Directly cooperative mechanics in coop boardgames?
I had a thought about cooperative boardgames the other day.
I feel like most cooperative boardgames follow the basic model of Pandemic insofar as each player takes their own individual turn, and although they can give each other cards and other resources in certain situations, they mostly can’t directly combine abilities or effects.
One example of the kind of “directly combine” action that I’m thinking of (that I feel like I don’t see so much in coop games) is the “Support” move in Diplomacy (a game that is not at all cooperative in the sense that I mean the term here), where one player wants to move a piece from one place to another, and sometimes the only way they can do that is for another player to explicitly support that move with a piece of their own. (I’m being vague/general here because the details of how Support works in Diplomacy aren’t important for the topic of this post; no need to explain Support in more detail.)
A related directly-combine mechanic from Fast & Furious: Highway Heist (which is cooperative): a player can play one of their “boost tokens” to improve another player’s (or their own) skill roll.
Below are some more examples of the kind of mechanic I’m thinking of, but some of these are made-up examples because I can’t think offhand of games that implement them. The below mechanics aren’t intended to be a list of things that could be done in a single game; I’m just brainstorming about more-directly-cooperative mechanics that I can imagine coop games could provide.
- One player’s character/role can heal another player’s character/role who has taken damage. I feel like various versions of this mechanic are pretty common in coop games, but I figured it was worth mentioning in passing.
Two or more players can both directly contribute resources to an action, without giving the resources to each other first.
For example, maybe an action costs 10 money, and that money can come from any number of players whose pawns are in the same board region.
Or maybe (like in 7 Wonders, which isn’t a coop game) a player can use/borrow resources from players next to them around the table, but (unlike in 7 Wonders) maybe the player using those resources doesn’t have to pay for them.
- Two or more players can join their units together like a combining mecha, and they have more abilities, or more powerful abilities, in that combined form.
- When two or more players do the same action on consecutive turns, each subsequent instance of the action builds on the previous one(s) in such a way that the combination is more effective than the separate actions would be.
- Similarly: in a game that doesn’t have turns as such, two or more players can do complementary actions at the same time in a way that makes one or both more effective.
In a game where each player gets a certain number of actions on their turn, a player can give some or all of their actions to another player.
(In Pandemic, the Dispatcher role lets one player move another player’s pawn (with the other player‘s permission), and that works out to being somewhat similar to giving the other player some of your actions, but imo it’s not quite the same. Still, that Dispatcher player power (see also Navigator in the Forbidden Island series of Pandemic-like also-designed-by-Leacock games) is somewhat along the lines of the kind of mechanic I’m talking about in this post.)
(Another quasi-example from Pandemic and other Leacock games: Event cards that can be played at any time, even when it’s not your turn, that affect other players or the state of the game, such as Airlift, which you can use on someone else’s turn to move them. Again not quite the same thing as giving actions to another player, but again similar to the sort of mechanic I have in mind.)
When you move one or more of your game pieces, you can also take along with you other players’ pieces (with their permission). (Much like the way that in many games, you can move multiple of your own pieces together as a temporary unit.)
(Some of the roles in Leacock coop games do allow this or similar.)
Some resources, instead of being individually owned by one player, are collectively shared by all players.
(Example: in the Three Musketeers coop game Gascony’s Legacy, there are “Stones of Chance”—dice that provide bonuses. At the beginning of a round, you roll one of those dice per player in the game; during the round, any player can use any number of them, presumably after consulting with the other players about who wants or needs them.)
Playing a card gives benefits not only to the player who played it but also to other players.
(I’ve seen cards that do this kind of thing in many games, mostly but not exclusively non-coop ones. There’s one particular game where I see it come up a lot, but I’m blanking on what it is.)
- In a Legacy game, two characters can train together and both gain in skill, or one who has more of the skill can train another who has less of it, and in either case, it’s more effective than training solo.
…And so on. Don’t get too hung up on details of any one of these examples; my point is that I feel like there’s this whole class of interesting more-directly-cooperative actions that I’m not used to seeing much of in coop games. Or maybe I do see them more often and I’m just not thinking of them.
So if you know of coop games that do these kinds of things, let me know.
Clarification: I don’t at all mean to criticize Matt Leacock or his games! And as noted above, some of these mechanics do exist in Pandemic. My point is not “Pandemic is bad, there should be other kinds of games”; it’s “I’m interested in directly-interactive cooperative game mechanics, and I would be interested in seeing more of them.”
This post was mostly sparked by thinking about Terraforming Mars, where in the original game a lot of the player interaction involves taking stuff away from other players. (Some cards, especially in expansions, do provide benefits to multiple players.) A friend and I (not sure whether they want to be named here) have intermittently talked for years about trying to create a coop version of TM; that could take the form of just playing TM normally but discussing together what to do (and not attacking other players), but I realized the other day that I would find a (hypothetical) coop version of TM more satisfying if there were more ways for players to directly/interactively help each other.
