I like the idea of Peacemakers. I even had the same idea myself—to make an explicitly semi-cooperative game with a goal of maximizing your own score but every player having a different scoring mechanism—but haven’t done anything with it.
That said, I think you’re underestimating how much cooperation there is in a zero-sum game.
If you offer a deal, you must be doing it because it increases your chance of winning, but only one person can win under the MostPointsWins rule, so that deal couldn’t be very good for me, and I’ll always suspect your deal of being a trick, so in most cases no detailed deals will be offered.
Three examples of cooperation that occur in three-player Settlers of Catan (between, say, Alice, Bob, and Carol), even if all players are trying only to maximize their own chance of winning:
Trading. Trading increases the chances that the two trading players win, to the detriment of the third. As long as there’s sufficient uncertainty about who’s winning, you want to trade. (There’s a world Catan competition. I bet that these truly competitive games involve less trading than you would do with your friends, but still a lot. Not sure how to find out.)
Refusing to trade with the winning player, once it’s clear who that is. If Alice is ahead then Bob and Carol are in a prisoner’s dilemma, where trading with Alice is defecting.
Alice says at the beginning of the game: “Hey Bob, it sure looks like Carol has the strongest starting position, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t be very fair if she won just because of that. How about we team up against her by agreeing now to never trade with her for the entire game?” If Bob agrees, than the winning probabilities of Alice, Bob, Carol go from (say) 20%,20%,60% to 45%,45%,10%. Cooperation!
So it’s not that zero-sum games lack opportunities for cooperation, it’s just that every opportunity for cooperation with another player is at the detriment to a third. Which is why there isn’t any cooperation at all in a two player zero-sum game.
Realize that even in a positive-sum game, players are going to be choosing between doing things for the betterment of everyone, and doing things for the betterment of themselves, and maximizing your own score involves doing more of the latter than the former, ideally while convincing everyone else that you’re being more than fair.
Suggestion for the game: don’t say the goal is to maximize your score. Instead say you’re roleplaying a character who’s goal is to maximize [whatever]. For a few reasons:
It makes every game (more) independent of every other game. This reduces the possibility that Alice sabotages Bob in their second game together because Bob was a dick in their first game together. The goal is to have interesting negotiations, not to ruin friendships.
It encourages exploration. You can try certain negotiating tactics in one game, and then abandon them in the next, and the fact that you were “roleplaying” will hopefully reduce how much people associate those tactics with you instead of that one time you played.
It could lighten the mood. You should try really hard to lighten the mood. Because you know what else is a semi-cooperative game that’s heavy on negotiation? Diplomacy.
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 like the idea of Peacemakers. I even had the same idea myself—to make an explicitly semi-cooperative game with a goal of maximizing your own score but every player having a different scoring mechanism—but haven’t done anything with it.
That said, I think you’re underestimating how much cooperation there is in a zero-sum game.
Three examples of cooperation that occur in three-player Settlers of Catan (between, say, Alice, Bob, and Carol), even if all players are trying only to maximize their own chance of winning:
Trading. Trading increases the chances that the two trading players win, to the detriment of the third. As long as there’s sufficient uncertainty about who’s winning, you want to trade. (There’s a world Catan competition. I bet that these truly competitive games involve less trading than you would do with your friends, but still a lot. Not sure how to find out.)
Refusing to trade with the winning player, once it’s clear who that is. If Alice is ahead then Bob and Carol are in a prisoner’s dilemma, where trading with Alice is defecting.
Alice says at the beginning of the game: “Hey Bob, it sure looks like Carol has the strongest starting position, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t be very fair if she won just because of that. How about we team up against her by agreeing now to never trade with her for the entire game?” If Bob agrees, than the winning probabilities of Alice, Bob, Carol go from (say) 20%,20%,60% to 45%,45%,10%. Cooperation!
So it’s not that zero-sum games lack opportunities for cooperation, it’s just that every opportunity for cooperation with another player is at the detriment to a third. Which is why there isn’t any cooperation at all in a two player zero-sum game.
Realize that even in a positive-sum game, players are going to be choosing between doing things for the betterment of everyone, and doing things for the betterment of themselves, and maximizing your own score involves doing more of the latter than the former, ideally while convincing everyone else that you’re being more than fair.
Suggestion for the game: don’t say the goal is to maximize your score. Instead say you’re roleplaying a character who’s goal is to maximize [whatever]. For a few reasons:
It makes every game (more) independent of every other game. This reduces the possibility that Alice sabotages Bob in their second game together because Bob was a dick in their first game together. The goal is to have interesting negotiations, not to ruin friendships.
It encourages exploration. You can try certain negotiating tactics in one game, and then abandon them in the next, and the fact that you were “roleplaying” will hopefully reduce how much people associate those tactics with you instead of that one time you played.
It could lighten the mood. You should try really hard to lighten the mood. Because you know what else is a semi-cooperative game that’s heavy on negotiation? Diplomacy.
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.