Games which do not end friendships, but strengthen them. Games where working together works and loners fall behind.
Can be something simple like The Game or reach any complexity level. Coming to think of it, bring on the complexity. 🙂
Games which do not end friendships, but strengthen them. Games where working together works and loners fall behind.
Can be something simple like The Game or reach any complexity level. Coming to think of it, bring on the complexity. 🙂
In my experience many co-op board games are prone to quarterbacking, especially if there is a difference between levels of experience between players.
In my experience it can be alleviated with the help of the game’s mechanics.
For example Pandemic is a terrible game for that (it’s a good game, but completely has the default you mentioned) because all the information is public, you know what cards the other players have, and in terms of mechanics, each character has its own power, but it’s really easy to have everything in mind at the same time. So an experienced player will have a good vision of the strategy and will possibly railroad everyone.
On the other hand, games like hanabi hide some parts of the information, so a player cannot really know enough to do the strategy by themselves.
If you make the player characters very different from one another, you go in that direction as well. I know how to play my Gloomhaven character, and I mostly know what the other characters do, but I don’t know the exact actions they have, it’s too much. Same with Aeon’s End, the more the game goes on, the more different the decks end up.
So yeah, in a nutshell, there are mechanics a game can use to prevent a single player to have too much of an influence on the game
to what?
Quarterbacking is the behaviour common in cooperative boardgames where 1 player ends up in command of the entire team, telling everybody else what to do. It goes from cooperative to single player with extra hands. Pandemic is an example of a game that’s particularly prone to this.
Thank you