Through the Lens: Board Games - Game Design Theory - page 140

son has a much higher skill level in a cooperative game, he or she will
tell everyone else what to do. This happens all the time in cooperative
games; one person basically takes a leadership role and figures out what
the game plan will be for the next four or five turns. A lot of times, what
that player is telling everyone to do is at least a decent call—often a better
call than what the other players would have come up with.
Some think that this is really not such a terrible thing. The truth is,
if you're into these games merely for the social aspect it isn't so bad. The
damage done to your game experience, however, is tremendous. A huge
part of playing games is creative exploration, and a huge part of creative
exploration is being able to make mistakes. If you aren't allowed to make
your own mistakes, then you really aren't playing at all. So how do we
resolve this issue?
I actually had a daylong conversation about this issue with three oth-
er game designers at a recent game designer's conference. We figured out
that there were essentially only two ways to fix the problem.
Make the game competitive-cooperative . Competitive-coopera-
tive games are games that either one player will win, or all players
will lose. Therefore, some amount of cooperation is required to
avoid total failure on all sides.
Add a traitor mechanism to the game . The issue with purely co-
operative games is that there can be no hidden information. For
instance, Pandemic 's rules tell players not show other players their
hands. However, players do need to know what cards the other
players have, and if they can't show each other, they continually
have to ask instead. It's just a silly rule. Adding a traitor mechanism
sets up the possibility that one player might not be an ally, though,
which creates a real, in-game motivation to not reveal cards.
What you may have noticed is that with either of these solutions, the
game is no longer purely cooperative. I feel comfortable saying that the
potential lack of creative exploration in cooperative games is a difficult
problem that no one has solved yet, and it's possible that it may be un-
solvable. It would be great if someone could come up with a completely
new way to play that resulted in the cooperative game surviving when
played with players of drastically different skill levels.

Role-Selection and Worker-Placement Games

Examples: Puerto Rico , Agricola , Caylus , Citadels , Dominant Species

Role selection and worker placement are not the same mechanism, but
they're close so I figured I'd hit them both at the same time. Typically,