Why Cooperation Is Hard to Design
The challenge of making every player matter
A few weeks ago, my team and I sat down to playtest a cooperative mode for our upcoming The Lord of the Rings™: Ascension™ game. On Thpaper, the setup is a natural fit. You and your friends play as members of the Fellowship. Each player has goals tied to their character, and the Fellowship must complete a certain number of goals to win. Meanwhile, Frodo carries the One Ring and steadily accumulates Corruption. If Frodo falls, everyone loses.
The first session was fun. The second session was fun. Then one of my more blunt playtesters said the quiet part out loud.
“What is my presence here actually doing to change the game compared to just one person manually running an extra position?”
That’s the question that haunts every cooperative game designer. And the honest answer, in most cases, is “not much.”
The Quarterback Problem
In game design, we call this “quarterbacking.” One dominant player at the table figures out the optimal play and starts directing everyone else. “You should buy that card. I’ll grab this one. Don’t attack yet, wait until next turn.” The other players become hands holding cards on behalf of a single brain.
It’s a real problem, but I want to be careful here. For a lot of play groups, it actually works fine. Social norms solve the problem as players naturally take ownership of some decisions while collaborating on others: some people enjoy being the strategist, while other people enjoy being told what to do while still feeling like they contributed. When I play cooperative games with my mom or with kids, the quarterback dynamic is a feature, not a bug. Someone needs to take charge or the game doesn’t go anywhere.
Where quarterbacking becomes a design failure is when your target audience is the strategic gamer who wants ownership over their own decisions, especially in a group where one loud voice dominates the table. That player isn’t going to come back to a game where their seat feels interchangeable with an empty chair.
So as a designer, you have to ask: who is this game for? If it’s for the strategist, you have a problem to solve.
The Fake Fixes
When designers first encounter the quarterback problem, they tend to reach for two solutions. Both feel like they should work. Neither really does.
Fix #1: Give Everyone Unique Powers
Frodo is good at carrying Corruption. Aragorn defeats monsters for less power. Legolas doubles his rewards. Surely that gives each player a meaningful role at the table?
It doesn’t, and here’s why: unique powers don’t change the information state of the game. The quarterback still sees all the cards, all the powers, and all the options. They just have more variables to optimize across. In fact, fixed powers often make quarterbacking easier because each player’s role signals to the table what their “correct” play is. You haven’t added agency. You’ve added flavor.
What unique powers actually do is give players a sense of identity, which matters. Even if the quarterback is calling the shots, you still feel like the elf for the night. That’s not nothing. But it’s not solving the problem you think it’s solving.
Fix #2: Hide Information
Hanabi makes you hold your hand backwards. The Mind forbids talking. In our The Lord of the Rings: Ascension design, we considered whether each player should keep their goals secret.
This works better than unique powers, but it has its own failure mode. The moment a regular play group develops familiarity, they start inventing ways to leak information around the rules. The pacing of your speech. The cards you choose to hint at. The way you sigh when someone proposes a play. I love Hanabi. I love The Mind. Both games break down once groups develop enough shared shorthand (even if developed unconsciously).
Hidden information slows down quarterbacking. It doesn’t eliminate it. At the same time, it can create awkwardness at the table as players dance around communication restrictions when everyone’s incentive is to share information freely. If that communication restriction isn’t the heart of your game, it’s usually a mistake to introduce it.
The Real Fix
The only thing I’ve ever seen truly solve the quarterback problem is conflicting goals. Some version of: “I can’t fully trust the person telling me what to do.”
The cleanest version is a traitor mechanic. You’re all part of the Fellowship, but one of you might secretly be working for Sauron. Now when the quarterback says, “Trust me, buy that card,” the question is no longer just “Is this optimal?” The question becomes “Is this person actually on my team?” The entire cooperative dynamic gets weaponized into something much more interesting.
A softer version is corruption. Everyone is still on the same side, but each player has a personal corruption track slowly pulling them toward the dark side. Now there’s real tension between helping the group and protecting yourself. The quarterback can still call plays, but you have a legitimate reason to refuse, and that refusal itself becomes meaningful gameplay.
The emotional core of the game shifts as a result. That’s a real cost. The warm “we’re all in this together” feeling of pure cooperation becomes something colder and more paranoid. At that point, you’re not really making a fully cooperative game anymore.
Cut the Root, Not the Branches
Here’s what I want game designers to take away from this. When you encounter a design problem, the first solutions you reach for usually address the symptom, not the cause.
The symptom of quarterbacking is “one player is making all the decisions.” So the obvious fixes are to give other players more decisions through unique powers or to make decisions harder to share through hidden information. Both approaches target the symptom, but the cause is different.
In a fully cooperative game with perfect information, there is often a single optimal answer to any given situation. Any player capable of identifying that answer has very little reason to defer to anyone else. The problem isn’t the players, its the structure of the game itself.
To solve the root cause, you need to introduce situations where “the optimal play for the table” is not automatically “the optimal play for me.”
That’s a much bigger surgery because it fundamentally changes the kind of game you are making. Yet, sometimes the correct answer is not to do the surgery at all, and accept that your game will occasionally have a quarterback. Some groups will enjoy that experience and others won’t. And that is ok if you are serving the audiences that enjoy that kind of experience or those that will self-regulate to protect against it.
That said, if you want a cooperative game that consistently holds up for highly strategic players, you can’t solve quarterbacking by sprinkling unique powers and hidden cards on top. You have to build tension into the heart of the cooperation itself, giving players a reason to think for themselves.
Right now, we believe the value of a fully cooperative The Lord of the Rings: Ascension experience outweighs the benefits of using a traitor mechanic to solve quarterbacking, though we do like the feeling of each player facing their own corruption threat in addition to needing to protect Frodo.
Ascension also has the advantage of already supporting a strong competitive multiplayer mode, so groups looking for less quarterbacking can naturally gravitate there instead. Even so, the idea of giving players more ways to experience the game—Competitive, Cooperative, Solo, Traitor Mode, Saga Mode, and beyond—is incredibly exciting to me. The more meaningful ways players can engage with the system, the more value we can pack into the box.
We’re continuing to test some of these more exotic play patterns, and I’ll let you know how it goes.
I've played lots of TTRPGs with very good GMs who employ spotlighting techniques: deliberately shining the light on quieter players and delegating the decision making to them, to the point of telling more opinionated players to release their tight grasp on the strategy and let the story evolve.
I don't know if there is an equivalent that can happen in a board game, because there needs to be some kind of enforcement tool that protects the agency of the quieter players in the face of a more dominant player. But I think there is SOME kind of space that board games can take up here which harmonises a group against the forcefulness of a self-appointed leader.
Pandemic is one of my all-time favorites and I saw this come up frequently. It's hard to fix! My (somewhat inelegant) solution was - once we all knew how to play the game - simply to insist that nobody weigh in on someone else's turn unless they asked for advice or opinions.
I play a ton of Magic casually, and I see this come up a lot too when teaching folks how to play, especially at the EDH tables. From my experience, the best way is to just let folks play their cards and do things their way, let the chips fall where they may, and maybe talk about it later if they're open to it.
Having said all that, I do enjoy the idea of occasionally throwing in a game where someone's covertly working against the interest of the group. I found the old Battlestar Galactica games handle this in really fun ways.