The Captain is Dead, which we studied two weeks ago, has a sequel, “Lockdown”, a standalone game that uses the same core system. However, whereas we thought the design of The Captain is Dead was wildly successfully (in large part due to its great theming), we found Lockdown lacking (in large part due to its difficulty).

The Captain is Dead: Lockdown by  JT Smith & Jamie Vrbsky

Publisher: AEG (2018)
Cooperative Style: True Co-Op
Play Style: Action Point, Adventure Game, Card Management

Overview

This sequel to The Captain is Dead (2017) reuses many of its game systems but in a new environment with new challenges. Now, the characters are being held prisoner in an alien prison, and they must steal a ship and escape before the aliens take notice of them and kill them all.

Challenge System

The Captain is Dead: Lockdown reuses the core mechanics of the original game system. After each player-turn, a new alert card causes something bad to happen. These alerts are previewable (if the Surveillance system is online) and they’re overridable (if certain resources are spent). They’re also stacked to create decay — which is to say, Lockdown contains all of the more interesting challenge elements of the original game.

There are also two major additions to the challenge system.

First, the game is full of aliens. In fact, almost every alert adds aliens to the game. This actually tends to make the alerts much less interesting, because they’re so repetitive. There is some variety, with five different sorts of aliens, but they tend to broadly have the same effects. (For a little more variety, one of the alien types also “patrols”, moving around the board in a simple circuit.)

Second, there’s a major new tally threat: concealment. A multitude of actions (but especially killing aliens, getting caught by aliens, and hacking systems to bring them online) cause the concealment to decrease, and if it drops to zero, the aliens start shooting to kill.

Together, the aliens and the concealment effectively expand the original Captain is Dead challenge system into a full simulation, since it now has effects that are removed from the card input by one or two levels of indirection. For example, an alert may summon a patroller alien, which may then move into a room where a character is hiding, causing the concealment level to drop, and this may cause the aliens to go into berserk end-game mode. It’s a nice lesson in how to develop simple card draws into a more complete simulation by a layering of rules.

With that said, the Lockdown variant of the Captain is Dead challenge system also has some issues.

First, it’s quite fiddly. Developing a challenge system always creates potential problems because it’s players who have to play out the simulation. Pandemic (2008) and Flash Point: Fire Rescue (2011) demonstrate how to make simulations easy and playable, in large part because their simulations flow out from obvious starting points. Pandemic: Rising Tide (2017), which has the potential for water suddenly overflowing everywhere at any time, is more challenging. Lockdown is unfortunately in the latter category — not because the simulation is particularly complex, but instead because it’s poorly supported by the components. The board can be filled with aliens of all different sorts, and they mostly look pretty similar, which makes it hard to pick out the patrollers; their patrol path is also not as obvious as it should be.

Second, Lockdown is a much more difficult game than The Captain is Dead, in large parts because of the limitations that it places on actions. Though there are certainly very difficult co-ops games that can be fun, with Orléans: Invasion (2015) being a prime example, Lockdown’s style of difficulty, which not only focuses on limitations, but also makes the impending loss very obvious, isn’t necessarily one of those.

Third, the game is designed so that the difficulty can in part be overcome by relatively simple actions, and this creates preset strategies. For example, the players must immediately do something to halt the decreases of the Concealment track, or they’re doomed. In fact, the randomness of the card draws in Lockdown doesn’t feel that important in balance to the preset strategies that must be conducted, and since unpredictability and uncertainty are two primary requirements of cooperative design, this leaves the game somewhat lacking.

Challenge System Elements: Turn Activation; Card Trigger (with Preview); Simulation; Decay; Environmental & Removal Consequences; and Tally, Combat & Skill Threats.

Cooperative System

Limitations often make cooperative systems great: they can keep the gameplay from being too easy and they can help to give each player autonomy. Unfortunately, limitations can also be used excessively, as happens in Lockdown, and this can damage a game rather than improve it.

The biggest limitations in Lockdown are the aliens: they leap upon characters who are not in their starting location. The dramatically restricts the strategic play of Lockdown because players now tend to primarily do the things that they can do in their starting locations — a trend that is often amplified by the strong specialization of the characters. The result is that the players have a lot less choice: an admiral might stay in the Mess Hall to draw improvised plans, a Science Officer might stay in the Maintenance Room to research, etc. (This was certainly somewhat the case in The Captain is Dead, bit it’s even moreso in Lockdown.) The excess of aliens also means that players either have to kill aliens or teleport away to do anything at all, another major limitation!

The other big limitation in Lockdown centers on that Concealment system. It penalizes many of the strategic actions that players might want to take, such as killing aliens and hacking systems (and, as noted, moving away from a character’s starting area). If the Concealment level gets too low, then players might no longer feel empowered to take these actions that destroy what’s essentially a cooperative resource.

Overall, the limitations in Lockdown drive players to narrowly defined choices, which are weighted even more heavily due to character specializations, and in the worst cases make players feel like they can do nothing at all. Though limitations are certainly a vital element of cooperative design, when they go too far, they can start negatively impacting both agency and fun, and Lockdown trends quite far in that directions (though different players will likely have different reactions to the tight constraints).

Adventure System

Much like The Captain is Dead, Lockdown has a great adventure system, focused on evocative characters, appropriate system-actions, and a fun story. However, whereas The Captain is Dead was in danger of constraining player actions with character roles, Lockdown makes that possibility much stronger, primarily through its other limitations.

Expansions & Variants

Lockdown is the sequel to The Captain is Dead. It was released in an earlier edition by The Game Crafter (2017) before its publication by AEG.

Final Thoughts

Quite simply, Lockdown feels like it took a well-balanced system and made it too complex. The new challenge elements are intriguing additions that made the game less manageable, but the new limitations constrain the game so tightly that they remove agency.

“[The Captain is Dead] does not have the random exponential escalation effect. Instead, each card in the alert deck has a specific bad thing that happens, and there are a specific number of yellow cards, a specific number of orange cards, and a specific number of red cards. That means that the game will always escalate in a more controlled manner. In Pandemic if you happen to get unlucky with your draw, you can get really bad outbreaks really early in the game.”

—JT Smith, June 2014, “JT Smith on The Captain is Dead”, The Inquisitive Meeple, https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/31181/jt-smith-captain-dead

By this point, there have been a shocking number of Pandemic games. Some slightly vary the original formula, while others move increasingly far away. We expect to look at most of them over time, because variations to an an existing system are one of the most intriguing ways to examine the evolution of a game design.

This article originally appeared on the Meeples Together blog.

Pandemic — Reign of Cthulhu by Chuck D. Yager

Publisher: Z-Man Games (2016)
Cooperative Style: True Co-Op
Play Style: Action Point, Card Management, Set Collection

Overview

The players take on the role of various investigators who are trying to close four gates that are destroying the world. As in Pandemic (2008) they must balance removing  cultists and shoggoths (to avoid losing the game) and collecting sets of cards (to ensure winning the game). However, this is more than just a retheme, as Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu features a few new threats, such as Old Ones and a sanity die.

Challenge System

Reign of Cthulhu is built on the challenge system from Pandemic with a number of tweaks. Most obviously, there’s just one type of cultist, not four, and they don’t actually overflow when they replicate. Instead, a fourth cultist in a location generates an awakening ritual, which results in the appearance of an Old One.

Old Ones are a major new threat that introduce both environmental effects and a countdown to DOOM. As such, they’re a nice addition to Pandemic, because the varied environmental effects introduce interesting uncertainty and variability to the game.

And what’s that shoggoth do? It creates an obstacle on the board that will move toward one of the gates … where it will summon yet another Old One into the game.The “epidemic” cards of Pandemic have become “evil stirs” cards, and they’re also slightly different. Besides resetting the draw deck for where cultists appear (and adding cultists to a new location) they also advance the Old One count and add a shoggoth to the board.

The repeated use of Old Ones in the gameplay shows how to take a new mechanic and thoroughly integrate it into the game. In Reign of Cthulhu these Old Ones have practically become the main threat, because they can appear in so many different ways — though you can still lose the game by running out of cultists, shoggoths, or cards.

Challenge Elements: Turn Activation; Card Trigger; Simulation; Decay; Environmental & Removal Consequences; Task Threat.

Cooperative System

The cooperative systems of Reign of Cthulhu are almost identical to Pandemic with one major difference: the clue cards that you need to close the gates are now tied to general areas rather than to specific locations. This makes card trading much easier, and thus a more important part of the game.

The reason for this change may have been partially to simplify the game, but it also seems pretty important for balancing the increased difficulty introduced by the shoggoths and Old Ones.

Adventure System

Cthulhu games generally have great theming, and Reign of Cthulhu is no exception. In fact, it’s a great example of how to add strong theming to an otherwise abstract game. The Old Ones are the most thematic element, with strong art working together with special powers that reflect the monsters. However, the game’s relic cards and its investigators also show how to integrate strong theming with adventure game elements — primarily through colorful descriptions and evocative powers that match those elements.

Final Thoughts

Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu is a mild revamp of Pandemic that shows how to link new mechanics to an existing system, how to balance difficulty, and how to introduce evocative adventure game elements. Though there’s nothing particularly innovative, it’s a good design.

Chuck D. Yager

Chuck Yager is a video game producer who also designs board games for fun. He’s obviously a Lovecraftian fan, as he previously produced Rise of Cthulhu (2015), a small press two-player Cthulhu card game. However, Reign of Cthulhu is his most popular game to date by far.

Forbidden Sky was the game that we really wanted to include in Meeples Together, but it came out too late in the year for it to meet our schedule. So, consider this a true addendum to Chapter 4, where we offered case studies of Pandemic, Forbidden Island, and Forbidden Desert.

This article was originally published in the Meeples Together blog.

Forbidden Sky by Matt Leacock

Publisher: Gamewright (2018)
Cooperative Style: True Co-Op
Play Style: Action Point, Tile Laying

Overview

The players take on the roles of space archaeologists exploring a secret power platform. They must build an electrical circuit to power a rocket ship. But, a storm has overtaken the platform, and it may electrocute the explorers or blow them off the platform, sending them plunging to their death.

Challenge System

The basics of the Forbidden Sky challenge system look very familiar. At the end of each player’s turn, there’s an arbitrary (card) trigger of the challenge system, causing bad things to happen, with the number of cards drawn increasing over time. However, Leacock has built a very different set of challenges upon this familiar chassis.

Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert were both about the decay of the game board, as tiles disappeared or as sand piled up. Forbidden Sky is instead about the decay of the characters, as their health weakens due to lightning strikes and as their ropes fray due to wind-driven falls. In other words, players largely face death-tally threats in Forbidden Sky, something that was touched upon in Forbidden Desert with its water system, but which is otherwise largely absent from both the Forbidden and Pandemic games.

However, there’s a bit more depth to Forbidden Sky’s two sorts of death-tally threats:

First, both threats are highly manageable. The lightning threat strikes lightning rods on the platform, then travels along wires, hitting everyone on those tiles. This means that players can not only avoid the tiles which are threatened by lightning, but they can also cooperatively expand the platform in such a way as to minimize the lightning strikes. Similarly, the wind threat only endangers players who are standing at the edges of the platform.

Second, the wind threat also has a secondary effect: it introduces chaotic uncertainty to the game. Though players can somewhat assess where they’re likely to be blown by wind, they never know when wind will strike, and it also has the possibility of changing directions. Where most challenge systems offer results that are absolutely bad for the characters, Forbidden Sky’s wind threat is a refreshing change: if the players are very careful, they can actually harness the wind threat for good, by having it help them along the way.

As in Forbidden Desert, the randomness of the challenge cards is carefully controlled: there’s a specific number of each sort of card in the deck, which the players can easily count, thus knowing what dangers lie ahead. The card that causes the players to shuffle the deck also stops the challenge system for the turn, ensuring that card counters aren’t put back on their heels. But, later in the game, when two or more cards are drawn at a time, there’s still the possibility of surprise from the arbitrariness of the cards: most notably, the wind can suddenly change directions, then blow characters off the platform when they thought they were safe!

Challenge System Elements: Turn Activation; Card Trigger; Simulation; Decay; Environmental Consequences; and Tally Threats.

Cooperative System

Forbidden Sky is another of the rare tile-laying genre of co-ops, where drawing and placing tiles on the board to form the map is the core gameplay: Sub Terra (2017) was another recent example.

Leacock takes full advantage of the tile laying system by very cleverly having tiles possess only portions of the components that the players need to form an electrical circuit and win the game. So, an individual tile might possess half of a small capacitor or a quarter of a large capacitor or launch pad. Players then need to strategically work together to place tiles in such a way that complete components are created. Additionally, they work strategically to wire together those components into a complete circuit. There’s almost no possibility for tile trading, so this turns the game into a strategic puzzle, with each player holding only some of the pieces.

It’s a pretty good representation of a core theory of co-op design, which Meeples Together describes as: “Spread the pieces out among the players, then give them the opportunity to bring those puzzle pieces together.” Of course, the book was speaking more theoretically then this wonderfully physical and concrete design.

The tile laying of Forbidden Sky can also be entirely pitiless: if the players don’t lay down their tiles well, leaving gaps in their circuitry where things didn’t connect up, they can create a platform that’s fundamentally impossible to wire together (or at least impractical). Without careful play, players can find they’ve lost before the game is over, which isn’t a lot of fun.

Beyond the tile laying, Forbidden Sky’s core cooperative elements are as familiar as its challenge chassis: players use action points to move and to take crucial actions. But again, the result is very different: it’s strategic in a different way, focusing on connecting up tiles rather than dealing with distant threats.

Adventure System

Like its predecessors, Forbidden Sky has specialized characters, an evocative setting, and a gaming plot that supports rising action (once more: everyone must return to the ship at the end). It also contains an entirely unique element: an electric rocket ship that actually makes noises if you connect up your circuit correctly. Well, theoretically: as long as the wires are all placed carefully and the battery is set in correctly.

Final Thoughts

Matt Leacock is a star co-op designer, and Forbidden Sky shows how he can use his cooperative infrastructure to create totally different sorts of play. The challenge system is interesting for its focus on a death tally and on chaotic interference while the cooperative system is intriguing for its use of tiles as literal puzzle pieces. As with most Leacock designs, Forbidden Sky offers a master’s class in co-op design.

“In Forbidden Island the deal is that the tiles in the game are disappearing as you play … in Desert they’re shifting around and the sand is building up so you’ve got shifting tiles, so we wanted to do something different with the tiles, so this is a bit of an exploration game: you’re building the tiles as you explore.”
—Matt Leacock, 2017, “Matt Leacock Interview and Design Discussion”, One Stop Co-op Shop, http://www.geeksundergrace.com/tabletop/interviews-tabletop/interview-with-matt-leacock-designer-of-pandemic/

The hidden team games are an interesting adjacent space for co-op design, both for the cooperative mechanics of their team-based play and for the introduction of deduction, something that any traitors game could learn from. So over the rest of October we’ll be looking at a pair of hidden teams games.

This article was originally published in the Meeples Together blog.

Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space by Mario Porpora, Pietro Righi Riva, Luca Francesco Rossi, and Nicolò Tedeschi

Publisher: Santa Ragione (2010, 2016)
Cooperative Style: Hidden Teams
Play Style: Hidden Movement

Overview

The humans are trying to escape! The aliens are trying to kill them! And you are secretly either a human or an alien. Your moves are secret too, though you’ll sometimes reveal your true location and sometimes a false location, based on which cards you draw when exploring. Humans win individually if they escape, and aliens win collectively if they eat up all the tasty human morsels.

Cooperative System

Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space is obviously reminiscent of Bang! (2003), the first hidden teams game of the modern era, and before it Werewolf (1986, 1997). They’re all about figuring out which team everyone is on, and then killing off your adversaries. However, Escape focuses a lot more on its deduction— though it’s deduction that’s somewhat tangential to the teams themselves.

Deduction tends to be the first cooperative design element of hidden teams games: it traditionally focuses on whether players can mechanically determine which team another character is on. In Escape, a few of the core actions (playing an item and making an attack) largely reveal which team a player is on. Unlucky draws of movement cards can also do so. It’s all quite rote (and very black and white).

So, the role deduction in Escape is somewhat limited on its own, but fortunately there’s another super-star deduction mechanic: Escape’s hidden movement system. The fact that a player can either reveal a real or a fake location, depending on the draw of a card, allows for both bluffing and deduction regarding where a player actually is. This dovetail nicely dovetails with the hidden teams, allowing for some more thoughtful role deduction as a result: a locations might reveal which team a player is on or it might obscure it (depending on how good a job the player is doing with the hidden movement). It’s a combination that’s rarely been used, but fits together well.

The second cooperative design element of a hidden teams game tends to be whether players can work together. Unfortunately, this isn’t as strong as Escape’s two-tier deduction system. As it turns out, the humans have almost no incentive to work together because they win individually. Meanwhile, the aliens can work together once they verify who’s on their team, but the rules are silent on what they’re allowed to say. If the aliens just generally talk about which areas they’re moving to and what they’re going to do, all is well. But, if they’re allowed to state the exact sectors they’re moving to, then the game loses one of its vital balances: the ability for aliens to accidentally kill each other. Escape very much needs a detail limitation in its communication rules, but doesn’t have one.

There’s one last weird quirk to Escape’s cooperative play: a winning condition unlike almost anything in the cooperative world — at least when using its classic “Infection” rules or its standard rules set in the Ultimate Edition (2016). The aliens all win if they kill all the humans … but any humans killed become aliens. That suggests that either everyone wins during any game in which the aliens win, or at worst only the last human loses. Fans of the game have tried to come up with alternatives, like transformed aliens being “lesser winners”, but none of this is supported by the rules. This winning condition is an example both of how victory rules can undercut cooperative gameplay and how victory conditions need to be carefully defined.

No Challenge System Elements. Hidden Teams.

Adventure System

The aliens and humans each have a role that gives them a slight advantage. Unfortunately, these roles aren’t very evocative during the play of the overall game (and thus don’t really constitute an element of an adventure system). That’s in part because they tend to be secret, meaning that most of the table doesn’t see the results, and in part because they’re often one-use, meaning that they don’t have any ongoing effect.

The roles are also unbalanced: some have one-use effects that might never be used, while others have continuous effects that can offer minor but ongoing benefits. This type of unbalance is usually a poor choice in an adventure game, unless it’s a purposeful design element — perhaps one that encourages or molds cooperation in some way. (Escape’s roles don’t.)

Final Thoughts

Escape is a pretty terrific hidden movement game, but unfortunately that’s where its focus tends to be, not on the hidden teams / cooperative play. A hidden teams and movement game could be a great combo, and in fact Escape’s hidden moves give a little depth to its role deduction, but beyond that Escape’s cooperative elements are relatively weak.

Santa Ragione

Pietro Righi Riva is the studio director of Santa Ragione, a “micro game design studio” in Italy, while Nicolò Tedeschi is its director. The studio has mostly put out computer games, with Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space being their one tabletop release.

We’ve just passed by the night of masks and false faces, so it seems appropriate that we’re talking about another hidden teams game (and one that feels like a natural successor to Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space, which we discussed two weeks ago).

As it happens, we’ve played a number of hidden team games since the publication of Meeples Together, and we’ve still got a few classics to touch upon as well. We don’t want to take away from the full co-op games that are the core of the book, but we will be returning with a few other games of this sort in January. 

This article was originally published on the Meeples Together blog.

Blood Bound by Kalle Krenzer

Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games (2013)
Cooperative Style: Hidden Teams
Play Style: Take That

Overview

You’re a vampire of the secretive Rose or Beast clan. They’re so secretive that you don’t even know who the other members of your clan are! Instead, you must engage in deduction by stabbing the other characters with a knife. Your eventual goal is to identify the leader of the opposing clan and capture them — but if you capture the wrong vampire, your whole clan loses!

Cooperative System

Blood Bound is obviously a descendent of team games such as Werewolf (1986, 1997) and Bang! (2003), but it may share the most interesting similarities with Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space (2010): both are elimination-focused hidden teams games that layer a second level of deduction atop the typical role deduction.

Role deduction is always a core element in hidden teams game. Unlike games such as Bang!, Saboteur (2004), and Werewolf, which only support role deduction through assessment of game activity, Blood Bound has an actual deductive system: each character has two  affiliation tokens and one rank token that identify that character. The core action of the game, stabbing another character, reveals one of these identity tokens each time a character takes a wound. It’s a simple system, but the ambiguity of some of the tokens means that many of the characters are never entirely identified, requiring players to meld this mechanics-based deduction with the more typical assessment of player actions.

On its own, Blood Bound’s role deduction would be interesting, but it rises up to the next level because the game also contains rank deduction: each character has a rank between 1 and 9, with between three and six ranks appearing on each team in a game (depending on the number of players). The players know that the lowest ranked character is the leader, but not only don’t they know what everyone’s rank is at start, but they also don’t know which rank is the lowest. In an eight-player game, with four players per team, the rank “2” character is probably the leader (unless there’s a “1” in the game), but and less obviously a “6” could be. This means that players often have to weigh what they know and what they’ve deduced against probability — which is a good design for a hidden teams game because it forces players to make decisions when everything is shades of gray. (In our opinion, a hidden teams game where you’re able to deduce most of the roles by the end of the game is superior to one where you always deduce all of them.)

The other major element of hidden teams games, the ability to work together, does get some attention in Blood Bound, even if it isn’t as intricate of a system as the deduction. Obviously, players can work together to kill (capture) their opponents, just like in Bang! or Werewolf. There’s also an ability to “intervene”, throwing yourself in front a knife meant for someone else, which can help keep your leader safe (assuming you’ve deduced correctly). Finally, each player has a special ability, and a number of these can be used to help fellows or hurt opponents — and again are made more interesting by how often players are not 100% sure of their assessments.

Finally, Blood Bound contains a “deductive cue” to get things started: at the beginning of the game each player grants a “clue” to the player to his left: he shows them a corner of his card, which contains an icon that probably shows which team he’s on. Giving player this sort of starting cue helps them make more thoughtful deductions and take more meaningful actions; it compares favorably to a more classic game like Bang!, where the first player is forced to take a shot, not knowing who most of the players are.

A deductive cue also offers the ability to provide information (or misinformation) to the rest of the table. Players assume that their fellows will take certain actions based on what they know — and that can be used to benefit one team or hurt the other, but it can also be used to throw the rest of the players off the scent.

No Challenge System Elements. Hidden Teams.

Adventure System

The theming of Blood Bound as a vampire fight is very shallow. Though there are nine ranks, each with their own title and special ability, neither that nor the game’s theming makes it much of an adventure game.

Final Thoughts

Blood Bound has a strong deductive system that shows what you can do when you focus a game entirely on deduction. In particular, it shows how much uncertainty you can allow in a game that focuses on hidden teams (or traitors), while still allowing players a good chance at figuring things out, and it demonstrates the benefits of doing so.

Kalle Krenzer

Kalle Krenzer has designed just one game: Blood Bound for Fantasy Flight Games. It received good attention when demoed at Heidelberger Spieleevent 2012 and was a 2014 Kennerspiel des Jahres Recommended game.

The overlord category of co-ops gets a decent amount of attention in Meeples Together, but we probably could have written a whole chapter on how overlords interact with the challenge machinery of a co-op game. Instead, we offer up this case study, our first to discuss an overlord game. It describes one of the foundational games in the modern overlord category, and also outline how overlords and challenge systems work together.

This article originally appeared in Meeples Together.

Descent — Journeys in the Dark 1e by Kevin Wilson

Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games (2005)
Cooperative Style: Overlord
Play Style: Adventure, Combat

Overview

In Descent: Journeys in the Dark, players take on the roles of heroes who are venturing forth on dangerous quests. Each of these quests is codified in a scenario that tells the overlord how to lay out rooms and monsters. The game is then played out as tactical combat, with the heroes trying to fight their way to the end of the scenario while the overlord tries to slay them.

Challenge System

Descent was the first major overlord-driven co-op of the euro-influenced wave of games that followed the release of Lord of the Rings (2000). However, its design for how its overlord interacts with the challenge game system largely follows in the footsteps of older co-ops such as HeroQuest (1989).

This interaction comes from the overlord filling two major roles.

The overlord’s true interaction with the challenge machinery comes from his second major role, as a fighter. Here we truly see how an overlord can work as a cog amidst the challenge gears.First, the overlord acts as an administrator: each scenario describes a dungeon with different areas separated by doors. Whenever a door is opened, the overlord places rooms, corridors, monsters, and treasures according to the design of the scenario. There’s also a minor storytelling role here: the overlord is instructed to read color text when each new area is unveiled (and also when certain events occur). Neither of these roles is a very interesting part of the challenge machinery: the players could just as easily do this placement themselves if they could be protected from seeing information that they shouldn’t — as Fantasy Flight has managed in some of their later, app-driven co-ops, such as Mansions of Madness 2e (2016).

Like many co-ops that derive from the roleplaying side of gaming, the overlord in Descent activates just once a round, after all the heroes’ turns. This is pretty important for overlord play because an overlord shouldn’t go too often, lest they impact everyone else’s fun.

After the overlord is activated, he has an overlord trigger, meaning that he makes the decision about which bad things happen. But, that’s not the whole story. The overlord can only play cards that he draws, which effectively introduces a card trigger to the equation: it’s just hidden from the other players, because only the overlord gets to see those cards before they’re played. There’s also a simulation at play, because the overlord is spawning monsters, which he’ll then activate and move toward the players. (Their activation isn’t automated as in similar co-ops that don’t have an overlord, such as the Dungeons & Dragons Adventure System games, but nonetheless their movements and attacks will often be pretty set, depending on the powers of the monsters and the position of the heroes.)

Descent doesn’t contain much decay, which is another standard for overlord play: because the overlord is more explicitly a competitor, the game can’t be too unfairly biased toward him. As for cascade, the closest is a system of resource-driven ebbs and flows. The overlord has to pay for his card plays with the “threat” resource, which he gains every round. He can continuously play it to generate constant pressure, but he can also save it up to suddenly hit the players with multiple problems (or one big problem) all at once. So, it’s a uniquely player-driven style of cascade, where the overlord decides when everything spins out of control.

Generally, one can model overlord-driven challenge machinery as a system of inputs and outputs with the overlord sitting at the middle. Here, he receives cards, resources, and a round-limited activation as inputs and he outputs monsters and consequences that then link into a monster simulation and can create cascades.

Challenge System Elements: Round Activation; Arbitrary Trigger; Overlord Trigger; Simulation; Linear Cascade; Overlord; and Combat Threats.

Cooperative System

Descent is a game of tactical combat, and so the majority of its cooperation occurs via that mechanism. This cooperation is enabled by the specialization of the heroes, which mainly focuses on how they fight. Tanks stand up front and use their armor to shield the rest of the party, while more vulnerable spellcasters and archers attack from afar. Together, they group damage to try and kill monsters in the most efficient way possible. It’s a simplistic method of cooperation, but the complexity of the game board creates tough tactical decisions.

Adventure System

Contrariwise, Descent has a very intricate adventure system.

Each character is defined by a character card (which includes ten attributes), three skill cards (which grant special abilities), and a number of equipment cards (which mostly aid the character in combat). This creates quite a high level of specialization for each character.

The game’s skill-test system is based on carefully manufactured dice. This is quite a clever design, because the players don’t have to learn special rules for figuring out when they hit their foes: they just roll the dice and read the results.

A “miss” result (or its lack) determines the overall success of the dice, while “damage” results measure the total number of hits; this means that the more dice a character rolls, the more damage he does, all without requiring special rules for more proficient warriors: they just roll more dice. Special “power surge” results integrate special powers: a character uses any surges rolled to pay for those special abilities. Finally, ranged attacks roll special dice that include “range” results, which are added together to measure how far the character could fire; this is yet another clever and intuitive integration: better ranged fighters will roll more dice, which will allow them to hit from further away.

Since Descent’s skill-test system is focused on combat, it doesn’t have the breadth of some other adventure games, but its use of special dice to model the usage of special powers and the advantages of proficiency remains unmatched even more than a decade later.

Expansions & Variants

Descent reimplements the game system from Doom: The Boardgame (2004), adapting it for dungeon play. The two games remain close cousins.

Descent has also been much expanded. Most of its supplements add new rules, new scenarios, and piles of new plastic monsters to fight. These include: The Well of Darkness (2006), The Altar of Despair (2007), and The Tomb of Ice (2008).

Descent 1e’s Road to Legend (2008) expansion marked a larger change — and also a turning point for the whole co-op category. Road to Legend introduced rules that allowed players to engage in many sessions of tactical combat, all connected together as a campaign, lasting perhaps 40 hours in total. Back in 2008, the idea of being able to pack up a game and return to it was all but unprecedented. Road to Legend managed it by using a campaign board to link together all of the adventures and by providing boxes that could be used to store a character’s cards and markers. As a first in its class, Road to Legend was a bit unpolished, suffering in particular from problems with maintaining balance over time, but it was still an amazing innovation.

No other game has repeated Road to Legend’s idea of simply breaking a game down into bite-sized scenes, allowing for sessions as short or long as desired. However, the concept of campaign games has proliferated, particularly in card-based campaign such as the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game (2013) and in legacy games beginning with Risk Legacy (2011), which spawned co-op campaign releases such as Pandemic Legacy (2015, 2017, 2020?). Fantasy Flight themselves repeated the campaign idea for Descent 1e in Sea of Blood (2009), though it reportedly had even more game balance problems.

The whole Descent line has since been revamped in Descent: Journeys in the Dark second edition (2012).

Final Thoughts

By reimplementing the Doom: The Boardgame (2004) system, Descent 1e became the first of the new dungeon delve co-ops. It (and Doom before it) in turn followed in the footsteps of HeroQuest, redefining its classic gameplay — with an overlord laying out set scenarios and controlling combat threats, while the other players cooperate mainly through tactical combat — while applying more precise eurogame mechanics. Many more games of this sort have followed, from the flicking Catacombs (2010) to the three-dimensional Attack of Titan: The Last Stand (2017), from the overlord-free Masmorra: Dungeons of Arcadia (2017) to the Legacy-hit Gloomhaven (2017). But this is where you can find the core concepts that defined the category of play.

“When I designed Descent 1st ed., I purposely started the quests easier for the heroes at first, and then ramped them up over time because of the violent reactions some folks had to Doom’s difficulty. It’s tricky to gauge that sort of thing because no two gaming groups are the same, and that makes the 50/50 win ratio that some expect kind of impossible, assuming it’s even a worthwhile goal.”

—Kevin Wilson, January 2012, “Interview with Board Game Designer Kevin Wilson”, Cheerful Ghost, https://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/666/interview-with-board-game-designer-kevin-wilson

The Resistance by Don Eskridge

Publisher: Indie Boards & Games (2010)
Cooperative Style: Hidden Teams
Play Style: Voting

Overview

In The Resistance players are secretly divided into one team of rebels and one team of spies. Though the spies know which team everyone is on, the rebels do not.

Gameplay centers on missions that are assigned by a rotating leader. Each leader chooses a fraction of the players around the table to join the mission. The players then openly vote whether to OK the members for the mission. Once a mission has been OKed, its members secretly vote to determine whether the mission succeeds or fails — and a single act of sabotage causes the mission to fail!

The rebels are trying to succeed at three missions before the spies cause three missions to fail.

Cooperative System

Most hidden teams games divide their play into two parts: deduction gameplay where players figure out who their teammates are and action gameplay where the teammates then try to work together. The Resistance offers an interesting change: each of the two teams tend to focus on just one side of this equation.

For rebels, The Resistance is all about figuring out who your teammates are. The rebels do this via deduction — based upon who voted for each mission and which missions (mysteriously) failed.

Because it’s so simple, The Resistance does a great job of showing how much information can be acquired from such a minimal source: the players have a maximum of four missions to figure out what’s going on. This minimalism nicely spotlights the deductive side of hidden-teams play.

(Why don’t spies deduce? Because just like the werewolves in Werewolf, they get to open up their eyes at the start of the game and see their team.)

For spies, The Resistance is all about sabotaging missions without appearing suspicious. This means that spies have to put other spies on missions for what seem like good reasons, and they have to figure out when to play failure cards in such a way that they (and their fellow spies) don’t look too guilty. There are so few choices that each one is quite important.

All of the votes for the success of a mission are randomized, but rebels can slowly start to deduce who might have played which cards as different subsets of players take part in different missions — which is what requires spies to play carefully together. This is the same successful design used in Battlestar Galactica (2008) — but massively simplified as is appropriate for a smaller, tighter game.

(Why don’t rebels work together? Well, they do, but they have an obvious choice if they can manage the deduction: choose fellow rebels for missions and support the missions. As in Saboteur, the teams are unbalanced, with fewer saboteur/spies, so there are always enough rebels to win … if they choose correctly.)

No Challenge System Elements. Hidden Teams.

Expansions & Variants

The Resistance has an almost identical variant game called The Resistance: Avalon (2012), which moves everything to King Arthur’s court.

Meanwhile, if there’s an alternative way to manage hidden teams, it probably appears in one of the Resistance expansions: Hidden Agenda (2014), Hostile Intent (2014), or The Plot Thickens (2016).

Giving individual players special powers is a popular mechanism that first appeared with characters like the Seer in Werewolf (1986). Thus, The Resistance has some traditional characters-with-powers, such as Hostile Intent’s Inquisitor and Hidden Agenda’s Commander, each of which has informational advantages, and Hostile Intent’s Reverser, who has an action-based power.

However, The Resistance offers an interesting twist on character powers in The Plot Thickens, which includes cards that a leader must give to another player to activate special powers. This implicitly introduces trust into the game, as the leader must now decide which players he really trusts, to enact certain powerful effects. It’s a great idea for hidden team games, and would work well in traitor games as well.

The other popular way to expand a hidden team game is to introduce special characters or special teams that have new or different goals than the standard two. Thus, there are Rogues in a promo set who can win on their own and Hunters and Assassins in Hostile Intent and Hidden Agenda who can help their team win by identifying opposition leaders.

Final Thoughts

The Resistance clearly comes from the Werewolf school of design, but it offers a eurogame take on the older game. The result is a cleaner game with just a little more in the way of mechanics; it also eliminates troubling elements from the original like player elimination.

From the cooperative point of view, The Resistance introduces interesting ideas that could be used in traitor-focused cooperative games — prime among them minimalism, voting, and the idea of introducing trust through the transfer of special powers.

Don Eskridge

Don Eskridge’s first designs were The Resistance (2009) and The Resistance: Avalon (2012) — plus the various expansions and supplements. After working on that for several years, he created Orange Machine Games, which has allowed him to create new negotiation and teamwork games like Abandon Planet (2017) and Black Hole Council (2018)

Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 was an amazing innovation when it was released in 2015, and it continues to be one of the newest foundational games in the co-op hobby. What made it so great? It’s not just that it broke new ground with its Legacy-campaign play, but also that it integrated that fully into its existing simulation.

This article originally appeared on Meeples Together.

Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 by Rob Daviau & Matt Leacock

Publisher: Z-Man Games (2015)
Cooperative Style: True Co-Op
Play Style: Action Point, Card Management, Legacy, Set Collection

Overview

The players take on the role of various specialists who are trying to cure four pandemic diseases that are ravaging the world. As in Pandemic (2008) they must balance removing disease cubes (to avoid losing the game) and collecting sets of cards (to win the game). However, there’s a twist: the game repeats over 12-24 sessions, with characters, the gameboard, and the rules all evolving over time.

Challenge System

Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 is built on the challenge system from Pandemic with one big change: the game evolves and changes from one session to another. Much of this comes about from careful changes to Pandemic’s simulation, linking its core model of disease to Legacy changes. For example:

• If a disease outbreak occurs in a city, then unrest begins to rise there, leading to: instability, rioting, collapse, and eventually the fall of the city. This makes the city harder and harder to access in future games.
• If a disease outbreaks occurs in a city with a character, then the character is “scarred”, receiving some disadvantage in future games.
• If a disease is cured and eradicated in a game, then the players can make the disease easier to deal with in future games through an “upgrade”.

These extensions effectively expand the gears of Season 1’s simulation from something that affects a single game to something that has repercussions in future games — which is just as innovative as Pandemic’s simulation system was when it first appeared.

There’s one other major change to the challenges in Season 1: the end-game goals are laid out by objective cards rather than a simple rule, which allows them to change over the course of the campaign, creating more variable gameplay. Though the first objective is to cure four diseases, just like in the original Pandemic, by the end of the campaign, the gameplay will be very different.

Whether the players accomplish their goals can also affect the simulation: if the players win a game, then they have fewer resources for the next game, while if they lose a game, they’ll get more resources next time. Maintaining the difficulty of a game over time has been a real issue with campaign games, with one of the main complaints with the very innovative Descent: Road to Legend (2008) campaign being that it got too easy for one side over time. Season 1 demonstrates how to use a simple but very effect method to dynamically adjust a game’s long-term difficulty based on the players’ success.

Though each game of Season 1 will evolve very differently because of its simulation-linked Legacy changes, the game also pushes its plot (and the changes to its challenge system) in a set way: between games players draw cards describing changes in the world, some of which will cause set changes to the challenge system. A disease might become incurable, epidemics might occur faster, or something totally wacky might happen. This obviously creates variability from game to game, and also keeps players on their toes.

Challenge System Elements: Turn Activation; Arbitrary Trigger; Simulation; Exponential Cascade; Decay; Campaign; and Replicating Task Threats. 

Cooperative System

The cooperative elements of Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 are largely unchanged from Pandemic, but that cooperation is now expanded to span an entire campaign, not just an individual session. To start with, there’s cooperative metagaming at the beginning of each session, when players decide which characters to use from a pool, focusing on how their special abilities will likely impact the coming challenges. There’s similarly metagaming within each session, because players must make decisions (about sunsetting a disease or letting a city outbreak) based on repercussions in future games. Finally, the players make cooperative choices between games, when they purchase upgrades for cards, characters, diseases, or the board, using a group pool of points.

Adventure System

Season 1’s Legacy rules notably expand the adventure system of Pandemic. Part of this comes through the aforementioned upgrades. At the end of each game, players can choose to make cards better, characters better, cities better, or diseases worse. The character upgrades in particular feel like “experience”, an important element of the roleplaying games from which adventure games derive. There are “downgrades” too: players can be scarred … or die! This ups the ante of the adventure-style play.

Season 1 also contains a lot of “story”. The set cards revealed after each session describe the plot of outbreaking and changing diseases. This explicit plot combines with the implicit story of simulation changes and various upgrades to add color and change to the game; players come back because they want to see what happens next!

Finally, Season 1 also revisits the concept of a campaign co-op popularized by Road to Legend and the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game (2013) and central to true “roleplaying” play, but it uses a very different model. Where Road to Legend was just a big 40-hour game broken into bite sized bits, and where Pathfinder ACG focused its campaign around selective character changes in the face of set systemic changes, Legacy instead makes systemic changes its entire game over time.

Expansions & Variants

Pandemic Legacy Season 2 (2017) followed a few years later and Pandemic Legacy Season 3 looks likely to be a 2020 release.

Final Thoughts

Pandemic was a foundational game for the co-op industry thanks to its implementation of tight, quick, abstract play. Season 1 innovates things again by introducing clever methods to expand Pandemic’s simulations to a long-term campaign.

Matt Leacock & Rob Daviau

Leacock is the creator of the original Pandemic. Daviau’s claim to fame is “Legacy” style games, the first of which was Risk Legacy (2011). They’re built around the idea that the game will change from one session to another, with players permanently marking and changing their game components (and presumably throwing out the game when it’s all played out). Pandemic Legacy was Daviau’s second Legacy game, followed later by the competitive SeaFall (2016) and the cooperative Betrayal Legacy (2018).

Pandemic Legacy was innovative enough that it’s worth talking about twice, so here’s a look at the second entry in the trilogy. And, whereas we played just a few games of Season 1, we played through the entire Season 2 campaign, with a win-loss pattern that resulted in 21 total games(!). Definitely a top co-op (and we’re looking forward to Season 3).

This article originally appeared on the Meeples Together blog.

Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 by Rob Daviau & Matt Leacock

Publisher: Z-Man Games (2017)
Cooperative Style: True Co-Op
Play Style: Action Point, Card Management, Exploration, Legacy, Set Collection

Overview

The players take on the role of various specialists who are trying to salvage a post-apocalyptic world that ended 71 years ago. As in Pandemic (2008), they’re fighting disease, and as in Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (2015), that’s part of an ongoing campaign, but there’s also a lot more story and a lot more hard choices in this sequel.

Challenge System

Matt Leacock looks at games very analytically. So, when he designed Pandemic’s close cousins, the “Forbidden” trilogy, he created one game that was about tiles being removed, one that was about tiles being moved, and one that was about tiles being added. He similarly turns Pandemic Legacy Season 1’s core mechanics on their head in Season 2: where Pandemic was previously about removing disease cubes created by the challenge system, it’s now about placing supply cubes destroyed by the challenge system (and its plague).

Season 2 again uses objective cards to lay out each session’s goals, just like Season 1. But with the game system changes, the goal can’t be about curing diseases anymore; instead the starting objective of Season 2 is to build supply centers. These are sort of the same as Pandemic’s research centers, except they’re much more expensive to build, requiring a set of five color-matched cards (which makes them an equivalent cost and an equivalent challenge to curing the diseases in the previous games).Despite this inversion, the gameplay of Season 2 still feels very similar to the original. Traveling to cities to add supply cubes is a similar logistical puzzle to traveling there to remove disease cubes, with just a few twists. First, the cubes have to be created before they can be placed, adding another step to the players’ cooperative challenge response, and second the objectives of the game have been adjusted, to accommodate the new rules.

Obviously, the objectives will again grow and change over the course of Season 2, creating variable and adaptive play, albeit play that remains focused on Pandemic’s core gameplay: collecting specific sets of cards. The most interesting objective, visible from the moment that you open the box, is the ability to “recon” new areas. Because of the post-apocalyptic setting of Season 2, players only get to see a little bit of the board at the start of the game; they then reveal more through “recons”, connect up cities that have been found, and also discover smaller secrets through “searches”. This turns the classic play of Pandemic into a new sort of exploration-focused gameplay (with the possibility of exploration activations, as you never know what you’re going to get).

Pandemic has always been one of the strongest examples of bipartite, orthogonal goal design. Traditionally, players decided between collecting sets to cure diseases (achieving long-term victory) or removing disease cubes (staving off short-term loss). Similarly, in Season 2, players must decide between collecting sets to build supply centers (achieving long-term victory) or replacing supply cubes (staving off short-term loss). As in Season 1, that’s made more complex by the question of supporting Legacy goals that will create advantages in future games, such as maintaining the populations of cities (achieving campaign-term victory). The exploration element of Season 2 adds a fourth possible goal (which is sometimes required for long-term victory and sometimes for campaign-term advantages). Somehow this isn’t overwhelming — or if it is, it’s the wonderful sort of overwhelming, where the players have so many different objectives presented to them by the challenge system that they have considerable agency to play as they see fit.

Challenge System Elements: Turn Activation; Exploration Activation; Arbitrary Trigger; Simulation; Exponential Cascade; Decay; Campaign; and Replicating Task Threats.

Cooperative System

The cooperative system of Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 works much the same as that in Season 1. Players make cooperative decisions before the game about what characters to play, within the game about both the game’s objectives and the movement toward Legacy advantages, and after the game about how to advance their characters (and the general game world).

Adventure System

As in Season 1, there are a lot of adventure system elements in Season 2, from the ever-growing characters and the ever-changing board to the ever-evolving plotline.  However, the exploration elements of Season 2 add another traditional adventure game system to Pandemic.

Expansions & Variants

Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 kicked off the storyline that continues in Pandemic Legacy: Season 2, while Pandemic Legacy: Season 3 is reportedly in process.

Final Thoughts

Pandemic and Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 were both foundational releases that, respectively, showed how to create a tight, abstract co-op and a Legacy co-op. Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 isn’t foundational in the same way, because it’s much more an incremental evolution. Nonetheless, it adapts all of the great gameplay elements of the previous games, twists them just enough to make them fresh and interesting, then introduces a totally new and evocative game system with its exploratory gameplay.

“The challenge we set out for ourselves was to make it fresh and exciting while still letting players jump right in. It’s important to me that each variant and expansion brings something original to the table and not simply be a rehash of older ideas.”
—Matt Leacock, October 2017, “Interview with Matt Leacock Designer of Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 from Z-Man Games”, The Players’ Aid, https://theplayersaid.com/2017/10/05/interview-with-matt-leacock-designer-of-pandemic-legacy-season-2-from-z-man-games/

Recently I’ve been writing about Eric Vogel’s Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game. I wrote about how it encourages players to even out resources here, then I wrote over on the Meeples Together blog about how its solo play differs from true cooperative play. When my co-author and I at Meeples Together realized that we hadn’t yet published the Meeples Together case study on the game, which is actually one of the oldest in our archive of bonus case studies, we decided we’d better do so. Here it is!

This article was originally published on the Meeples Together blog.

The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game by Eric B. Vogel

Publisher: Evil Hat Productions (2017)
Cooperative Style: True Co-Op
Play Style: Adventure(ish), Card Management, Resource Management

Overview

The players take on the roles of Chicago wizard Harry Dresden and his friends. Players each hold a very limited hand of cards that they must play to jointly kill as many Foes and solve as many Cases as they can — but they also have to manage their Fate pool, which decreases with the play of every card.

Challenge System

The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game (DFCO) focuses on a type of challenge system that’s relatively rare among cooperatives: it presents an abstract tableau of problems that the players must jointly solve. This abstract style of play is similar to that of classic The Lord of The Rings (2000) or the more recent Freedom: The Underground Railroad (2013), both of which tend to take a step-away from the adventure-style play of many co-ops. In the DFCO tableau, four types of cards are laid out: players may take Advantages that help them as a group, remove Obstacles that disadvantage everyone, or add clues to Cases or hits to Foes.

One of the most interesting aspects of the challenge system is that it lays out its “problem” cards in ranges: closer cards are easier to resolve, while further cards are often impossible to get to. This means that players must figure out how to resolve problems in an order that might not be optimal. They must also decide when to expend additional resources to reach a problem that’s “further away”, (literally) adding another dimension to the play.

Remarkably, all of the challenge cards are visible from the start — and players also receive a hand that contains almost all the cards they’ll play. This means that there isn’t any sort of random trigger, as is usually seen in cooperative games — or rather the randomness is baked in from the start of each game. During the actual play of the game, the uncertainty and indecision instead result from not knowing the contents of other players’ hands and how everyones’ plays will interact. Vogel calls it a “a get-the-task-done-before-the-resources-run-out system” as opposed to an “oppositional system”[1].

The other interesting element in DFCO’s challenge system is its “showdown”. The challenge system is designed so that players rarely can score an absolute victory before the end of the game. But at the game ends, they get to convert their remaining resources (Fate points) into die rolls, which can be used to finish off foes and solve cases. This isn’t as random as it sounds: players will usually know if they have enough Fate points to allow a roll that will solve a problem. Nonetheless, the die roll maintains tension up to the last second of the game, because players will feel like they could lose up to that final roll, because of the uncertainty implicit in the dice.

Challenge System Elements: Timer; (One-Time) Arbitrary Trigger; End-game Activation; End-game Goal; Environmental Consequences; Combat and Task Threats.

Cooperative System

Most obviously, players can cooperate through the play of cards. Each player has their own resources that they can use to solve the collective puzzle on the board. As is typical for cooperative games, this play might become too easy if the players knew precisely what resources everyone else held. There’s thus a very common limited-talking mandate: players can’t show their cards nor state specifics about their numbers.

However, card play is just part of the cooperative equation. Players are also jointly working with a community pool of Fate points. Each player can either add to the pool by discarding a card or subtract from the pool by playing a card. This often requires careful coordination so that the right people can play the right cards and it also creates a real need to frequently sacrifice, something that’s a bit rare in cooperative gaming.

Vogel says this approach allows “working together not just to take actions, but also formulating a strategy”[2]. It creates more of a “collective decision-making process” as opposed to simple collective play.

Adventure System

DFCO gives each player the role of a single character, who has unique cards that thematically match the abilities of that character from the novels. So it’s an adventure game, right? In actuality, the details are a façade over a fairly abstract game. It’s one of those games where players can really dive into the theming or not, depending on their preferences.

The lack of major adventure game tropes continues through the fact that there’s no way to improve characters (unless you count drawing additional cards), there’s no physical locale, and fundamentally there are none of the roleplaying-like activities that you find in typical adventure games.

However, the theming is definitely there — and includes not just the characters, but also the whole setup of the game: each play is a scenario based on a single book from the Dresden Files series, and the details of the individual scenarios strongly call back to the novels they’re based upon.

Final Thoughts

At its heart, DFCO is a nicely innovative cooperative game that changes the core gameplay of a cooperative to be more cooperative and more puzzle-oriented. It’s a big step away from the board-oriented adventure games that dominate the category. It’s also a surprisingly quick play, while still allowing for continued campaigning through multiple books, which is a lesson many co-ops could learn.

Eric B. Vogel

Vogel is an associate professor in clinical psychology whose first published work was a Land of Psymon: A Cognitive Psychotherapy Game (2004). He’s since published numerous games for the board game field, scattered across a wide variety of genres. The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game was his first co-op design, and is also his most successful game to date, as seen by its very strong Kickstarter. Like several of Vogel’s works at the time, it was produced by Evil Hat Productions.

[1] Appelcline, Shannon. 2016. “Co-op Interviews: Eric B. Vogel & The Dresden Files Co-op Card Game”. Mechanics & Meeples. http://www.mechanics-and-meeples.com/2016/05/09/co-op-interviews-eric-b-vogel-the-dresden-files-co-op-card-game/.

[2] Ibid.