cooperative conversation about how to build out the cities … but each of those partners is also trying to ensure a tile placement that best benefits them, not the player’s other partner.

Between Two Cities also has a second, more unusual style of cooperation. When a player is drafting tiles, he can choose to pass specific tiles to his partner that he thinks will benefit their shared city. He may even keep a certain tile to play, while also sending a complementary tile to his partner. This sort of unspoken cooperation avoids the problems that open communication can causes in co-op games, while simultaneously allowing for real cooperation.

No Challenge System Elements. Partial Partnerships.

Expansion & Variants

The Capitals (2017) expansion for Between Two Cities increases the challenge of city building by introducing new ways to score points and new geographic obstacles. (The picture at the top of this post shows the expansion in play.)

Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig (2018) is a brand-new game that mixes together the partnership play of Between Two Cities with the more freeform building and higher complexity of Castles of Mad King Ludwig (2014).

Final Thoughts

Though it’s ultimately a competitive game, Between Two Cities incorporates some great cooperative mechanics by forcing players to work together with two different partners while simultaneously requiring them to make decisions for themselves about both card drafting and tile placement. Between Two Cities also plays very quickly, showing that meaningful cooperation can occur in small, bite-sized bits.

Ben Rosset & Matthew O’Malley

Matthew O’Malley designs games primarily through his own Black Oak Games. Ben Rosset has worked with a number of small publishers. They both are relatively new designers, who got their professional start in 2014. To date, Between Two Cities is their most successful game.

Our Kickstarter for Meeples Together ends this week, but we’ll be continuing to publish new case studies supplementing the book in the weeks and months to come. (We’ve got more than 50 additional case studies drafted, plus another handful planned.) Today’s talks about Sub Terra, one of the big co-op Kickstarters in recent years, and one that turned out to be quite a good game too!

This article has been crossposted from the Meeples Together blog, which focuses exclusively on cooperative game design.

Sub Terra by Tim Pinder

Publisher: Inside the Box (2017)
Cooperative Style: True Co-op
Play Style: Action, Tile Laying

Overview

Whoops! You fell in a cave! And your flashlight batteries are going to run out! You and your fellows thus have a limited amount of time to explore the caverns by laying tiles, trying to find the exit. However, floods, gas, and quakes all make those tiles more dangerous … and then there are the monsters hunting you in the dark!

Challenge System

As in most co-ops, the challenge system in Sub Terra is triggered by the draw of a card, which reveals a new hazard. However, Sub Terra’s challenges have a unique twist: though a few such as “Tremor” and “Out of Time” have global effects, others such as “Cave-In”, “Flood”, and “Gas” are linked to specific tiles. This creates a very elegant interdependence between the co-op system and the game’s main (tile-laying) mechanic — something that any co-op could benefit from.

This is supplemented by a combat-threat system that’s much more typical, but that still has interesting complexities: monsters are activated by card draws; every turn, they then move toward the nearest player. The very constrained passages of Sub Terra turn this into a simple simulation where the players can carefully control the movements of the monsters, much as is possible with the slave catchers of Freedom: The Underground Railroad (2012). Combining this sort of controllable threat with something more random, like a card draw, supports both player agency and the surprise of an unexpected occurrence: in Sub Terra, not only do you not know when new threats will appear, but there’s also a slight chance that they’ll move double speed each turn.

Sub Terra contains one other challenge element is of note: it essentially contains two timers. If players get to the bottom of the tile deck, that’s a good timer, because they find the exit, but if they get to the bottom of the hazard deck, that’s a bad timer, because their flashlights go out. This struggle between two different clocks is quite unique in co-op play.

Challenge System Elements: Turn Activation; Arbitrary & Simulation Triggers; Sequential Cascade; Decay; Timer & End-game Goal; Environmental Consequences; and Combat & Skill Threats.

Cooperative System

The cooperation in Sub Terra is entirely strategic, with different players taking on different tasks, but the game is rather uniquely designed so that this strategic play is both required and deleterious! The strategic play is enforced by the need to reach the bottom of the tile deck: players must split up to explore enough tiles over the course of the game. It’s contradicted by the fact that players must be together at the end of the game in order to get out of the caves: if they’ve gotten too far apart, some will be stranded and everyone may lose! The back and forth between strategic exploration and possibly wasteful congregation is another strong tension in the games; other co-ops could probably benefit from Sub Terra’s idea of simultaneously rewarding and punishing strategic play<<IDEA>>.

Players can also work together to clear cave-ins, to heal fallen comrades, or to use their specific advantages for the good of the group. There’s a wide variety of ways that players can cooperatively interact, which creates interesting gameplay.

Adventure System

Sub Terra is on the fringe of adventure gameplay, with a few elements of particular note.

The most important adventure elements are the characters, which each have special abilities that are specialized enough that they will push players in specific gameplay directions. There’s also a simple skill-check system: a player rolls a die and tries to get 4 or more.

None of this is particularly complex, nor are there any surprises, but these simple adventure-game systems show their important to cooperative games.

Expansions & Variants

Sub Terra was Kickstarted with a huge variety of add-ons and variants. A lot of them were cosmetic, but there were also three small expansions: Annihilation (2017), Extraction (2017), and Investigation (2017). Each introduces a new player character and also features some slight new rules for play.

Final Thoughts

Sub Terra’s greatest strength is its integration of random tile-laying play with cooperative gaming. Though there are certainly other games that feature tiles, such as Mansions of Madness (2011, 2016) and Star Trek: Expeditions (2011), most haven’t managed to capture the fun and excitement of tile draws. Betrayal at House on the Hill (2004) and its various spin-offs was probably the only major release to really exemplify the joy of exploration that tile laying can create, and Sub Terra follows right in those footsteps. It also takes a step forward by truly intertwining the tile-laying and the challenge play, making them into a cohesive whole.

Other elements of the game are more mundane from a design perspective, but the result is nonetheless exciting, tense, and fun, which is all you can ask for.

Tim Pinder

Although he’d previously self-published Draftica (2015), Sub Terra (2017) marks Tim Pinder’s first fully professional game design.

Nikki Valens was a Senior Game Designer at Fantasy Flight Games from 2013-2018, during which time she worked on several cooperative board games, including two of FFG’s top releases: Mansions of Madness and Arkham Horror. This compressed period of game design has already made her one of the most prolific and knowledgeable co-op designers in the industry.

Nikki was kind enough to talk to me about her co-op designs while Christopher Allen & I were amidst the Meeples Together Kickstarter last month (now available for preorder).

Shannon Appelcline: You seemed to hit the ground running at Fantasy Flight with a heavy focus on cooperative games, starting with Eldritch Horror. Was there something that drew you to cooperative design?

Nikki Valens: To me, games are a social experience. I like to play games with my friends and family. But I have no desire to enter a competition against those I love. As a result, I tend to enjoy co-op games more than competitive games, especially if there’s narrative investment involved. Winning a game of Hearts is abstract enough that there’s not going to be any hard feelings, but getting invested in a story and characters only to lose feels quite a bit different for most players. When I design games, I’m usually working toward a specific experience that I want to give to players.

SA: Eldritch Horror revisits many of the ideas from Arkham Horror 2e. Were there elements of Arkham Horror’s play that you were specifically trying to redevelop?

NV: Eldritch Horror was certainly inspired by Arkham Horror, but it was never the intent that Eldritch would replace Arkham. Eldritch sought to take some of the core ideas of Arkham Horror and apply them to a globetrotting Indiana Jones like narrative.

For the handful of core systems that the two games share, it was important for Eldritch to not only find its own way, but also to be more accessible to new players. Major design choices, such as the round structure or other world encounters were created taking inspiration from Arkham, but in ways that would be easier to learn, teach, and play.

SA: You’ve produced quite a few supplements for Eldritch Horror. Did you learn anything new about its cooperative or challenge game systems as you went?

NV: Absolutely. As is going to be the case with virtually any game, the expected balance when the game first comes out won’t even resemble the balance later in a game’s life cycle. How the base game and first expansion valued different effects was much different than the later expansions, causing some of the early investigators and items to be either hugely overpowered or basically useless.

Another thing about games that you discover the more your work with them is how much design space certain mechanics have. For instance, the mysteries were created to allow scenarios to play out differently from one another and tell unique stories, but it turned out there was a lot less space for unique designs for mysteries than we originally thought. This results in the ancient ones not always being as diverse as we had hoped.

SA: Your second co-op, Mansions of Madness 2e, was even more explicitly a redevelopment. Leaving the innovative computer app aside for a moment, what were your other goals in redeveloping the game?

NV: One of the most important goals with Mansions second edition was to create a deeply immersive story experience for players. It was important that the balance between narrative and mechanics was just right to allow players to embody their characters and become part of the world within the story.

SA: What do you think the app added to the game, particularly as a cooperative game?

NV: The companion app was one of the biggest tools when trying to accomplish that goal for the narrative. It meant that the game could be a fully cooperative experience instead of needing one player to act as the keeper and tell the story.

By allowing the app to tell the story and handle game effects, we were also able to hide much of the game’s complexity behind the scenes and out of the reach of the players. No need to worry about fiddly token counting or reading a flow chart to determine how a monster moves. The app will just take care of that busy work for you so that you can spend your time exploring a spooky mansion and solving a mystery.

SA: Your third co-op, Legacy of Dragonholt, is thus far your only co-op that wasn’t some form of reimagination or redevelopment. What was your intent in creating a totally new co-op game?

NV: Much as it was with Mansions or Eldritch, Dragonholt was about creating a narrative for players to immerse themselves in. Reading fiction is one of my favorite hobbies. I love losing myself to a good book. But for many, being able to directly interact with the story is important, so I wanted to give them that. I like to think of Dragonholt as about as close as you can get to being a character in a fantasy novel.

SA: It’s been billed as a GM-less roleplaying game. How do you think that differs from a traditional co-op?

NV: The traditional composition of a co-op game (think Pandemic for example) places a lot of emphasis on working together to overcome a challenge and win. The difference between winning and losing such a game is extremely clear.

That’s not the case with fiction or with roleplaying. There is much more nuance to if each character has achieved their goals and what did they sacrifice to get there. In a roleplaying game, that goal isn’t for the player characters to crush the game master, nor is it for the game master to TPK. The goal is for all of the players to collaborate and create a fun story. And that’s what Dragonholt chooses to focus on. I tried to give players enough options that they could feel like we were working together to tell a fun story, even if not all of the characters achieved their personal goals.

SA: Most recently you produced the third edition of Arkham Horror. What did you feel needed to be changed in the game?

NV: Primarily the game wanted to be more accessible. Second edition had its dedicated fans, but many of them have stories about how difficult it is to get new players to play the game and keep playing it.

SA: Were there any lessons learned from your creation of Eldritch Horror?

NV: There were many things. One that sticks out to me is giving players a fun narrative while also letting them have the deterministic advantages they want. In second edition, players would frequently use static effects of locations instead of resolving encounters because the sure bet was simply the better choice. In Eldritch, we instead wanted more focus on the story of the encounters, so we put the location effects in the encounters themselves. But we didn’t push it far enough. The effects weren’t consistent enough for players to feel like they got to really make a choice.

In Arkham Horror third edition, the encounters almost always let the player do exactly the effect that is expected of a location. If you want to buy items, nine times out of ten an encounter at the general store will let you spend your money on the items in the display (and that tenth time might just give you an item for free).

That’s not to say that third edition was able to execute on all of the lessons learned. As I look back at the design, I see things that could be improved.

SA: What will particularly excite existing players about the new game?

NV: Something that’s new to this edition is that each scenario has a set of cards that help tell its story and often that story has branching paths depending on either the players’ decisions or how well they’re doing. It’s not endless replayablility, but there’s at least multiple different ways each scenario can conclude whether the players win or lose.

SA: With four co-op games under your belt, you’re one of the most experienced cooperative designers in the field. At this point, what would you say are the core defining characteristics of cooperative games?

NV: Cooperative games have just as much potential for diversity as competitive games. Many co-op games look similar now because there are fewer of them, but the industry will see that the breadth of co-op games will just keep growing.

As a result, the only real defining characteristic of a co-op game is that it requires players work together to accomplish their goals. How they do it, the story (if there is one), and what they are trying to accomplish could be virtually anything. It’s even possible the experience isn’t 100% cooperative. Games like Betrayal, Dead of Winter, and Descent are cooperative, even if there’s a traitor among the players or one of the players is openly working against the rest from the beginning.

As the hobby grows, we’ll likely find the line between co-op and competitive games blurring even more.

SA: Any other interesting lessons learned from your cooperative designs?

NV: A big one is that “your players are always right,” whether that means your designs are fighting against human nature, players are consistently misplaying some aspect of your game, or players elect to houserule certain aspect of the design. Any of those small changes could disrupt the intended balance or pacing of your game, so it’s easy to get defensive as a designer. But hopefully these small differences in how player want to play the game and how you intend for them to play it come out in playtesting. When players consistently misplay something or choose to play it differently, they’re telling you they’re not having the best experience. It’s good to listen to that and take that unspoken feedback to heart.

SA: What are your plans now that you’ve left Fantasy Flight?

NV: To create more great co-op games!

I have a game that will be coming out in 2019 that I’m very excited for people to see. I’ve also been working with Fog of Love on an expansion that will be coming out (hopefully) in Q2 2019. Beyond that, I have a number of small card games I’m working on as well as some narrative games and some larger games in the long term plans.

For anyone that wants to get some sneak peeks at what I’m up to, you can follow me on Twitter: @valens116.

This co-op case study was originally posted at Meeples Together, a blog focusing exclusively on cooperative game design. And, if you missed the Kickstarter for my upcoming book on cooperative game design, you can now preorder it with Backerkit.

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game by Mike Selinker

Publisher: Paizo Publishing (2013)
Cooperative Style: True Co-Op
Play Style: Adventure Game, Campaign, Deckbuilding

Overview

The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game is built with a unique combination of deckbuilding, adventure gaming, and cooperative gaming — resulting in a cooperative campaign that can last for 30 or more play sessions! Over the course of many games of Pathfinder, players improve their characters by acquiring new cards while simultaneously fulfilling the scenario objective, which usually requires defeating a villain after beating up some of his henchmen as well.

Challenge System

The main challenge system in the Pathfinder ACG is a simple timer: each turn the active player flips over a “blessings” card, and when all 30 are gone, the group loses. The timer itself does contains a little bit of uncertainty: if a player fails to defeat the villain in combat, then the players can lose extra blessing cards that they weren’t counting on. However, it’s mainly a monotonic count towards doom.

The rest of the challenge system depends on exploration activation: players have to reveal (mostly unknown) cards at locations in order to eventually track down the villain and his henchmen. The results could be bad (a monster attack or a barrier) or good (an opportunity to gain some equipment). As in any well-considered exploration-activation system, players sort of know what they’re getting into: they can review the general composition of each location, which tells what types of cards it contains.

Because players must dig through the locations to find and trap the villain, these activations are required to beat the timer. If the players are unlucky, unprepared, or insufficiently aggressive in drawing from the location decks, they might run out of time before they find the villain and his henchmen. In other words, the uncertainly that’s missing from the timer itself is instead a part of the location system.

The Pathfinder ACG also includes a surprisingly strong anti-cooperative incentive. A character dies if his personal deck is emptied of cards. This can happen through character damage or through the normal play of cards; it creates another, personal timer.  This anti-cooperative incentive works better than most character-death systems for two reasons. First, it feels very tight: even at the beginning of the game, a player can look at their small deck and consider how close your character lies to oblivion. Second, it’s a big deal to lose a character, because the player could have invested many sessions of gameplay into him; by creating a cooperative campaign, Selinker has dramatically escalated the stakes for character death.

One of the interesting elements of the Pathfinder ACG’s challenge system is that it doesn’t really discourage losing. That’s because there’s no penalty, other than having to play the scenario again. Beyond that, there’s no tally of wins or losses, just a gradual movement toward the campaign’s end. As a result, if a character is wounded, that player may stop exploring locations, largely canceling the challenge system, to ensure that his character doesn’t get killed. In fact, players may even choose to concentrate on improving their characters rather than winning a game (prioritizing the group’s long-term viability over the win of a single session). Despite all of this, there is still tension in the game. Players do still want to win. It’s just not the literal do-or-die of many other co-ops. The fact that the Pathfinder ACG still is obsessively replayable despite this just shows the strength of its overall design.

Challenge System Elements: Exploration Activation; Card Trigger; Timer; Campaign; and Combat & Skill Threats.

Cooperative System

The cooperative mechanics of the Pathfinder ACG are all pretty simple, but there are enough of them that they create a critical mass of cooperation.

That begins at the strategic level: players will visit different locations at different times. Early on, they’ll choose to visit different locations based on their characters’ strengths or needs. Later, when they’re trying to capture the villain, they’ll remain stationed at different locations to keep the villain from escaping.

There’s also quite a bit of tactical cooperation. Most notably, players have blessing cards that they can play to help each other on their task resolution. There are enough of them for their use to be a constant possibility, but not so many that their use becomes too easy. It’s a delicate balance that’s been well maintained. In addition, some player abilities allow mutual aid, as do some items. Finally, players will sometimes want to tactically team up to fight the villain; this is specifically allowed by monsters who require multiple skill tests to overcome, ensuring that the greatest cooperation occurs at the most dramatically appropriate time.

Surprisingly, some elements in the game also discourage cooperation. The rogue’s ability to backstab monsters only applies when he’s on his own; while some later supplements include monster effects that hit everyone at the same locations (encouraging players to spread out). In order for this sort of cooperative disincentive to work, there needs to be strong incentives to balance them; absent that, the strategic cooperation often wins out over the tactical cooperation in the Pathfinder ACG.

Adventure System

The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game has some of the strongest adventure game elements in the entire cooperative field — which is unsurprising because it’s derived from the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (2009).

That begins with the character, which is individually defined, has lots of special abilities, and can improve over time. This is all enabled by Pathfinder’s unique card game system: though a player’s character sheet defines a few abilities and which cards a character can have, the actual cards define the majority of a character’s powers in play. During a game, players gain new cards, but they must drop back down to their limits at the end of each session. However, characters will still be improving from this influx of cards because they’ll constantly be throwing out less powerful ones and keeping more powerful ones (or at least more complementary ones). A character’s ability to grow over many sessions of cooperative play is what really makes the adventure system of Pathfinder stand out.

The Pathfinder ACG also contains a simple-test system: players are given a target number for a task, then get to throw a pool of dice which is defined by a character’s base stats, his equipment, and other card play. This same system is used for acquiring new cards, defeating monsters, and overcoming barriers.

Finally, Pathfinder is strong in its creation of an evocative world. This is built on its use of scenarios — which not only define the ongoing story of an “adventure path”, but also list which locations, villains, and henchmen to use in the game. The powers of those specific cards then influence how the game plays out. Beyond that, the individual cards all add color to the game.

Expansions & Variants

The trick with a scenario-based cooperative game is to ensure that it remains fresh. The Pathfinder ACG manages this with an ongoing stream of Adventure Decks. Each “adventure path” starts out with a big box of cards, which is then supplemented with six Adventure Decks — each of which features a total of 110 new cards to freshen up the play decks. This is a good model because it introduces variety to both the goals and the cards that the players see; it also allows the game to ramp up in difficulty over an extended period of play.

The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game has proven quite popular, and as a result four different adventure paths were released for this original incarnation of the game: Rise of the Runelords (2013), Skull & Shackles (2014), Wrath of the Righteous (2015), and Mummy’s Mask (2016). A new Core Set (2019?) is planned to revamp the game, introducing more cooperation and more story; the fifth adventure path, Curse of the Crimson Throne (2019?), will then supplement the updated game system.

Final Thoughts

Pathfinder Adventure Card Game is an extremely innovative deckbuilding game. However, it’s a bit more staid as a cooperative release. Its location-based challenge system and its piecemeal cooperative system both work well, but they don’t bring a lot of novelty to the category. Instead you can see the influence of classics like Arkham Horror (1987, 2005, 2018), which follow similar play patterns.

With that said, Pathfinder Adventure Card Game offers one notable cooperative design expansion: the cooperative campaign. Players level up their adventure gaming characters over dozens of play sessions and while doing so face ever-improving monsters and villains. Though there’s clear victory (or defeat) at the end of each session, there’s also constant momentum as players struggle to improve at the speed required by the oncoming Adventure Decks. No one else has tried to create an ongoing cooperative game of this sort (though obviously, it shares elements with legacy games); it shows the exciting directions that cooperative gaming could go in.

Mike Selinker

Selinker is an American game designer with an extensive professional career in the industry. He started creating puzzles for Games Magazine in 1985, worked for Wizards of the Coast from 1995-2003 and with Paizo Publishing from 2006-2009. He also formed his own game design studio, Lone Shark Games, in 2003 and turned it into a publishing company in 2015.

Selinker has done a lot of co-op work over the years. Besides co-designing Betrayal at House on the Hill (2004) while at Wizards, Selinker has also led the industry in adventure co-op design at Lone Shark. Following the creation of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game (2013) for Paizo, he co-designed the Apocrypha Adventure Card Game (2017) and Thornwatch (2018) there.