Collaborative board game

For this prototype, I wanted to find an answer to the following question:

Can board games be used to promote a sense of shared responsibility?

From my personal belief that our sense of community is a natural but suppressed aspect of our human being, I became curious about the role games could play to get people in touch with that natural state.

Below, I will describe some of the design choices I made in pursuit of this goal.

Design choices

1. Shared goal: To demonstrate the benefits of cooperation and operating as a team, I’ve designed the game to not have individual goals. Instead, the team aims for their spot on the leaderboard, with the only real opponent being their own previous highscore – or that of another team.
    
2. Shared resources: Each round, there are 4 dangerous paths players can traverse, either alone (more loot potential) or with the help of one or more team members (higher survival chance). This requires the group to decide, for every round, which rewards are worth the accompanying risk.
   
   In addition, all items obtained throughout the game are stored in a shared inventory; bringing one or more useful and/or precious items along (with the risk of losing them!) requires consultation with your team, and some degree of trust in each other’s capabilities.

Reflection

The intended emotional aesthetic (fun through cooperation) seemed to work: I did not sense any competition between players, besides them jokingly holding grudges about their friends’ mistakes. Some playtesters did experience it to be a bit more of a cognitive experience than the fantasy-rich one I had envisioned, which I think is to blame on the placeholder setting and visual aesthetic.

From nearly all (if not all) playtests, I have concluded that the game’s goal (placing your team on the leaderboard) was a bit too vague/unconventional for board game standards, which took a toll on the players’ motivation to reach deeper floors. In a future iteration, I’d look into giving the game a more universally understood win condition, such as reaching a final floor with a spectacular encounter of some sort.

Last but not least, I personally did feel a lack of tension, some friction inherent to any cooperative endeavour. Maybe players weren’t immersed enough in the prototype; maybe the risks weren’t great enough; maybe there should be some temptation for players to aim for individualistic goals, to take power in their own hands.

To argue in favour of that last point: perhaps the value of collectivist ideals can be experienced much more effectively, much more truthfully, when it’s not the only option given to the player, but instead a conscious path they took within their experience.

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Resources

A more in-depth explanation of the game’s rules: