I’m aware of those dynamics, they feel like weeds growing in the cracks in the pavement to me: The situation is still mostly pavement. I think the negotiation allowed in those games is so much shallower that I suspect it’ll be a qualitative difference.
Hmm, the Diplomacy wikipedia page says “around half of all games will end in a draw”. “Draw” isn’t a term we’d use in the cohabitive frame, because the entire genre takes place within the varying shades of draws, negotiation is all about selecting between different intermediary outcomes. If a game is just calling all of those outcomes the same name, it’s probably not doing negotiation well.
Would a good solution be to just play Settlers, but instead of saying “the goal is to get more points than anyone else,” say “this is a variant where the goal is to get the highest score you can, individually”? That seems like it would change the negotiation dynamics in a potentially interesting way without having to make or teach a brand new game. Does this miss the point somehow?
Solution to what. That would be cohabitive, I’d like to play that at least once, but I wouldn’t expect it to work that well. 4 of 10 victory points in catan come from criteria that’re inherently zero sum (having a longer road or bigger army than anyone else) (I wouldn’t know how to adapt those). I’m not sure to what extent land scarcity makes the other conditions fairly zero sum as well. I haven’t played a lot of Catan.
You’d have to replace the end condition with a round limit. P1 (and the other one I’m going to publish soon, Final Autumn) also just ends after a certain number of rounds, and the only way to pace it well is to make it end ‘too early’, so that every game will be a study of haste. I don’t love it. I wonder if we should try for a mechanic where players have to, to some extent somewhat deliberately build the true peace by taking some actions in the world that freezes current conditions in place/ends the game. I think that could be pretty interesting.
Oh, good point, I had forgotten about the zero-sum victory points. The extent to which the other parts are zero sum depends a lot on how large the game board is relative to the number of players, so it could be adjusted.
I was thinking about having a time limit instead of a round limit, to encourage the play to move quickly, but maybe that’s too stressful. If you want the players to choose to end the game, then you’d want to build in a mechanic that works against all of them more and more as the game progresses, so that at some point continuing becomes counterproductive...
I like time limits because time constraints are what make negotiation difficult (imperfect compromise), though just having a single shared time limit lets players filibuster. If players have separate time limits it’s basically still a round limit, but good point to remember to impose a time limit.
Separate clocks would be a pain to manage in a board game, but in principle “the game ends once 50% of players have run out of time” seems like a decent condition.
I’m aware of those dynamics, they feel like weeds growing in the cracks in the pavement to me: The situation is still mostly pavement. I think the negotiation allowed in those games is so much shallower that I suspect it’ll be a qualitative difference.
Hmm, the Diplomacy wikipedia page says “around half of all games will end in a draw”. “Draw” isn’t a term we’d use in the cohabitive frame, because the entire genre takes place within the varying shades of draws, negotiation is all about selecting between different intermediary outcomes. If a game is just calling all of those outcomes the same name, it’s probably not doing negotiation well.
Would a good solution be to just play Settlers, but instead of saying “the goal is to get more points than anyone else,” say “this is a variant where the goal is to get the highest score you can, individually”? That seems like it would change the negotiation dynamics in a potentially interesting way without having to make or teach a brand new game. Does this miss the point somehow?
Solution to what. That would be cohabitive, I’d like to play that at least once, but I wouldn’t expect it to work that well. 4 of 10 victory points in catan come from criteria that’re inherently zero sum (having a longer road or bigger army than anyone else) (I wouldn’t know how to adapt those). I’m not sure to what extent land scarcity makes the other conditions fairly zero sum as well. I haven’t played a lot of Catan.
You’d have to replace the end condition with a round limit. P1 (and the other one I’m going to publish soon, Final Autumn) also just ends after a certain number of rounds, and the only way to pace it well is to make it end ‘too early’, so that every game will be a study of haste. I don’t love it. I wonder if we should try for a mechanic where players have to, to some extent somewhat deliberately build the true peace by taking some actions in the world that freezes current conditions in place/ends the game. I think that could be pretty interesting.
Oh, good point, I had forgotten about the zero-sum victory points. The extent to which the other parts are zero sum depends a lot on how large the game board is relative to the number of players, so it could be adjusted. I was thinking about having a time limit instead of a round limit, to encourage the play to move quickly, but maybe that’s too stressful. If you want the players to choose to end the game, then you’d want to build in a mechanic that works against all of them more and more as the game progresses, so that at some point continuing becomes counterproductive...
I like time limits because time constraints are what make negotiation difficult (imperfect compromise), though just having a single shared time limit lets players filibuster. If players have separate time limits it’s basically still a round limit, but good point to remember to impose a time limit.
Separate clocks would be a pain to manage in a board game, but in principle “the game ends once 50% of players have run out of time” seems like a decent condition.
In practice what I was going to do was just say that each turn is limited to like 40 seconds or whatever.