You might like coop games if
- You enjoy playing single player games with other people.
- You’re tired of taking orders at work and it’s the only time you feel in charge.
- You’re tired of giving orders at work and just want to be told what to do.
- You thought that Britney‘s conservatorship sounded like a pretty good deal.
A coop board game victory is the participation trophy of board gaming. Congratulations, you eradicated the disease in Pandemic! This means you discussed the problem over the table and everyone mutually agreed to a rational approach to solve it using their limited actions and cards in their hand.
Reality: The person who has played the most knows the optimal strategy and tells everyone exactly how to play their turn if you want to win.
This gameplay is not fun. It does not take skill, and it does not include everyone at the table. Why pick on Pandemic, though? There are many cooperative games that fall into the same trap.
Some Bad Coop Games
Why are these “bad” coop games? None of them require cooperation mechanically. Nothing in the design of these games prevents you from playing by yourself. Sure, they have rules like “Keep your hand hidden”, but revealing your hand does not break the game.
These are bad cooperative games because they are ultimately not cooperative. They are cooperative only in the same sense that navigating from a map or assembling a jigsaw puzzle is. There’s a right answer, and all players have the information in front of them to solve it. These are puzzles. Not games.
Some Good Coop Games
Enough whining. What makes a good coop game and how could one improve these “bad” games? A good coop game has mechanisms that reinforce and require cooperation. Let’s take Space Cadets as an example.
Space Cadets is a game where the players have to work together to fly a spaceship. Each player controls one station on the ship and performs timed actions simultaneously to determine what the ship does. It’s essentially a bunch of separate mini-games. Space Cadets is a good cooperative game because:
- It requires each player to perform their own actions by playing the mini-game for their station.
- The game designates one player as “captain” who sets goals each round.
- There’s a designated planning and discussion phase which everyone participates in.
- The captain has tools to help certain players but cannot just take over.
- There’s a mechanism to rotate positions, including captain, so no one player masters their station too quickly.
Another approach to achieve cooperative game mechanics is to hide information from the other players. Codenames Duet and Hanabi do this beautifully. Each of these games would break fundamentally if information was revealed: in Codenames to your partner, and in Hanabi to yourself.
WARNING: OPINION
How could we improve Pandemic to be a better coop game? One way would be to reinforce the “hidden hand” rule by a new mechanism. Perhaps to cure a disease, instead of trading cards between players, you can spend an action to guess at what another player has in their hand. If you are correct, you get that card. To cure a disease, you’d just need sets of cards of the same color, not necessarily matching the city you are in. This would reinforce that you need to keep your hand hidden from the other players, otherwise this mechanism breaks.
OPINION OVER
Of course this change probably sucks and wouldn’t work. Any changes to a game’s mechanics would have to be play tested and tweaked.
We should expect more of coop board games. Players are robbed of fun when decisions are taken away and made for them. Coop games need more elegant rules and mechanisms that enforce cooperation, not merely suggest it.
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