Hm. I’m curious how well this extends to other cooperative games like Arkham Horror.
(I have a low opinion of Pandemic as a game because it’s a one-player game which four people play- which can work out okay if everyone has similar skill levels and tactical aptitudes, but poorly if you have players whose turns are just directed for them. It seems like a good substrate for this, though, since you’ve inserted a conflict that gets rid of the “play their turn for them” effect.)
That’s a common issue with any co-operative game, Arkham Horror included. The only ways of avoiding it that I’ve seen are either having traitors and secret information (e.g. Battlestar Galactica), or introducing time limits and such a cognitive overload that you’re lucky if you manage to play your own turn in time, let alone anyone else’s (Space Alert).
or introducing time limits and such a cognitive overload that you’re lucky if you manage to play your own turn in time, let alone anyone else’s (Space Alert).
Is this not likely to amplify the differences between players and so make it far more rational, given the seeking of a cooperative goal, to spend some time aiding allies? It is one thing to suggest tweaks for the allies to improve their play but another when the allies aren’t even able to pick up the low hanging fruit!
Yes, if some of the players are beginners, it’s often a good idea for the more experienced player to take some time out of her turn to help them. But this means that she can’t pay as much attention to her own actions.
The game is also built so that coordination between the players is of crucial importance. The way the game works is that there’s ten minutes during which the players have to plan out all of their actions. The planning is done with placing cards from your hand on the turn track in front of you, e.g. I might play a card saying “move left” to the “turn 4″ slot in front of me, and then my character will move left on the fourth turn. The information necessary for making those plans is parcelled out gradually during the ten-minute period. E.g. after four minutes of planning, it might be announced that an enemy vessel will appear on the left side of the players’ space ship on the sixth turn. The players must then adjust their plans to accomodate for this, and make sure that around the sixth turn, somebody’s character will be on the correct side of the ship to shoot down the enemy. After the ten minutes is over, the players’ plans are executed and everyone gets to see what actually happened.
Now if I’m manning the guns on the right side of the space ship, say, and I tell another player to make sure that the guns have enough energy available so that I can shoot with them, then the other player must be up to his task. Otherwise I’ll end up wasting half of my actions trying to shoot guns that don’t have the power for it, and I won’t find out about this until the execution phase, when it’s too late to change any plans. On all difficulties but the easiest ones, the action planning cards are placed face down on the track, so I can’t look at the other player’s actions to make sure that he’s doing what I told him to—he has to make sure of that himself. It’s possible to have complicated chains of actions involving many players—e.g. “on turn 3, player A charges the main reactor, player B draws the energy from the main reactor to the auxiliary reactor on the left, player C uses that energy to fire the guns on the left, and player D uses that energy to recharge the shields on the left”. If player A or player B fails to make his action just at the specified time, the whole chain of actions is ruined, as are any later plans that were presuming the success of that particular chain. Frequently, this is exactly what happens, with whole games having been lost because one player failed to commit a specific action on one single turn. (You can charge the reactors ahead of time, so that there won’t be such split-second timing required… but then you still have to keep mental track of when they’ll need to be recharged the next time. You can also schedule in redundant actions to make sure that something really is done, but this wastes time and possibly also energy, which is a limited resource.) Fortunately a single game doesn’t take long, so there’s always time for just one more rematch.
Ultimately, at least on the higher difficulties, each player has to learn to work as part of the team, do their share of the planning, and take care of their own actions. Otherwise the players are bound to lose.
I think I’d enjoy the challenge of trying to make plans that were robust with respect to handling some errors on the part of comrades. It sounds rather difficult!
Similarly, when I dallied in D&D I used to hold my character largely in reserve, keeping memorized spells in hand and holding back in the battles. A failsafe for when my companions failed—be that through distinctly suboptimal character creation or poor tactical decisions. While sacrificing some glory and the appearance of personally dominating the battles it maximised both safety and chance-of-saving-the-world. This also meant that the fight looked and felt more challenging to the players and DM while keeping the actual risk to the party lower than it may seem. This counters the pesky DM tendency to try to ramp up difficulty and do so incompetently, dooming the party to inevitable defeat.
It helps to choose a character that, when given a few rounds to prepare, could singlehandedly handle more than the rest of the party combined and then proceed to heal up all the wounded to satisfactory levels. I love my perfectly designed 3.5 druid!
I imagine with Space Alert at the highest difficulties winning despite allied incompetence may actually end up physically impossible. When it gets to the stage that even with perfect play every character is necessary. The best I could do would be to make sure I handle the most confusing or error prone tasks.
It would be perfect if the difficult tasks also happened to be the most bland—fiddling with power supplies and ammo rather than personally wreaking havoc upon the enemy at every turn. One of the most difficult elements of maximising winning is managing the egos of compatriots. It isn’t uncommon for ego to go hand in hand with incompetence. If I can manage to maneuver the meat-heads of my party into situations that give them glory but are hard to screw up it makes my task of making the team win that much easier!
I expect that if Dwarf Fortress players hadn’t invented that phrase first, eventually Space Alert players would have. :-)
On the other hand it sounds like Space Alert has an actual win condition, not just more and more dangerous ways to lose. The closest I’ve seen to someone ‘winning’ is when they went ahead and dug down to Hell itself and colonized it—building their residential areas in a location that is designed such that merely breaching it is supposed to spell inevitable doom. All to give their dwarves the chance to say “Tonight we dine in Hell!”—and proceed to do so for days on end.
What about just barring unsolicited communication? Forbidden Island works for my local mix of adults, old, and young children if it’s given that restriction. If it isn’t then the older and bossier players (yes, me) try to be too controlling.
What about just barring unsolicited communication? Forbidden Island works for my local mix of adults, old, and young children if it’s given that restriction. If it isn’t then the older and bossier players (yes, me) try to be too controlling.
I like this idea. It doesn’t eliminate the problem of making the game potentially too easy if there is one smart player. But it does eliminate the social problem. Asking for advice from others is an entirely different social interaction than having another give you orders!
It seems to me that it is more about a certain personality type than intelligence. I know highly intelligent people who would not ask the smartest or most knowledgeable person what to do because they damn well want to figure it out for themselves.
This is true- really it’s true of any purely cooperative board game- and I’ve played it single player with several characters several times. For some reason the effect seems stronger with Pandemic.
I would imagine you can play it with any cooperative game. Another great one that wouldn’t quite fall prey to the problem you describe is Scotland Yard, which has a group against a single player. The group could play with biases, while the single player plays without and tries to guess the biases. People have also suggested competitive games, such as Munchkin, but I’m skeptical so far. If anyone does play it with competitive games, I’d love to hear about it of course.
I would imagine you can play it with any cooperative game.
The types of decisions players make, and the amount of information players have about each other matters. In Arkham Horror, for example, everything is public- in Pandemic, hands don’t have to be (although I imagine you might want them to be for this, to make biases easier to spot). In Pandemic, there seems to be closer connection between actions and the endgame, whereas in Arkham there’s an element of building up your character that can be independent to winning (for player motivation, at least).
Without some experience, I’m not willing to speculate on what features make a cooperative game work better or worse for roleplaying or noticing biases, but I am confident that some features will be better or worse.
Hm. I’m curious how well this extends to other cooperative games like Arkham Horror.
(I have a low opinion of Pandemic as a game because it’s a one-player game which four people play- which can work out okay if everyone has similar skill levels and tactical aptitudes, but poorly if you have players whose turns are just directed for them. It seems like a good substrate for this, though, since you’ve inserted a conflict that gets rid of the “play their turn for them” effect.)
That’s a common issue with any co-operative game, Arkham Horror included. The only ways of avoiding it that I’ve seen are either having traitors and secret information (e.g. Battlestar Galactica), or introducing time limits and such a cognitive overload that you’re lucky if you manage to play your own turn in time, let alone anyone else’s (Space Alert).
Is this not likely to amplify the differences between players and so make it far more rational, given the seeking of a cooperative goal, to spend some time aiding allies? It is one thing to suggest tweaks for the allies to improve their play but another when the allies aren’t even able to pick up the low hanging fruit!
Yes, if some of the players are beginners, it’s often a good idea for the more experienced player to take some time out of her turn to help them. But this means that she can’t pay as much attention to her own actions.
The game is also built so that coordination between the players is of crucial importance. The way the game works is that there’s ten minutes during which the players have to plan out all of their actions. The planning is done with placing cards from your hand on the turn track in front of you, e.g. I might play a card saying “move left” to the “turn 4″ slot in front of me, and then my character will move left on the fourth turn. The information necessary for making those plans is parcelled out gradually during the ten-minute period. E.g. after four minutes of planning, it might be announced that an enemy vessel will appear on the left side of the players’ space ship on the sixth turn. The players must then adjust their plans to accomodate for this, and make sure that around the sixth turn, somebody’s character will be on the correct side of the ship to shoot down the enemy. After the ten minutes is over, the players’ plans are executed and everyone gets to see what actually happened.
Now if I’m manning the guns on the right side of the space ship, say, and I tell another player to make sure that the guns have enough energy available so that I can shoot with them, then the other player must be up to his task. Otherwise I’ll end up wasting half of my actions trying to shoot guns that don’t have the power for it, and I won’t find out about this until the execution phase, when it’s too late to change any plans. On all difficulties but the easiest ones, the action planning cards are placed face down on the track, so I can’t look at the other player’s actions to make sure that he’s doing what I told him to—he has to make sure of that himself. It’s possible to have complicated chains of actions involving many players—e.g. “on turn 3, player A charges the main reactor, player B draws the energy from the main reactor to the auxiliary reactor on the left, player C uses that energy to fire the guns on the left, and player D uses that energy to recharge the shields on the left”. If player A or player B fails to make his action just at the specified time, the whole chain of actions is ruined, as are any later plans that were presuming the success of that particular chain. Frequently, this is exactly what happens, with whole games having been lost because one player failed to commit a specific action on one single turn. (You can charge the reactors ahead of time, so that there won’t be such split-second timing required… but then you still have to keep mental track of when they’ll need to be recharged the next time. You can also schedule in redundant actions to make sure that something really is done, but this wastes time and possibly also energy, which is a limited resource.) Fortunately a single game doesn’t take long, so there’s always time for just one more rematch.
Ultimately, at least on the higher difficulties, each player has to learn to work as part of the team, do their share of the planning, and take care of their own actions. Otherwise the players are bound to lose.
That game sounds like it has a lot of potential for FUN!
I expect that if Dwarf Fortress players hadn’t invented that phrase first, eventually Space Alert players would have. :-)
I think I’d enjoy the challenge of trying to make plans that were robust with respect to handling some errors on the part of comrades. It sounds rather difficult!
Similarly, when I dallied in D&D I used to hold my character largely in reserve, keeping memorized spells in hand and holding back in the battles. A failsafe for when my companions failed—be that through distinctly suboptimal character creation or poor tactical decisions. While sacrificing some glory and the appearance of personally dominating the battles it maximised both safety and chance-of-saving-the-world. This also meant that the fight looked and felt more challenging to the players and DM while keeping the actual risk to the party lower than it may seem. This counters the pesky DM tendency to try to ramp up difficulty and do so incompetently, dooming the party to inevitable defeat.
It helps to choose a character that, when given a few rounds to prepare, could singlehandedly handle more than the rest of the party combined and then proceed to heal up all the wounded to satisfactory levels. I love my perfectly designed 3.5 druid!
I imagine with Space Alert at the highest difficulties winning despite allied incompetence may actually end up physically impossible. When it gets to the stage that even with perfect play every character is necessary. The best I could do would be to make sure I handle the most confusing or error prone tasks.
It would be perfect if the difficult tasks also happened to be the most bland—fiddling with power supplies and ammo rather than personally wreaking havoc upon the enemy at every turn. One of the most difficult elements of maximising winning is managing the egos of compatriots. It isn’t uncommon for ego to go hand in hand with incompetence. If I can manage to maneuver the meat-heads of my party into situations that give them glory but are hard to screw up it makes my task of making the team win that much easier!
On the other hand it sounds like Space Alert has an actual win condition, not just more and more dangerous ways to lose. The closest I’ve seen to someone ‘winning’ is when they went ahead and dug down to Hell itself and colonized it—building their residential areas in a location that is designed such that merely breaching it is supposed to spell inevitable doom. All to give their dwarves the chance to say “Tonight we dine in Hell!”—and proceed to do so for days on end.
Barring communication usually works, though the cure is generally considered to be worse than the disease.
What about just barring unsolicited communication? Forbidden Island works for my local mix of adults, old, and young children if it’s given that restriction. If it isn’t then the older and bossier players (yes, me) try to be too controlling.
I think my local gaming group might need to steal this idea, hard as it will be to remain silent when others are making suboptimal decisions :)
I like this idea. It doesn’t eliminate the problem of making the game potentially too easy if there is one smart player. But it does eliminate the social problem. Asking for advice from others is an entirely different social interaction than having another give you orders!
It’s still a problem if the one player is clearly smarter and the others are smart enough to know who it is.
It seems to me that it is more about a certain personality type than intelligence. I know highly intelligent people who would not ask the smartest or most knowledgeable person what to do because they damn well want to figure it out for themselves.
With a sufficiently strong player, Arkham Horror is a one player game which seven people play.
This is true- really it’s true of any purely cooperative board game- and I’ve played it single player with several characters several times. For some reason the effect seems stronger with Pandemic.
I have experienced exactly this.
I would imagine you can play it with any cooperative game. Another great one that wouldn’t quite fall prey to the problem you describe is Scotland Yard, which has a group against a single player. The group could play with biases, while the single player plays without and tries to guess the biases. People have also suggested competitive games, such as Munchkin, but I’m skeptical so far. If anyone does play it with competitive games, I’d love to hear about it of course.
The types of decisions players make, and the amount of information players have about each other matters. In Arkham Horror, for example, everything is public- in Pandemic, hands don’t have to be (although I imagine you might want them to be for this, to make biases easier to spot). In Pandemic, there seems to be closer connection between actions and the endgame, whereas in Arkham there’s an element of building up your character that can be independent to winning (for player motivation, at least).
Without some experience, I’m not willing to speculate on what features make a cooperative game work better or worse for roleplaying or noticing biases, but I am confident that some features will be better or worse.