More than anything (and please excuse me for saying it out loud) this blog is for me. I write it for the most part to get my thoughts in order. When I feel my thoughts are in order and that they might interest other people, like gamers and designers, I publish a post. I hope that I sometimes hit the things that whoever reads my blog actually finds compelling.
With that in mind, I started designing my first cooperative, or coop, game from the bottom up and had many interesting thoughts. I am currently working on a coop that is going to be an expansion that will turn a non-coop game to one that is. The experience of building a coop from the very beginning has led me to writing a previous entry on what coop games should contain in my opinion.
I must say that I am not a big coop gamer. This made me play more coops recently to make my knowledge broader and better. I have played Pandemic (regular, legacy and dice), Forbidden Island and Desert, Eldritch Horror, TIME Stories, Freedom and more. While this is a nice list of games, I must say that most of these games I did not play more than once before not wanting to see them anymore. Currently Freedom is my favorite of this list followed closely by Pandemic: The Cure which makes me push my luck with those evil dice.
Enough chit-chat, let's talk design.
I wanted to have a coop game where at the beginning of every round players will chuck a bunch of coins and will have to distribute those coins among themselves. Each coin represents a supporter of your goal and has two very different sides, one side contains an action and the other an amount of money, namely active or passive support of that character. During the game you might gain or lose coins and since each coin has one action you will have to choose the coins you want to gain or willing to give up according to your strategy. If you must get more of action A in order for your strategy to work, get BLUE coins that have that action on them. If you don't need action B that much, you can lose one RED coin that has that action on it.
I plan on having 4-5 basic actions that will each have a coin of a certain color. Think of a round wooden chip that has a sticker or engraving on either side. That way it will be extra easy to know what's on the other side of the coin without having to flip it over. In order to augment the coin mechanism and make the game interesting it will have cards. Some will be good and some bad. Players draw cards to their hand and will have a three options for using them:
Paying a cost that is written on the card in order to activate its text.
Using the icon that appears on the card to negate bad cards.
Using the icon that appears on the card as a set collection that will enable carrying out strong actions.
What are those bad cards you ask? Still unsure. They should be some cards that hinder the players' efforts. Those cards will have a timer (in player turns) that will tell you when they will take place. Also, they will have a cost for negating them and removing them from the game. A cost can be a combination of money to pay and discarding cards specific icons on them. Otherwise, the evil cards will hit once the timer runs out.
Good decisions I want the game to have:
How to distribute the coins?
What cards to use and how?
What coins to get and which ones to lose?
Should we deal with the bad cards or keep our resources and let the storm hit?
In the picture: Card anatomy as drawn by a crazed chicken. Not for the faint of heart.
Winning the game should be tough. If you read my entry about coops, you know I want a strict win condition(s) should be placed. I would love using a trick I saw not so long ago in a game I never played. That game is Star Wars: Rebellion. The rebellion wins in that game, only if the round marker meets another marker that moves down the same track. In order to move that marker down the rebel player needs to carry out successful missions. This represents the support that the rebels have, it naturally grows over time (every time the round marker moves up). The more missions the rebels carry out the faster that support grows over the galaxy and the time the empire has to catch that sneaky base becomes shorter and shorter. That's a great STRICT win condition that can be adapted for a players vs. game kind of coop game.
By the way, I'm not a big Star Wars fan. I think the movies are nice and I watched all of them, but the hype around each and everything star wars is beyond me. To add insult to injury, I don't enjoy many of FFG's games, because it's just not my style of gaming. Nevertheless, I watched a few videos about Rebellion and I loved the win condition. There's also one more thing I liked, but that's for another post. Maybe.
In the picture: The round/victory track with the two markers moving slowly towards one another.