#35 - The Third Type of Coop Games

Music.

Hello and welcome to Fun Problems, the problems of fun. I'm Peter C. Hayward. I'm AJ Branton. And this is the first ever video podcast that's ever been recorded by anyone in the history of the universe. Isn't that amazing, AJ? That is amazing. I'm glad you're the expert on time travel because I think you've got paradox here. We just invented a whole genre and you lucky listeners and viewers, audience members, get to witness it.

So as you can tell, if you're watching this, or if not, by the fact that I'm referencing it, people like the video podcast format enough that we're going to keep on doing them. It also gives us a nice central place for comments. So if you're on YouTube, feel free to leave a comment, algorithm, algorithm, algorithm.

But yeah, people seem to like it as long as it wasn't, someone made the note, like, as long as it's not all visuals all the time, which someone made the opposite note of like, yeah, the video added nothing because there were no visuals any of the time. But some people prefer watching things on YouTube and are less into podcasts. So I think if nothing else, you know, it will service some small number of people and it allows us to do some content that is more visual.

But don't worry, listeners, that won't come at the expense of our regular content. Yes. So this is not one of those. This is just a talky talk chat episode, as we call them in the biz.

But first, for the first time in a while, we actually have some follow up. Last episode we recorded was called Unhelpful Advice, in which I gave some of the least helpful advice I could think of and AJ spun it into helpful advice. And I realized basically the moment we were done, I'd missed two, possibly three, I think I had a third, but it's gone now, two pieces of advice that I wanted to share. I know two, and then I'll say the third one. You can be like,

no, Peter, we did cover that. Or we'll just cover it a second time. So firstly, so this is just the throwback to last episode where I have some advice that I don't think is actually helpful for anyone. It's just how I do things. And AJ is going to try and take that unhelpful advice and spin it that it is useful for people who aren't Australians called PETA. First bonus piece of unhelpful advice is just be around for 10 years.

Specifically, people tend to know me, not only because I make games that people like, but also just because they met me at seven different conventions over five years or 25 different conventions over 10 years. Humans have little lizard brains. The more you meet someone, the more you're like, oh, that's a person. And eventually that can translate to like, I want to work with them.

The game obviously has to be good, but it is definitely like, it's easier for me to pitch, even if I'd never had a published game, just because I have been around for a decade and I know people. Supremely unhelpful. I think you'll agree. Yes. So now I get to do the fun thing of figure out how to spin it. AJ has not been warned about this unhelpful advice. So this is on the fly spinning. Yeah. What I would say is you can't go back 10 years ago and have been doing this for 10 years.

What you can do is start today and plan for 10 years in the future. So I would be doing things now to get you into a position where 10 years from now, you can say that you are the Peter C. Hayward of the world. So first go to Australia. Live in Canada for five years. If you don't have a beard, grow one. Another part of that is being present or being visible, I guess. Now, this will relate to my third piece of advice, so I won't go into that too

much. But when I started, I volunteered for judging contests. I was at prototyping conventions. I have been doing this for 10 years. I've been doing this for 15 years, however long, but a lot of that was in Australia where I literally couldn't be visible and present.

But as long as i have been doing it on this continent i have been present does that make sense yeah for sure and i think ways to be present going to cons obviously like we talked a bit about last so you can volunteer for publishers and things like that that's how you get yourself known publishers if you go to prototyping cons or play testing or events things like that that'll get you known around the industry shake as many hands as you can be as genuine and as authentic

as you can and i would say like try to make some genuine connections it's kind of cool that we have an industry where maybe all industries are like this i'm not in other industries maybe you can but like networking is so key to this but it's networking with people genuinely i would say most people have a pretty good bs meter and if you're just meeting someone to, hungrily be like hi save my game hi.

I could name names and other people from the area who know people who I would name would also agree like, yeah, this person, they talk the talk. They just are very clearly interested in themselves and not interested in other people as a community. The audio listeners, AJ has actually written out seven names and is now holding them up to the camera. So only video watchers get to see who he's exactly talking about.

And and you know obviously i moved to the u.s or to canada first and then to the u.s which makes it much easier to go to u.s conventions but before that i was at my monthly melbourne playtesting group every month i was going to pax australia that's where i met greater than games and i did i think i've maybe i've never told the story so back in 2012 2013 back in the in ancient history pax australia was happening for the first time and one of

my friends was having a booth there So I went and just helped him out with his booth because he was a friend of mine. And next to us was Greater Than Games. So they were just a scrappy little three-person company at this point. They had no other employees, which if you know Greater Than Games now is crazy. And we were just the booth next to them. And we went and said hi. And they said hi. They came back the next year. My friend's company had folded at that point.

And I just helped them out for a whole week. Like I drove them around Melbourne. I showed them cool places to eat. I helped them pick up all the different stuff that you need when doing a booth in another convention, sorry, in another country. If I had had a game, they would 1000% have taken a pitch.

Like they would absolutely have done that. So, you know, just because you're not where the big, you know, just because you don't live in Indianapolis or can't get to Indianapolis doesn't mean that you can't be present in various different ways. And I assume there's lots of online playtesting. I don't do it as much anymore, but I can't imagine that there's a shortage of it, especially after COVID. Right. Yeah, I mean, I can put a link to Chris Bakke's one in the show notes.

They're always open to more people. I don't really attend most of these events. I don't take that advice of like connecting with people because I've already connected with some people I don't feel like that need to, you know, like I playtest weekly with the designer of Decrypto, you know, like. AJ, can you think of a thing you do to be visible in the industry? Oh, oh gosh. I guess this is a pretty good example.

I'm also kind of a big fish in a small pond i managed a local board game store that was very popular so i know a lot of locals around here and i've ran a bunch of events at breakout con which is our biggest local convention in toronto i've run mega games there i was briefly helping with proteo and briefly ran proteo not the full event but a smaller one through breakout and i've also to go to other things in the works so yeah i guess i am doing all right yeah and

and that's not to say like we we've not gotten any games signed because of this podcast this podcast doesn't have publishers breaking down our door being like show me the prototype but all this little stuff adds up this is actually going to tie very directly into our episode topic today so i'll save that for a few minutes from now number two piece of unhelpful advice is and this this was.

Such a game changer for me and it's so so deeply unhelpful is stop working on on games that aren't amazing and by that i mean like i have had so we didn't cover this last time did we it sounds vaguely familiar i didn't listen to that one it just came out oh that's true okay so i used to bash my head against the wall for years on designs trying to get them working trying to get them working trying to get them working nowadays if

the design's not working within two or three drafts i know we've talked about this but maybe it was a deleted episode if it's not working within two or three drafts i just drop it because the best games are the ones that start strong and then you go up from there as opposed to starting weak and then like it's a it's a struggle to get where some games start i mentioned last time that i do this for theme i do this for mechanics i do this for product ability like i just really let

go of stuff very very quickly and it's easier to pitch it's easier to design it's easier to get to the table because people are excited to play it so unhelpful advice because i've been doing this for a very long time but i just i work on the bangers and i let the other ones wither away so first off i'm going to reject your premise okay yep because i think everyone designs games differently this is something that you obviously believe and i'm completely covered by the fact

that this segment is called Unhelpful Advice. So I'll start by saying, like, if... If you have a design style where you find that you have to tinker with it for a while, especially if you're starting with a more complex thing and whittling it down or that sort of a style of game design, then it might not apply to you. That said, I do actually think, while Peter led with this is the most unhelpful advice, I actually disagree with that too.

I disagree with every element of what you're saying. i think it's very important to acknowledge that we are in such a saturated market the most saturated board games have ever been it has never been a better time to be a board gamer and never been a harder time to get a game signed so i would say you don't think that's debatable this i hear this logic a lot with youtube people are like youtube 20 years ago you would be one of like very few

creators on the platform so you had a bigger chance of blowing up nowadays there's so many people it's over saturated you have a smaller chance yes there's many more creators there's also way more audience so like it's harder today to get a ticket to ride hit sure that was never easy like the the you know puerto rico came out was played every day by billions of billions people by millions of people like for 10 years that's not realistically

going to happen today but you You said specifically it's harder to get published. There are more publishers looking for more things because the audience is so big. So yes, the market's oversaturated. I don't agree that it is harder to get published than any other time. You go back to Sid Saxon. Yeah, Sid Saxon's diaries are online.

I really recommend just picking a random year and reading a few pages of his 1965 diary because it's just so interesting seeing him talk about meeting publishers and pitching games. And publishers being like, Sid, we don't want chess variants. And it's like, wow, this was 55 years ago, 60 years ago, whatever the math is on that.

And it's the same advice. So, yes, there's... A lot more competition but there used to be six publishers right like i have worked with 11 publishers so far and there's a lot that i haven't worked with carry on very true thank you for bringing that up so yeah definitely you're right to point out not only are there more publishers but way more games are being published per year yeah and you know who's to say how much that counterbalances the sheer

number of people trying to pitch and design games and do this full-time time and all that but definitely at the at the bare minimum the quality of games coming up the bar for that has been going up for sure and i think it's worth pointing out that if you want to be a published designer in this industry you need to have a great game and it has to be a great part that we i know we said to death and we said that last episode but it's worth

repeating in this case where you need to think of your games as not only is this a good the best thing it can be but But how does it compete with everything else that's on the market? And also, who's going to publish it? Is this a game that there's not really a publisher looking for this type of thing? Yeah. And this, I guess you're right. It's just purely philosophical difference as to whether a game has a potential to be great if it's not great within the first X playtests.

I think, again, we will both agree, though, that after two years, probably let it go. Don't be that guy for 11 years on the same one game. No? You disagree? No, I agree. But, uh, I don't know if Daniel's blog would agree with you. Ooh, teaser for future episode. Okay. And then the third one, which I genuinely don't remember if we talked about last time is very similar to the first one. you know, be present and be visible.

Be distinctive has gotten me a long way. So I, I mean, if you're watching the video, you can see, this is just what I normally look like. I did not dress like this for the podcast. This is just, can you describe your handsome co-host for the, for the audio listeners? Peter is wearing a shirt that is a Rorschach test and has a blue beard and hair. And this is the blue beard and hair. It's very weird. And this is by far the least colorful and least standout-ish I've ever seen Peter dress.

What are your pants like? they're actually white here we go you can you can have a full full body i mean your sense of style is great but it is by again by far the least colorful even.

So not you know i'm not saying go out and dye your hair blue i also have the unfair advantage here of i have a very distinctive accent so when i'm doing audio play tests like on tts or whatever ever people can't see my blue beard or my amazing style or my colorful clothes but they're still more likely to remember me because you know how many people in your online playtest unless you're me with a bunch of australian playtesters have

that australian accent so extremely unhelpful advice is like i meet a publisher the second time they meet me they're almost certainly going to remember me even if i didn't have a single game published yeah and this was actually advice that you gave to me back when we were first starting to like discuss this podcast existing really yeah this we were talking about this on the drive back on the same drive that we were discussing doing fun problems that's funny and you

were giving me advice of find some way to stand out and you know what i still haven't uh so you cannot spin this to helpful advice is what you're saying i don't think so so what i tried to do was incorporate the brand into myself but you know what, everyone has a brand and nobody cares. You know, every person is wearing a t-shirt with their company's logo on it, that, you know, it's just a sea of nothing.

I went with, I wore it, hi, my name is AJ nametag, and then I wrote game designer underneath it. And that's what I'm doing for every convention from here, because it starts conversations and it's dorky, but you know, it's a lot closer to people's eyeline than the badges you have. Yeah, yeah, that's really cool. that more memorable? I'll tell you an anecdote from another unrelated field. So I used to do stand-up comedy around Brisbane when I lived there.

And doing stand-up comedy is going to a lot of open mic nights. You could go up to five, 10 a week if you really dedicate yourself to it. So I would see a lot of comedians. And even a small place like Brisbane, Brisbane's probably comparable to Vancouver in population, just approximately. I have not looked that up. Don't get mad if that's not accurate. But in terms of what you'd expect, it's about that size city, I think.

And even like doing the comedy circuit, yeah, there's some people you'd see over and over again. There's also people who you would see, there was a big rotating cast. So I would go and see maybe two or three standup nights a week. Each one would have five to 20 acts. I can't even remember. It's been decades now. And so some of them you would get to know and you'd get to know the circuit. Some of them you'd only see once or twice.

One time I was watching a guy and I was like oh this guy's pretty funny and then halfway through his set i noticed he was wearing a small we call them badges i think you call them pins he was wearing a small pin of the aboriginal flag so the aboriginals are the the indigenous people of australia and he had a little pin with a flag on it and the second i noticed that i was like oh i saw this guy two months ago he did a set about this this and this smallest

little like standout detail but that plus the fact that i really enjoyed his comedy immediately like placed him for me. So like, I think, I think the, my name is AJ is great. And I mean, you know, there's a billion ways you can do this without being annoying. Like always wear a very pink tie as a random example.

Like people will remember the guy with the pink tie. You don't have to do this. You don't have to go blue and colorful and explode your life. You know, bring a parrot who lives on your shoulder. Arcane wonders. What's the owner of that's name again? I don't know. Well, anyway, always wearing like a nice like suit to the conventions, like instantly you see them and you're like, oh yeah, exactly.

It's the suit guy. Yeah. So there are ways of doing this without being as extreme as me and having an accent and also just being a walking cry for attention. But that is the end of my unhelpful advice. advice, would you like to talk about today's topic? I'd love to. I'm very excited to talk about today's topic. Today's topic is a sequel to a podcast we never did. So I mentioned earlier that this is going to tie into what I was saying about being visible.

Almost 10 years ago now, it's probably like seven years ago, I was a guest on Gabe Barrett's podcast, The Board Game Design Lab. And I had never met Gabe at this point. This is how I met Gabe. I emailed him and I was like, hi, Gabe, I would like to come onto your podcast and talk about a topic I think about a lot. He was like, yep, sure. I came on and for years, I genuinely think that is what I was best known in this industry for.

Because I, for half a decade afterwards, people were like, oh, Peter Hayward, you did that podcast. And I'd be like, yeah, that was me. Hooray. So people found it very helpful.

And the name of that podcast episode, and we'll link to it in the show notes, of course, was The Two Types of Cooperative Game. Today is a sequel to that, where I'll do a full recap so you don't actually have to go and listen to that one, called The Third Type of Cooperative Games. Have you ever listened to that one, AJ? I've listened to it two or three times. Oh, lovely. Did you find it helpful?

Extremely. Okay, cool. So I'm going to recap it. I just listened to it again today, and oh boy, it was fascinating to listen to me seven years ago. I think my Australian accent was slightly stronger. Someone who's listened to that one and this one back-to-back, you let me know. So I'm going to start with just the two types of cooperative games, then we're going to move into SQL territory.

My theory at the time. So the context is that I was going to every playtesting convention I could, and I would get to a convention, or not even just playtesting conventions. I was going to every convention I could, and I was just sitting and playtesting games for 15 hours a day, every day of the convention. That was all I went. I'd stop for meals sometimes. I would often bring little shakes and stuff like that, so I didn't have to stop

for meals. and I would just run prototype, prototype, prototype. A lot of mine, a lot of other people's. The standard sort of back and forth. So I was playing, I think at my peak, probably like a thousand prototypes a year. I don't think that's an over-exaggeration. It might even be slightly under.

I was playing a lot of prototypes. And I realized that in all the time I was playing these prototypes, at this point, this is 2017, so I've been doing this for about a year or two, I had never found a cooperative prototype that I thought was publishable and co-ops are a pretty big genre I think we can I think that's a safe thing to say and so it was really fascinating to me and because I a don't like co-ops that much and b have whatever weird brain I have I started

to realize that there was a formula to successful cooperative games that none of these prototypes followed and that at the time every single, prototype, sorry, every single published cooperative game did follow. Is it making sense? Are you following so far? Yeah, but I listened to the episode two times. Cool. So the two types of co-ops, as was the name of the episode, were limited communication and against the game. And we're not going to go into this for 45 minutes as we did in the original

one. So I'm just going to say my piece and AJ, please feel free to add any thoughts in. This is not meant to be a monologue. Limited communication games, exactly what they say on the tin. It's a game where you, let's start with what a cooperative game is. Cooperative game is any game where you all win together or lose together. That's the binary outcome. You either all win or you all lose. The end.

Let's just accept that as the definition for now. We can debate that later, but that's what a cooperative game is. A limited communication cooperative game is one where you are, as the name suggests, limited in your communication. So the example I used in the podcast was Mysteria, which was my favorite game at the time. Nowadays, I would definitely use Just One. Just One, the goal is very simple. Get someone to guess a word. If there was no limit on a communication, you'd be like, oh,

hey, AJ, the answer is Egypt. Egypt and AJ would say, the answer is Egypt and we would win. And that would not be a game. The magic of a limited communication is that it limits your communication and creates this interesting puzzle where you have to get information across while not being able to just say the information. So this, this can be done with word trickery, like just one or codames duet or anything like that.

This can be done with a real time element where if you had all the time in the world, it would be quite solvable.

But as it is, you have to sit there, you can't just sit there and puzzle out you have to be like okay you do this you do this this can be done with hanabi does it by facing your cards outwards and you can't just say what people have it's generally a very very very simple goal that is obfuscated through limited communication and i i said at the time and i think this is probably still true they're really hard to design because there's not as much design space as maybe other genres have and i love

them this This is one of my favorite types of game in the world. I don't think I have anything specifically to comment on with that. I don't know that I would say that they're the hardest type of game to design. I said they are hard to design, not the hardest. Sorry, I heard one of the hardest. Yeah, I mean, I kind of feel like all games are hard to design, but maybe I'm just not a design games. Okay, I've got a great podcast recommendation for you.

Yeah, I think it's really important to make the distinction that limited communication. Can be limited in so many different ways. Like, obviously, Hanabi, you can't see your own cards. And you said real-time games, you can talk as much as you want to. You just don't have time to say everything you need to say. Yeah. But there's a lot of different ways to do it. And so it's a pretty broad category. Just try and keep your mind open as you're talking about it, I'd say.

I'll just give you two other examples because they came to me.

One is the mind, where you literally just can't say anything and you're not allowed to like non-verbally explicitly communicate which is such an interesting little restriction that we could probably do a whole episode on and then oh what's the other one i was going to say oh witness which i talked about in the old podcast too which is it's exactly four players really limited communication yeah you you all have one quarter of the information and

you have to get it to everyone but you can only do this by whispering to the player to your left so i whisper to the player my left they whisper to the player their left they whisper the player their left and then we all have the information. So there's a memory and a timed communication. It's mostly a memory aspect. So memory isn't strictly limited communication, but there is a limit to the communication and then memory is what further challenges you. So that's limited communication.

I love them. Amazing. At this point, I have played a few prototypes. I hadn't at the time. And I think one or two that have gone on to be published, but I would say this is a, maybe, maybe hard design is not fair. Maybe rare. This is quite a rare genre. And I think because it is such a, such a needle to thread, like it's so hard to find a new form of limited communication and then It's not hard to design. It's just rare because it's hard to design.

No, it's, it's specific, I guess. It's it, it has very, very specific requirements in a way that I don't think other genres do. To even start this, you need to have a very rare idea. And then once you have that, I've played a few that just fall apart straight away.

The second type of cooperative game, and this is what most people think of when they think of co-op, is against the game. Some examples would be Pandemic, Forbidden Island, other games by Matt Leacock, Sentinels the Multiverse, Spirit Island, other games by Greater Than Games. What are some other kind of classic against the game co-ops? Flashpoint Fire Rescue is one that I actually, I don't like this genre much, and I really do like that one.

Put me on the spot. We can't pause the thing anymore. Make me look like I have an encyclopedic knowledge. I actually used to have an encyclopedic knowledge, but I haven't worked at the GameStar for forever. And so all I ever play or think about are my games. Right. There's others. Anyway. So against the game co-ops are ones where we are all collectively just trying to solve this puzzle essentially. I mean, it's called against the game because the game, we are fighting the game.

And if we can defeat the game, we win. And if the game defeats us, we lose. It's almost like a video game in that regard. I don't think it's a fruitful path to go down, so let's not. But it is very much like you and your team against the game. And typically, there's no communication limits. So in Pandemic, you can say exactly what's in your hand, exactly what you're thinking. Some of these games obfuscate communication just by complexity.

So like Sentinels of the Multiverse and Spirit Island, theoretically, you could sit there and say what every card does and what ramifications it'll have. It would just take so long that people tend to like break off and be like, okay, you handle this, I'll handle this. And then you just go for it. Against the game games have, and this, this is my observation seven years ago. I honestly haven't played a lot since then. This is not a genre that I particularly enjoy.

So maybe this is, was true at the time. It is no longer true, but typically against the game co-ops have three main elements. And this was, this was a very formulaic thing that I observed and no one was doing. I, I still have never played a prototype that does these things, but every, oh, Oh, Ghost Stories is another one. Every against the game co-op that I played that was published very strictly followed this exact formula, despite no one else having written it down and

disseminated it. So the formula is these three elements. Firstly, there is a single iterative numerical goal. And that is a really jargony way to say it's a single goal. So there's one thing you're trying to do. It's got multiple stages. So it's iterative and it almost always has a number in its core. So for example, in Flashpoint Fire Rescue, you're trying to rescue seven people from the fire. It is a single goal. You win if you rescue those seven people.

It is numerical, the number seven, and it's iterative in that you have to go to them and pick them up and take them out again. In Forbidden Island, you have to collect the four relics and get them to a certain place. In Pandemic, you have to cure the four diseases. pieces. In Spirit Island, you have to... Spirit Island's a little bit fuzzier in this regard because it technically has two goals, but one of them is just to make you avoid cleanup.

So you have to defeat all the invaders until you get to level two, in which case you have to defeat all the invaders' houses until you get to level three, and it's all the invaders' cities. And they've said that they did that just so you don't have to spend half an hour after you've won just cleaning up all the mess.

Sentinels of the Multiverse, you are trying to remove the villain's health, and every villain's different in Sentinels Multiverse, but they all have that same goal of remove all the health, and they often will have very clear steps. Like Baron Blade, you have to destroy the defense platform, then remove the health. Citizen Dawn, you have to destroy the citizens and then remove the health, et cetera, et cetera. Any questions or notes on point one of my three-point against the game cooperative

formula? Got to keep this thing going. Okay. The second feature of every against the game co-op I've ever, every published one that I've ever played is that there are unrelated fires to put out. And what I mean by that is in pandemic, the goal is to cure the four diseases. There are a few loss conditions, but none of them, the diseases, it's not a direct reversal of what you're doing.

Like in Flashpoint Fire Rescue, you have to, Flashpoint Fire Rescue is a great example because I call this step putting out fires. In Flashpoint Fire Rescue, you're trying to go in, get the victim of the fire, pull them out. Do that seven times, you win. You lose if the house is too on fire and collapses before you've done that. So you are literally choosing between achieving your singular, numerative, iterative goal or putting out fires. In that case, it is very literal fires.

Pandemic's probably the most famous cooperative game. And that one, the fires are cities having outbreaks. So you've got these cubes all around the board and you want to go to the place that has the most cubes, because if it gets more cubes, then that is one step towards loss. These fires are also numerical. And so it's It's not just like, oh, we failed to save one city, we've lost. It's like, okay, we can afford to lose four cities, but a fifth one will kill us.

So you're always advancing towards victory and then separately advancing towards loss. Is this making sense? Yes. Should I interject with this? Please do. Okay. So I think that there's an interesting example of the game that is co-op and kind of limited communication, kind of not. Very famous, that doesn't have fires in the traditional sense, but kind of still does. So I think it's like a hybrid of both frameworks, which is interesting.

Can you think of what that might be? Is it one of the house on the hill things? Nope. It's an extremely popular board game. Is it a Cthulhu one? I haven't played any of the Cthulhu ones. No. Gloomhaven. So Gloomhaven has a bit of limited communication. You haven't played Gloomhaven? I have not played Gloomhaven. I've got it downloaded. I just haven't had a chance to see it. So after we're done recording, we'll play around with Gloomhaven.

But in Gloomhaven, it starts off and you choose which cards you play and you're not allowed to... You have some limitations on communication, but the limitations are pretty mild just to stop it from being completely mathed out. But then most of the game takes place after you play these cards. And frankly, like if you played your cards at random, most of the game would still feel pretty similar.

So I don't really consider it sort of limited communication, but also doesn't have fires on all the scenarios.

Scenarios the objectives in the scenarios change from scenario to scenario but oftentimes it's just to kill all the guys and so there aren't really fires in a traditional sense but there's sort of the reverse of fires rather than small things that you have to deal with or you lose it's there's all these little meta progression things that distract you from that main goal so when you kill an enemy it drops money and you have

to go to that space to get the money or if you have a attack you have have to use it in a certain way to get xp so you might want to play in a slightly different way, or you might be playing what was my thing oh and sorry you you might have a battle goal at the start of each scenario everyone gets a battle goal and if you accomplish it then you'll get xp and so that might make you play in a way that again is distracting you from the main goal so i just thought that was a really interesting

example so it doesn't quite fit the framework yeah it's interesting because when i when i when i came up with this theory this almost predates like, the mainstreamness of like legacy and campaign stuff, like Risk Legacy existed. I don't even know if Pandemic Legacy was out at this point. And so like Gloomhaven is a, is a dungeon crawler, I'd say pretty unambiguously and dungeon crawl is almost its own separate type of co-op again.

Cause like a campaign where like you have, you said you have individual goals, right? Are there some that like you want to get more treasure than someone else? Or have I made that up in my head? There's stuff that's basically like that. That's right. If that's not a literal one, it's pretty darn close. Yeah. It, it, it, it's still obviously very much a co-op game, but that like just nudges against the bounds of what is a co-op game to me. Yeah.

You're still definitely trying to overkill. You lose or fail as a group, that kind of thing. But it does edge the tiniest bit into semi-co-op where it's like, well, if I do this one thing that puts the group in a little bit more danger, I get a lot more XP. So it's a really interesting case for sure. Yeah, no, that is interesting. I should, as you correctly said, I should play that. The other thing about fires is that they give you an immediate second goal.

So like your goal, not second goal, they give you an immediate second thing to do. So at the start of Pandemic, there are cubes on the board and you've all got cards which you're trying to collect to make the cures. At the start of Flashpoint Fire Rescue, you can see some, if not all the victims, I think it's only some, and there's already fires started.

Like you play firefighters in that game. it would be weird to show up to the house there's no fires so right from turn one you as a player or as a group are torn what do we do first what do we prioritize like that's the core tension of i think and against the game co-op is like we have to achieve this goal we have to stop this fire and really importantly they're not on the same spectrum it's not oh if we achieve this goal then and that inherently stops the fires.

And it's not, if we stop the fires that inherently achieves the goal, they are two branching paths and you're constant, it's sort of like alternate paths to victory, you're constantly having to decide where to put your focus. And I think, importantly, it's something that completely distracts you, like you said. It doesn't contribute to you actually advancing towards succeeding at all.

Yeah. And I think there's a distinction to make between fires and, I don't know what else you want to call them, but fires versus things that distract you and are bonuses. Right. Side quest. I think that is side quest, sure.

But i think that's this to me when you broke down fires versus goals that's what the episode did for me to help make me understand co-ops in a different way and now whenever i play a co-op i can always identify those things and it really helps you understand what makes the game fun what the core tensions of the game are like that that's why it's a good game yeah the third part Part of my formula is similar to the first one. It's an iterative loss condition.

And that can end the game, not at any time, but that can end the game before X rounds. So I don't think that there are any co-ops that fall in this category that are just like, yeah, survive 10 rounds and you win. It's always goal, fire. If you ignore the fires, you lose due to iterative loss conditions. So Sentence of the Multiverse, I think, is a really good example of this. I'll use pandemic because that's like the co-op. Pandemic you lose if there

are X outbreaks. So the outbreaks of the fire and they are the loss condition, that's fine. You also lose pandemic if you run out the deck. So if you just spend the whole game taking care of fires... Cool, that's not good enough. You still have to go and achieve the goal. Like it has an ending. This is all kind of basic game design in a sense, but I think it's really interesting when applied to co-op specifically. Sentinels of the Multiverse, you win by taking away all the villain's health.

You lose, I think almost every villain has their own special loss condition. Like if they collect three rubies or whatever, then they win. But you also lose if all your heroes are incapacitated. So every hero has health. When one hero is incapacitated, you're like, oh boy, we are one-fifth closer to loss. If everyone's on one health, you can see exactly how close you are to loss. And I think that is really key for these. And I spoke about this on the episode too.

It becomes almost like a little currency that you can kind of spend. So if you're two turns away from winning and all the heroes are alive, you're like, cool, kill four of them.

It really doesn't matter because if we win we win and if we you know it's we can't lose this way we have this currency to spend which is the hero's health yep i was trying to think that whole time as soon as you said there's no games that don't just have you survive x rounds can't think about it yeah it's such a specific formula and no one does it i was listening to the episode today i was like i should just make a co-op to this formula so you might you

might see that designed hitting the tables at some point. Another game that you designed that everyone loves but you. So those are the two types of co-ops. Before we move on to the new element, the sequel, any big thoughts on those A to the. No, I think we did a good job covering that. Okay. So while talking about that, we sort of identified a new type, which is kind of dungeon crawler kind of campaign. I'm going to put that aside for now. I don't have well-organized thoughts on that.

The third type of co-op game is one that possibly existed when I made that episode, but I had never encountered it. And now I see it a lot.

This is, I think, a very, very common type of co-op. and that is the no limited communication so pure free open communication no fires, just trying to get as many points as you can before the game ends my theory and this is this is brand new peter theory is that this comes from the world of solo games because i think solo games are in their own little camp and i think a lot of solo games not all but i think a lot of solo camps are just like sorry a lot of solo games just like hey play

this try to get as many points as you can then check against this chart see how you did now maybe that's doing a disservice to solo games but i've played enough to be like that is not an uncommon feature of those and i specifically excluded solo games from my original episode because of that that as solo games have gotten more popular i think that has moved into co-ops more and more have you played any like the kind of thing i'm talking about no is this something

like dwarf romantic or yes those like cozy game type things okay yes so i guess i guess the cozy co-op is not a bad name for it but But I think of it as the score-based co-op. The one that I think of more than anything is Beacon Patrol by Pandasaurus Games. Have you played that? So I have a teeny tiny son who did not exist when I recorded this last episode. He is six turning seven and he loves games. He loves playing games with his dad, his weird blue bearded dad.

He loves playing games with AJ. AJ has played games with my son many times now. And it's great. Yeah, he's lovely. And he loves co-ops. I don't like co-ops, but I love playing games with Henry so much that I will play anything he wants to play, which means I've been playing a lot of co-ops. And I think his favorite co-op is a game called Beacon Patrol that Alex Cutler, a friend of the podcast, did a lot of work on. I think he found it and brought it to Pandasaurus and then devved it.

That game, you're basically playing like a little Carcassonne kind of thing where you're all putting out tiles. But unlike Carcassonne, you've got a little figure that's moving around. So you're putting out tiles. You only score tiles that have something on all four sides. And then you're trying to maximize combos. So certain types of tile want certain things next to them.

Certain types of tile can only be played next to them. Like Carcassonne, you have to match, in this case, it's water and lands, it's not roads or anything like that, but you have to match land to land, water to water, and the features on the tiles score in different ways. You play until the stack of tiles is over, just like Carcassonne, most points wins. There is no limited communication. It's purely open. One person could quarterback the whole thing. Quarterback is a co-op term.

That means one person basically runs the whole game and everyone else just sits there and watches. and there is not a single fire to put out. There is not a single loss condition. It doesn't do any of the things and yet it is a fairly successful co-op. And I've seen, like you said, Dwarf Romantic is another example. This is a new third type of co-op that I don't think exists or at least was very uncommon seven years ago. Does Sprawlopolis have limited communication rules?

It does not. Sprawlopolis is a great example of this. Okay. Sprawlopolis is an 18-card button-shy game that you basically put out tiles and you're trying to get as many points as possible as a group. Now these games have limited play. In Beacon Patrol, only I can put out my tiles, only you can put out your tiles. We can swap, but it's quite limited. But that's not limited communication at all. That's just a game mechanic.

Yeah, it's interesting for you to point that out because I'm on record as saying I'm one of the least competitive people on earth. If every game ended before scoring, I would be actually happier because then I don't have to waste time scoring. I don't care. I don't care if I win or not. And so like a score attack like that has just no interest to me at all. But it is interesting to see industry shifts like that because I have heard of those games.

And going into this episode, I knew what the topic was. In my head, I was trying to think of what it was going to be.

And i was assuming you were like yeah i was assuming you'd like recontextualized it and you'd like and it was some sort of like hybrid between the two that's kind of why gloomy was on my mind i was like oh i wonder if it's going to be like something like that but it's interesting to to think about in those terms especially because it's that's something that i assume you have no interest in as like the peak of things you don't like yeah it's it's not it doesn't it It doesn't grab me

in the, I mean, I don't like co-ops at all. And as you know, I don't like scoring, but it's a really, and so I want to get your thoughts.

And then I want to kind of shift into like how to use this as a designer. Cause this is, this is what's really interesting to me. Have you played Dwarf Remedic? I have not. So for context, Dwarf Remedic won the Spiel last year, two years ago. It won the Spiel, Spiel der Jahres, the big board game award. Not this past year. This past year was Sky Team. So it would have been the year before. Oh, right. Another, a limited communication to-op.

And yeah, co-ops are big right now. One of the reasons people think co-ops are big is because there's more people who win at the table. I don't know if that's true, but it's an interesting theory. So Dorfromedic, basically you're putting out tiles and then you are putting quests on those tiles and trying to complete them. So you have a lot of control over how ambitious you get, because the goal is just get the most points. You get to choose your own aspiration level and then try to achieve it.

It's such a different design space to a lot of even what we talk about out on the podcast yeah it's interesting i wonder if part of this is the hobby becoming more diverse because like it's a very like traditional masculine thing of like dominate your opponents and like if you look at a lot of like kill yeah i feel like a lot of games are popular with that demographic like war games were popular like dnd which is which was like more of a skirmish or like a battle ended rpg

system a lot of like magic's gathering a lot of classic card games and stuff like the things that men were typically drawn to back in the day were a lot of the combat related things and nowadays now the hobby's a bit more diverse rpgs are i don't know if this is quite true but like there if there's like more non-combat based ones but there's so many non-combat based ones at the at the minimum being coming to the hobby and there's so many,

different types of games that are getting popular that are de-emphasizing conflict between players it's almost like another like mini renaissance of like euro you know. We probably shouldn't, but we could do a whole episode on Euro because I've learned Euro used to mean a completely different thing than it means today. Like Euro is one of those words that is just, even in 20 years, completely shifted in meaning. I think also it had some usefulness when it first came out.

There was a pretty big divide between American games and European games, but the more time has gone on, the less and less and less and less that would mean to anything. It's less literally descriptive. descriptive, but now we won't get into this because we can't cut it. But yes, pin that as a thought for another time in one of our bonus episodes, maybe. So I want to talk about victory points for a moment in general, because I have had a very public anti-victory point stand for many years.

This is hopefully not news to you, AJ. I don't think in victory points. And that's not to say I think victory points are bad. I think victory points are a tool that do a lot of things.

That's just not how my brain works. My default with every game I make is that there is a singular win-lose-win condition and victory points for me are always not a fallback but like if that doesn't work I'm like oh but I could achieve you know appropriate incentives through victory points in my mind and this is maybe unfair in my mind, victory points are almost like a little cheat code they're like I think a little bit less satisfying than a game without victory points this is obviously personal

preference people love their point salads but for me I'm like are you just you just resorted to victory points you You could have worked a little bit harder and done something differently. And, you know, I've got now multiple games with victory points, so I'm no one to speak. But I do hold victory points in this sort of like, if you're struggling, absolutely go and use the cheat code. If you're not having a good time, go and use the cheat code.

It's the only way to get through, go and use the cheat code. But in my mind, it is still a cheat code. Does that make sense? Yeah, I don't agree, but yes. Yes, yes. I'm not saying that this is correct.

Correct i'm just saying like this is this is my stance on on victory points is that like, yeah for for me i think part of it is just the you know because i'm a game designer i i look past the surface level thing so robotopia robotopia is not get four points robotopia is get four guilds on your side but like function if you just said like every time you come i disagree, this so thoroughly people are like oh yeah chess has victory points one victory

point for winning the game. And I'm like, cool. Then nothing means anything. No, see, I do think that is a big difference, actually. If you win a race game by coming in first, to me, that is totally different than victory points. But if you have to do, like you said, iterative numbers of a thing, to me, that's when it feels very similar to victory points. The reason I'll separate Robotopia out is because it's not get four guilds. It's get guild A, get guild B, get guild C.

You actually start with a guild, so it's just those three. And they all They'll have specific different requirements. So for me, I'm like, sure, at that point, anything is victory points. So that one specifically, I'll take umbrage with. My general anti-victory points rant is when they are just from unrelated things. I'll use the classic example. I don't know if I've used this on the podcast before for professional courtesy. Maybe I have, and I'm not that professional.

The game Tapestry. Do you know if I've talked about this on the podcast? You have not talked about this on the podcast, I don't believe. But we have talked about it a lot after. Yes. The game Tapestry is a game where you win by having the most victory points. And you get victory points from everything. It's very pointsality in that regard. And again, that's fine. This is more popular than any of my games. This is more popular than all my games put together.

I am not definitively right. I just don't like it. In Tapestry, going up this track can get you victory points. Covering stuff up in your field can get you victory points. This can get you victory points. Everything can get you victory points. And the thing that is the breaking point for me, the thing that bugs me the most, is when you place a new land in the world of Tapestry, Jamie, the designer who runs the company, he clearly wanted people to make a

nice map at the end. I think he's explicitly said this in his design diaries. So if you connect mountain to mountain, field to field, ocean to ocean, whatever it is, you just get a victory point for each of those connections. It makes no thematic sense that I, as the explorer, have explored this. It doesn't make sense. And for me, it's just such a transparent, like, I want people to do this. Oh, I'll just give them a victory point. Cool.

Have it. Just take a victory point. So there is a game by, I can't remember who the designer is, but the original Energy Empire, sorry, Manhattan Project, the original Manhattan Project. The winner is the first to 27 victory points, whatever the number is. You get victory points by making nuclear bombs. The end. You don't also get them for bringing your wife flowers and for rolling nines whenever you roll a die and for having the best hat in the room.

It's a very singular focus goal you get victory points from one specific solo thing this has become a whole victory point tangent because as soon as i start talking about victory points i find it very hard to stop i like that i don't think of that as a victory point game in the way that i'm talking about like i guess point salad would be a more appropriate term but it's just so common so point salad games i i love castle burgundy that's pure point salad

and i love it but i don't like games that are just like how do we balance this card versus this card oh this one can just have a victory point, how do we do this? Oh, we'll just give that a victory point. I am doing this in some of my prototypes. I'm not above this.

I'm just saying like, I am aware that instead of fully balancing two cards, you can just throw some victory points on one of them, save yourself a lot of work, but I believe there is a cost to that and that's why I consider it a cheat code. I'll just say, I think that the best cases for you, the best use cases for victory points are super simple games. If you have like a card game, it's push your luck or whatever.

Then just having that be as simple as possible makes a lot of sense at any game where you want to have multiple paths to victory, where you can, you know, if you're playing, you know, a sandbox or style game or like TI or one of those ones, having victory points for. Yep. Allow you to have very different paths to victory.

I think those are really great uses for it. I don't disagree with you on principle, just to clarify to the audience that it's not good to try and make it a more thematic, integrated feeling thing as opposed to just slapping a number onto something. But I just take a less dogmatic stance against it, I suppose. I mean, again, I'm arguably a hypocrite in that, like, I have, like, Critter Kitchen. Critter Kitchen, coming out soon from Carbon Alchemy, has what is essentially

victory points. Whoever has the most stars at the end wins. Now, you will get 50 plus percent of your stars from the endgame critic. You will get 45 to 50 percent from the challenges that you complete along the way. But then there are just some random stuff throughout the game that gives you stars. Because like the alternative, my ideal game doesn't have victory points, but instead gives you little incentives that get you closer to achieving whatever the main goal is.

That's the dream. I love that. I'm working on a game called Maddie and the Sword with a local designer. And for a while, every time you placed essentially a bookmark on a book, I won't go into it beyond that, you would get either one, two or three victory points if you were the third, second or first one there. So you wanted to be first to get three victory points. I hated this. I was like, this is exactly the, like, we're, we want people to race for bookmarks. Oh, we'll just pay them.

The comparison, this is now the third type of cooperative game and also victory points. The comparison I often make is with like romance. Like you cannot pay someone to be your husband or wife. Like you can, but you, you probably shouldn't. Like that's not, that's not how it, how it works.

And that's how I see this. is like if i'm having a fight with my girlfriend i can't be like here's 200 it it just fundamentally doesn't work and that's what it feels like to me when a game designer is like i really want you to do this so i'm just going to give you victory points i'm like it makes me feel tawdry so in critic kitchen like i said there are these other things that give you them and it's like in the ideal situation seven is the best number

in that game uh if you have like a seven cheese that's the best cheese it would have been oh if you go here you get the seven cheese but that was for various reasons, a logistical nightmare. So we just said, okay, cool. Just have a victory point. The game ends anywhere between like 20 and 40 victory points. So it's not like everything is getting it to you and you're sitting there mathing for a long time, but I use them. I'm a hypocrite in that sense. Okay.

This does relate to the topic of our podcast because as a designer, this third type of cooperative game, this cozy cooperative game allows you for the first time I'm in cooperative games to use this. This tool, this cheat code, this whatever you want to call it, wasn't really available to you in against the game co-op. Because in against the game co-ops, there are no victory points, there's win or loss. And so you have to like tie it directly into the win condition, the loss condition.

You can't have an event in pandemic that's like, get a cure. Like you only have to get four cures to win the game. You can't just get a cure by randomly drawing a card. But if the goal is most victory points, you can have a card that's like, hey, have some victory points. That's a particularly weak example, but hopefully you understand where I'm coming from. Yeah. And so I find this really- Oh, okay. Gotcha.

I find this really interesting. A designer, me and Alex, frequent co-designer, Alex Cutler, friend of the podcast, the guy from Beacon Patrol that I mentioned earlier, he and I are working on at least one game, possibly more than one, which is just a purely victory point driven cooperative game. And it's just so interesting how it lets you do things. Because I'm me and because I have such an aversion to it, I am limiting the scope as much as I can.

So it's still like i think one of our games you win if you hit 20 hearts or the scale like maxes out at 20 so it's not like you know 700 amazing job 600 good job it's still quite a limited thing but it does open up interesting design avenues that i thought would be interesting to our audience and hopefully to you aj as well not to me i won't design a game like that sounds boring point but i and i also think that the conversation about the tool of victory points is interesting.

Yes well like and most importantly and most importantly now we have the two types of co-ops on our channel i think that's all i have to say if i come up with anything else i will put it into follow-up but that is the third type of cooperative game maybe we'll do a whole follow-up on on uh campaign games because you've got my brain thinking about that now yeah and you know what i would love to hear our listeners about this episode in particular because i think

that there's a lot of nuance in this discussion here and i feel like the conversations with our listeners could bring up more things that we want to talk about in relation to this for me in particular because i hadn't heard of this type of co-op or you know i had heard of these games so i didn't think of them in that framework so if i have more time to percolate on i may have more stuff to say later this this is the downside of peter led episodes is that aj gets no time to prep i will mention

that we have a discord server that is very active honestly it's it's a really lovely little community. Lots of people talking about the episodes, which is very flattering, but also just like sharing design links and discussing designs. We now have this on YouTube. So if you're listening, you can check out our YouTube, just go to Bluebeard Entertainment YouTube, search for fun problems, and you can comment down below. That's another way that we can engage.

And also AJ is looking for 17 housemates. So anyone listening to the podcast is instantly welcome to come and live with AJ. Yeah. At the address of 25... For the people listening and not watching, AJ has written down his address and is now holding it up. So AJ, would you like to have some fun? Yes, but only for a few moments. Good, good. A very limited amount of fun that we are allowed to have. So do you have a question? No. Okay.

To celebrate our entrance into YouTube, I wanted to bring up YouTube and I wanted to ask you which YouTube channel, actually I want two answers. Which YouTube channel do you think you have spent the most time watching and which YouTube channel do you think you have watched the most videos from, individual videos? So this is total quantity versus individual quantity. The most time I have spent watching is either Channel Fireball or LSV's new channel.

For those who don't know, these are channels for Magic the Gathering content. And I think the answer for most amount of hours viewed would be the same.

As in either one of those two. because every night when i go to sleep i throw on one of these videos of this guy what are these what do these words mean i genuinely don't know what a fireball or an lsv is so this is magic the gathering content i thought i said that sorry um so but like what is is it just looking at the one card that's called fireball like i don't know what the content is right so channel fireball was a store an online store for magic singles and stuff and

they hired a ton of pros to put up magic content so they'd be you know streaming playing games and stuff like that way before streaming was like a thing this is before youtube i was watching channel wow yeah wow or or at least before youtube was like the place where everyone was it may have existed but this is before everyone hosted their youtube i think 2004 is when that started so you could possibly do the math on that and lsv was one of the owners of channel fireball so

he posted a lot of content he was a pro player He still is a pro player. He's top five Magic players of all time, and he's the most popular streamer and a very, very good content creator for that. And he, a year or two ago, started his own channel where he just posts every single day him doing cube drafts, which is a draft of Magic's most powerful cards all in one set. You're only playing that, and just speaking, you're playing it's very, very good players. Magic and steroids.

Yeah, it's such an interesting format because like you think it's like the most powerful format ever. But it actually feels kind of like how Richard Garfield intended it, even though the power level in general is quite high. Because you have you have access to all these powerful cards. If you see one of the power nine, like a black lotus, it would be the most common thing that people know about where it's like this crazy powerful card. Well, it's one in like 500 cards in the cube.

You actually will get like zero to one of these super powerful cards in a draft on average generally speaking i would say probably 0.5 per draft something like that and so it generally makes them exciting and it means that they're not as busted as they are in constructed formats where you can play whatever you want to and the combination of all these like really complex and powerful effects is unbelievably fascinating the just these cube videos alone

have inspired two different games for me that are trying to accomplish things that i have never seen any board game be able to accomplish. Really cool stuff. And I watch it when I fall asleep every night. The death of all children. It's a really interesting, I mean, no board games done that. How about you?

I want to bounce off what you were saying, which is that we've talked before that I used to play a lot of Soul Forge and I used to in fact record videos of me playing Soul Forge and put them up. And my favorite format of Soul Forge was drafting. I love drafting in all forms, like pick and pass draft. Where you pick and pass, and then you actually do a thing. So like Blood Rage is a good tabletop example. You do a pick and pass draft. Then you actually do something with the thing.

Magic the Gathering, I think, invented the format where you do the pick and pass, and then you play with the thing you drafted. And Soulforge had a really interesting system because there's four suits in Soulforge, but it was purely digital. So once you had chosen a suit, you would, sorry, each deck could have a max of two suits. So at first you'd guaranteed get one of each suit.

And then once you chose any card of a second suit, because it was a purely digital, like made up draft it would only give you cards of that suit so it wasn't like magic where once you start drafting a red heavy deck suddenly like if you've got no white cards you don't care about white cards it was tailored to what you'd already drafted i just think that's one of the most incredible innovations i love i love a draft i fully expected your answer to be build the

game because i know that you've watched a lot of that how do you know what to build the game because Because I've known you for eight years now and we talk almost every day. So that would have been my guess. So I have a very clear answer for the individual episodes, which would have to be Ryan George's pitch meeting series. I have watched all 250, 260, maybe not all. I think there's a few that I skipped because I haven't seen the film that I want to.

But if I have seen the film or I don't want to see the film, I watch them as soon as they come out. I rewatch them. I've started watching through his compilations, even though I've seen them all before, like Like pitch meeting is my favorite thing on the internet time. I don't know if I have a definitively correct answer, but I would have, Oh, actually, sorry. The vlog brothers might beat out pitch meeting. Cause I have watched them.

I watched them over about five years or so, but by, by length of video, I think the answer is taskmaster because I've watched all 17 seasons and they're all six to 10 episodes of 45 minutes each. And that's a lot of, that's a lot of time when you're not falling asleep to it every night. Yeah, those are pretty good rookie numbers. Yeah, yeah. Was I going to say something? Maybe not. That is all from us. Thank you so much for listening. And thank you so much for watching.

And thank you so much for listening to my theories. Because I have a lot of fun coming up with weird ways to look at games. And I hope people find it useful. I do. And I'm the only one who matters. Oh, that's true. No, nothing else. Cool. We will talk to you all next time. Bye. Music.

Thanks for joining us. You can follow us on Facebook or Twitter at FunProblemsPod or reach us via email at FunProblemsPodcast at gmail.com We'd love to hear from you, and if you enjoyed the podcast, please tell a friend.