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Mechanic Monday: Cooperative Players, Competitive System

New year, still here.  In spite of all my rage, I am still alive.  And back at it with another Mechanic Monday! Not a lot of preamble for you today since I already got some writing out of my system with a little bit of DnD character doodling - I have Session Zero of my first campaign in yeeeeeaaaaars tomorrow - and I need to get home to my beloved pooch so I’ll skip the recipe blog bit and get straight to the mechanic.  This one popped into my head after rapid-fire consuming Dan Thurot’s Best Week (an annual run-down of top games in custom categories pulled from his year’s worth of reviews) and BGG Design Diaries for Oath by Cole Wehrle.

Cooperative Resolution to Conflicting Player Asymmetry
In GREEM, the players represent state actors who wish to broker a peace, but who are empowered by policies from governments that are fundamentally at odds with one another.  Each player’s pool of possible actions is tied to a rule that must always be observed - and while the action may lead to peace, the rules ensure behaviour bends toward conflict.  Players must work together within the confines of their respective government’s agendae, complying with rules in order to undo them and achieve peace; but as the rules fall away, the actions they can take shrink.  Can the players successfully secure a treaty before they’re forcibly retired or war breaks out?

So the thought process here was that there are plenty of semi-coop games out there, but the design space (near as I can tell) has largely had to do with toggling victory conditions to create Dilemma uncertainty.  I wondered what it would take for players to have clear and set victory terms and conditions - this would be a definitively cooperative game, but with systems that would force competitive behaviour.  I thought of a play I once hoped to produce and star in, Lee Blessing’s A Walk In The Woods.  It’s a beautiful, bitter play about nuclear disarmament negotiations between a Soviet and American diplomat, and the institutional hopelessness that crushes their individual and shared hopes of securing peace.  I think that a game like that can take advantage of player ingenuity and agency, while maintaining some intriguing tension with impossible choices.

Anyway that’s the design, steal away, steal away, steal away non-existent intellectual property robot thieves! Til next week.  Fuck this year.

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