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Competitive Games - A game with two or more players and a single winner.
- Competitive Games need to be balanced
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Cooperative Games - Players coordinate their actions to achieve a common win condition or conditions. Players all win or lose the game together.
- These tend to be more forgiving for novices.
- Requires scaling the game difficulty with respect to the number of players.
- Another consideration is player agency — do players have to reach a consensus or can they act on their own.
- One problem that needs to be addressed is one player dominating and overriding the rest of the group.
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Team Based Game - Teams of players compete with one another to obtain victory.
- Allows for a mix of both cooperation and competition.
- Teams can either be fixed or flexible (i.e., alliances can be freely made or broken)
- Consider giving players different roles per team. The challenge here is teaching the player each role.
- Teams can be asymmetric (i.e., one vs all games). The challenge here is balance.
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Solo Game - a game intended for a single player.
- The challenge is to design the game’s AI system so that it is fun to play against.
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Semi-Cooperative Game - A game which ends with either no winners or the players winning as a group but a single player being recognized as the individual winner as well.
- Prone to sabotage, especially when players have to weigh between individual loss and group victory, and group loss.
- Incorporates individual motivations per player.
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Single Loser Game - A game with three or more players in which players are not assigned to static teams and which ends with only one loser.
- Incentivizes players to not perform better than everyone else but be better than one other person.
- Encourages players to impede with one another or dogpile on the losing players.
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Traitor Game - a team or cooperative game with a betrayal mechanism. The traitors win by triggering the fail condition for players. The identity of traitors is hidden at the start.
- Consider how the game plays at different stages of knowing the traitor’s identity. Make sure the game is still fun even if the traitor’s identity is deduced
- Make sure the traitor always has meaningful choices.
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Scenario Games - Games which feature a narrative or campaign using different game configurations.
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Score and Reset Games - Players play until reaching a stopping condition, then record scores, reset the game, and play one or more additional rounds. The game concludes after some number of rounds, and the cumulative score is calculated to determine a winner.
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Legacy Game - a multisession game where permanent and irreversible changes of the game state carry over from session to session
- Difficult to playtest
- Requires consideration for player progression