In general players will have a decent amount of influence on how much they are “starving”.
And in Gloomhaven there are possibilities to heal and get back life. In Pandemic you’ll be spending a lot of time “curing” diseases, taking cubes off of the board and placing them back in the supply. In both of these cases there are actions you can take to “restore” some of these resources. In Gloomhaven you start with limited life and when every player is out of life, you also lose. In Pandemic there is a limited number of (disease) cubes and if the supply ever runs out (because they are all on the board), you lose the game. StarvationĪ second loss condition is where you don’t have enough (or too much) of something, but where you have clear ways of getting more (or getting rid of it). I remember some games of Pandemic where everybody was on the edge of their seat because we won in the very last action before the deck would run out. You need to focus on those things that are important and leave the things that are not important and hope that they won’t explode in your face at some later point.Ī ticking clock in this way can add a lot of tension (see this post for more on tension in board games), especially when time is running out. You can’t linger, you can’t take your time to do everything that you’d like. Having a ticking clock creates a sense of urgency. Thus taking many actions makes the clock tick faster and there is randomness to its ticks as well. In TIME Stories player actions cost time units and moving from one location takes a variable amount of time units. Together the combination of the hourglass and resets is a ticking clock: The number of resets dwindles and the hourglass runs down.Ī clock doesn’t have to run out in the same pace every turn. But the number of times they can reset the hourglass is limited. Here players do have more control in that they can reset the hourglass through some actions and as such the hourglass on its own isn’t a ticking clock. In Magic Maze there is an hourglass which when it runs out ends the game. The ticking clock can also be a literal clock (or at least time-piece). And so every turn brings them closer to a world succumbing to horrible diseases! They must draw and there is no way to add cards to the deck. Players need to draw 2 cards every turn and when they cannot, they lose. The ticking clock is something that will bring about a loss state at some point in (game) time and that only ever moves towards that loss state and never back (in the sense that there is no way to get back “time”).įor Pandemic this is the deck of cards. Such loss mechanisms come in two varieties, which I’ll call the ticking clock and starvation. And, this being a board game, those circumstances will need to be explicitly designed. In coops however there will be specific circumstances under which everybody loses.
And as such there is no specific loss state or loss mechanic. In non-coop board games, whomever did not win, loses. On important thing that sets coops apart from non-coops is their relationship to losing. So I’m going to give some thought on what elements make for a good cooperative game.įor the rest of this article I’ll use cooperative game and the more colloquial “coop” interchangeably Don’t lose! I imagine that this would have quite some things in common with cooperative games: If the challenge is not to “beat” the other players, the game will need to provide challenges. One thing that is stuck in my mind is a game where any number of players can win: Each has their own goal and whomever makes that goal is a winner, regardless of how the other players perform. After a long hiatus of game design (and writing blog posts) I’m finding myself thinking about possibilities again.
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