In addition to doing a lot of solo gaming, I also play a lot of cooperative games. This is because my wife doesn't really like competitive games anymore, but still likes playing games. We play a lot together, and enjoy all types of teamwork-oriented experiences. Stuff like Spirit Island, Aeon's End, Pandemic Whatever, and so on are all regulars in our roster of games. We also play pretty much any videogame that's co-op, though we're picky and don't play anything if it hasn't hooked us in the first hour. Unfortunately, playing this many co-op games also means you see a lot of issues with the genre. As co-op games tend to be highly abstract or automata-driven, they have a lot in common with solitaire games, but also have unique challenges I feel often go unmet. The two biggest ones are what I'll be discussing in this article. I played a lot of EDH a while back. This was a format of Magic: The Gathering made up by a few guys in the middle of nowhere to entertain themselves, where the card pool was very broad and decks were initially built with the intent to use cards that were typically worthless. While EDH eventually was transmogrified by the horrific tendrils of Magic's NWO into the abomination known as Commander, EDH was really interesting for a few reasons. A big one was that before corporate sunk their awful teeth into it, it was expected that players would locally negotiate with one another about what kind of game they wanted to play and collectively set boundaries on power levels and acceptable ways to play. This isn't a new convention in gaming. I think, prior to the internet, the vast majority of games are played in this manner: local environmental factors trump everything else. As a result, a lot of games have plenty of leeway for allowing abusive tactics with the sort of safety valve of social pressure. If a given strategy is boring or bullshit, you can be called out and maybe ostracized, and then the problem is kind of self-correcting. It does require very basic social skills, but without a commodified tournament structure that forces you to play with random weirdoes, most people are doing this already without knowing it. However, EDH was kind of interesting because it springs from a game that is expressly designed for that sort of transactional tournament structure and because of it, is (allegedly) designed with abuse in mind and has a department of professionals trying to curtail that. It's interesting to see how these design philosophies contrast: the "abuse in mind" school where the rules are meant to be water-tight, playable as though they are a computer program, and the opposite where rules are a bit looser and players are expected to negotiate some hurdles themselves. To some extent this is like the hobbyist vs consumer divide, but that's a discussion of game audiences; this is the game designers. My wife and I have started playing Aeon's End, a co-op deck building game. We mostly play co-op games together, and not games I design. I don't know why I don't leverage our game time to test games, but I don't. Maybe if I make a game about flying dragons around frying things with a light dating simulator aspect to it, she'll be really interested in something I make. But that's not the point of this post. Playing Aeon's End immediately brought me face-to-face with one of my old enemies: single-point tokens. In Aeon's End, they're used for counting health points on enemies. I fucking HATE these. Last week's goals:
This has the strong potential to lead into another project, of course... Well, I had a pretty successful week with the launch of Afterglow and Plamo vs Plamo enjoying a one-day sale on Wargame Vault where I sold a good number of copies. Afterglow has been well-received by the people who have bothered to tell me their thoughts on it, and it's well on the way to selling better than anything else I've ever released.
So for this week's goals... Uncommon Valor
I had one job last week.
Afterglow
But I went above and beyond; I edited it and then published both Afterglow and Outer Dark. They're both in the wild now. Since Afterglow was one of the first things I spoke about when I started this website, and it's been a near-constant fixture in the Milestone Mondays for nearly a year, it's kind of weird to cast it off, but I'm done with it for now. Go and buy them both please. Afterglow here and Outer Dark here. I'm even running a nifty promo for the first month where anybody who buys Afterglow can get Outer Dark for half off! I had a lot of ideas left over from other games and ended up synthesizing them into Uncommon Valor (UCV). Mostly, the game is centered around the Momentum mechanics, but I ended up throwing all kinds of stuff at the wall to see what would stick. I have a bunch of documents with snippets for mechanical concepts in games that I've never fleshed out, and I often write down ideas as they come to me and then just leave them in the document, waiting for a chance to bring them out. As UCV was mostly made so my friend and I could play with miniatures that are unrelated (like ogres and trolls against super soldiers), I also decided I had nothing to lose with throwing lots of these ideas into the mix,
One of these ideas was delayed threat resolution. I like this idea a lot, and this seemed like a good context to add it in. But I ended up cutting it, and I'll examine why in detail. A very good week for testing, though it was a swerve...
Uncommon Valor
I didn't do this. Instead, I played my Monster Mash against some Star Marines. It was very productive. I received the game Interceptor Ace as a gift recently. I'm not knowledgeable about the subject matter and didn't know anything about the game, but I like airplanes and wargames. I'm also a loser with no friends so I like solitaire gaming. I fired the game up, played it a bit, and don't like it for a variety of reasons. But the main takeaway I got from it is the importance of well laid-out player aids. Interceptor Ace is not a particularly complex game but it's heavily reliant on referencing charts. Unfortunately, the way the charts are placed on the player aids is done in an irritating manner, requiring constant flipping, searching and general manipulation. I didn't end up digging this game much, but it did impress on my some principles I'd like to try to adhere to in the design of player aids from here on, though. Last week's goals:
Afterglow
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