The big problem faced by cooperative games without hidden agendas is that they are fundamentally solitaire games.
Imagine four people playing chess ‘as a team’ with the following ruleset:
Player 1 controls the King and Queen
Player 2 controls the Bishops and Knights
Player 3 controls the Rooks.
Player 4 controls the Pawns.
Each turn, choose one player. That player may move one of their pieces once. Then, your opponent moves.
It’s easy to see that the way to play this if you want to do well is simply to have whichever player is best at chess take over, and tell everyone what to do. This is an unfortunate position for a ‘cooperative’ board game to end up in, though.
You just made me intensely curious as to what happens to chess if you let people move more than one piece in per turn. In this case you’re allowing a move per four different categories. What if it was just the pawns and the bishops. (What if it was every single piece at once?)
Huh, I’m surprised to find that I didn’t explain this in the post. Yeah this is the reason I don’t think cooperative games are going to be as fun as cohabitive games, although it has a pretty simple patch: Stop playing to win. (I talk about how to enjoy cooperative games in this)
I wouldn’t have been able to find joy in Chess (where I’d usually be the worst player in the room) or in Pandemic (same, plusquarterbacking problem) if I had not learned when to let the real objective supersede the play objective.
[...] And in Pandemic, a purely cooperative game, I will try to learn from better players’ (the quarterbacks’) suggestions. If their lessons do not come easily to me — if I do not immediately understand the reasoning underlying their commands — I will not obey! :3 I will turn to whatever teacher is best, and if you fail me, oh quarterback, I will instead turn to the game itself, and I will just do whatever makes sense to me and face the consequences, and learn in the most natural way, even if that means we lose this time. (Your challenge, as a more experienced player, includes communication.)
The big problem faced by cooperative games without hidden agendas is that they are fundamentally solitaire games.
Imagine four people playing chess ‘as a team’ with the following ruleset:
Player 1 controls the King and Queen
Player 2 controls the Bishops and Knights
Player 3 controls the Rooks.
Player 4 controls the Pawns.
Each turn, choose one player. That player may move one of their pieces once. Then, your opponent moves.
It’s easy to see that the way to play this if you want to do well is simply to have whichever player is best at chess take over, and tell everyone what to do. This is an unfortunate position for a ‘cooperative’ board game to end up in, though.
You just made me intensely curious as to what happens to chess if you let people move more than one piece in per turn. In this case you’re allowing a move per four different categories. What if it was just the pawns and the bishops. (What if it was every single piece at once?)
Huh, I’m surprised to find that I didn’t explain this in the post. Yeah this is the reason I don’t think cooperative games are going to be as fun as cohabitive games, although it has a pretty simple patch: Stop playing to win. (I talk about how to enjoy cooperative games in this)