Probably the biggest problem with making a cooperative game (i.e. one where the players all win or lose as a group, and not individually) is getting the challenge level right. If the game is too difficult, most players will just get frustrated and not bother trying again. If the game is too easy, players just win and don't feel motivated to have another go.
What we are usually looking for is where defeats feel like a victory was achievable, and victories feel like they were just by the skin of our teeth. And, ideally, we want this to be reliable, so we don't see wild, swingy changes where one time a given group has an easy time, and the next play, with the same initial setup, the same group has a nightmare where the whole thing falls apart in a couple of rounds. Oh, and we need to have varying difficulty levels or alternative scenarios, so that once a group masters the basic game, they have a new challenge to move on to.
We'll not worry about that last point for now, as it seems to me pointless to worry too much about varying scenarios until the basic game is solid but, that said, it's worth keeping an eye open for where opportunities for varying the game come in.
So, just to recap on where we are at here: Sympolis is a cooperative game that I am currently working on, where players are each the leaders of city states, inspired by a mythical view of classical Greece, where they have to deal with various demands from both the gods and the people of the cities. Those demands might be to build a new building, to hold a festival, or to attack one of the neighbouring cities. Fail to deal with the challenges and the gods or the people will get angry. If either of these influences get too angry, or if an attack ends up sacking a city, everyone loses as a neighbouring empire takes advantage of the situation to sweep in and crush the collective culture.
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| This is what it might look like when you are about to lose the game. |
I tend to think of games having a set of "knobs" to twiddle to tune the experience, making it more or less challenging, increasing or decreasing the importance of a subsystem, or whatever. In this game, some of those tuning knobs are the number and proportion of the different types of cards (eg. ones that produce useful resources or abilities vs those that are primarily challenges), the costs of cards, the failure points on the wrath tracks, the details of the "wrath cards" that turn the screw as you play as well as how those cards are added to the game, and so on. There are quite a lot here, maybe too many; like in any complex system, a lot of the elements are interdependent, so tweaking too much at once could have dramatic and unpredictable results.
And thinking of unpredictable results, one of the issues I have with this game currently is at least partially due to there being two independent sources of randomness: cards and dice. This setup feels natural for this game, but there is a big difference between drawing a challenging set of cards and getting the "wrong" dice rolls, and having a game where everything goes right for you. Bad (or good) luck can really compound in a way that can be frustrating for players. Conventional wisdom in game design circles is that, for games that are meant to have strategy or other thoughtful elements, multiple sources of randomness is usually not a good idea. If I am going to keep both sources of random uncertainty in the game, I need to also include ways to mitigate against the bad luck - and maybe even limit the impact of good fortune.
I'm still pondering ways to do this at the moment, and I'm not sure of the correct approach. Right now I'm feeling that I should give the players more tools to allow them to be clever and get around the bad luck, while making the game more consistently punishing. Now, how to twiddle knobs to make that happen...?
One way to address the first part of the equation is with the starting setup. At the moment, each player has a couple of buildings in their cities which produce dice that can be used to deal with challenges. Some of the additional buildings that can be gained allow for dice manipulation, but if these don't turn up, life can be really hard. Maybe the starting selection of buildings given to players could include some dice manipulation options, so some of that flexibility is available right from the start.
Then there is the "investment" track on player boards. At the moment, dice of any colour or value can be used to push a marker up this track, and this investment can be cashed in later for more dice or reductions in wrath. This works fairly well, but I think I will try allowing the fruits of investments to be sent to other players, thus allowing an opportunity for "richer" cities to bail out their neighbours at their time of need, introducing some more flexibility in how the games challenges can be approached.
Up to this point, the game setup has involved each player having two starting buildings in their city, as mentioned above, and each turn providing a base number of challenges that scales with the number of players. This actually will mean that, amongst other things, the number of turns in a game will vary with player count. I'm starting to think that maybe there should be a set number of starting buildings in the game (divided amongst the players) and a set number of challenges each turn. This would mean that a smaller player count would mean each player has a lot more to deal with, which might either make the low player counts feel too busy, or the higher player counts seem too simple. This sort of setup would allow for a single, more stable configuration to the game that would allow me to work on that consistency more easily, but it's not a silver bullet.
Of course, I could require numbers of cards to be added or removed according to player counts. This wouldn't be the end of the world - many other games do it, and the current number of cards in this game would make it relatively easy to do - but I am a fan of games where you pretty much take things out of the box, shuffle the deck, and then go.
I guess I'll just need to try some of these options.
Finally for today, just some thoughts on what I call the "wrath cards". These are cards that provide a condition that increases the tension in the game, for instance, populations getting more angry if a war demand is unprosecuted, or an earthquake hitting everyone if the gods are sufficiently displease with any one player. The idea is that these periodically enter play, providing a thematic and mechanical incentive to "get a move on" rather than simply spending ages building up production systems. The problem is that I have tried a number of ways of introducing these to the game, and while the effect of the ramp up feels like something I want to keep in, every mechanism so far has felt like a bit of a kludge.
My latest approach is that, at the end of each turn, one of the wrath cards gets shuffled into the "easy" challenge deck (the one that mostly provides production buildings), thus making it riskier to take the easy route each turn. This, of course, provides yet more randomness that can make the game even more swingy than otherwise. I've had a couple of tests using this mechanism, and in one, hardly any wrath turned up, and the other flooded the table with nastiness very quickly. The challenge of the cards was cool, but the brutality was not.
So maybe the way for this is for the wrath cards to not be random at all, or at least the pace of their arrival not random. Perhaps we just have one flipped each round, also using this as a timer for the game as a whole - hey folks, you have 6 rounds to appease the gods... good luck!
Anyway, this has been long, rambly, and not really resolved anything, but writing it has helped me work out some ideas in my head, so it's time to put those ideas into a new iteration of the game. If you are still with me (thanks!) and have any thoughts, questions, or suggestions, please do feel free to comment.
