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-
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.