We don't bother keeping cards hidden in Pandemic because remembering who has what is exhausting.
Things we do to keep it from being too much one person decides the show.
- (except in the case of dispatcher) only you get to touch your own pawn - you get to decide when/if to use your special cards
So while we talk about what we want to do, we let the player whose turn it is make the final decision, rather than coming to a consensus about all the actions.
I'm enjoying the cooperative game flashpoint a lot; it seems like it should be just like Pandemic, but it's not.
Still, in Pandemic and Flash Point the overriding thing which keeps one person from controlling the game is let everyone play. There was a little coop syndrome when Will Wheaton played Castle Panic.
Yeah, in all the games I've played the person whose turn it is has veto power over actions, and physically moves their own pawn, which does help keep everyone involved, and I've never yet seen anyone not enjoy a game of Pandemic... but Group Mind can be a strong force, and I feel like there is often someone (usually the newbie at the table) who can get pushed into certain decisions, and often someone who is the micro-optimizer in the crowd, to use to frederickegerman's terminology below
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The fact that you're allowed to say what you have in Pandemic by no means guarantees that communication will take place effectively, at least not on my home planet. People are normally allowed to talk about all sorts of problem-solving that they still manage to screw up.
This is not "artificial" except in the way that all games are artificial; it's simply what the game is about.
Wait, Settlers is a long strategy game? It takes less time to play than most of the games named above.
I always emphasize about Settlers that the board is mostly a distraction: it's really a game about reasoning about asymmetric resource distribution, and figuring out how to value resources more accurately than your opponents given that they don't want you to know how much the resources are worth to them.
So far the Coop game I've most enjoyed is Forbidden Island. This is the San Juan to Pandemic's Race for the Galaxy: simpler mechanics, faster play. I'm beginning to think that you need fast play to keep coop games viable. As soon as there's time for someone to micro-optimize the game each turn, given the crowds we move in somebody will. The micro-optimizer becomes the de facto solitaire player (at least until two micro-optimizers start arguing).
Space Alert solves this by eliminating analysis / communication time. But games with imposed time pressure have their own problems (and desireearmfeldt won't play them at all
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Hmm. I can approve of stylized communication constraints (for example, I like the bidding mechanism in Bridge). That was where I was trying to go with the idea that only the player whose turn it is can talk. Another possible idea for Pandemic would be that you can only show your hand to someone in the same city: you'd probably need to drop the constraint that you can only trade the card of the city you are on, then. (and then the researcher's ability could change to be that that player would play with their hand open)
And yeah, mentally I think of Settlers as being a longer game than it really is, I should fix that.
Space Alert solves the coop syndrome problem because there is too much going on in too little time. One person isn't going to be able to do everything solo in ten minutes, so you have to trust the other players to do things on their own. It's an awesome game if you're willing to accept a goal of, "Let's see how we die hilariously this time" instead of, "We should always be able to win this game, given careful thought."
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Things we do to keep it from being too much one person decides the show.
- (except in the case of dispatcher) only you get to touch your own pawn
- you get to decide when/if to use your special cards
So while we talk about what we want to do, we let the player whose turn it is make the final decision, rather than coming to a consensus about all the actions.
I'm enjoying the cooperative game flashpoint a lot; it seems like it should be just like Pandemic, but it's not.
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This is not "artificial" except in the way that all games are artificial; it's simply what the game is about.
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I always emphasize about Settlers that the board is mostly a distraction: it's really a game about reasoning about asymmetric resource distribution, and figuring out how to value resources more accurately than your opponents given that they don't want you to know how much the resources are worth to them.
So far the Coop game I've most enjoyed is Forbidden Island. This is the San Juan to Pandemic's Race for the Galaxy: simpler mechanics, faster play. I'm beginning to think that you need fast play to keep coop games viable. As soon as there's time for someone to micro-optimize the game each turn, given the crowds we move in somebody will. The micro-optimizer becomes the de facto solitaire player (at least until two micro-optimizers start arguing).
Space Alert solves this by eliminating analysis / communication time. But games with imposed time pressure have their own problems (and desireearmfeldt won't play them at all ( ... )
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And yeah, mentally I think of Settlers as being a longer game than it really is, I should fix that.
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