Home

The Deck

Games

Mailing List

About

The CoCo Scale "CoCo" is short for "cooperation/competition," and indicates were on the spectrum among these a game lies.

The primary motivating factor in producing the Gnomon deck is exploring the ideas of Cooperation and Competition within the same framework. To aid with this examination, we have developed the Cooperation-Competition (CoCo) scale for rating games based on the extent to which the players work together or against each other. The CoCo scale goes from -4 to 4, with -4 being the most competitive and 4 being the most cooperative.

The CoCo Scale of Player Interaction in Games
-4	-3	-2	-1	0	1	2	3	4
Cutthroat	Combative	Contentious	Competitive	Coexistence	Connected	Cooperative	Collaborative	Communal
Risk Tsuro The 27th Passenger Fire Tower	Star Realms Small World Root King of Tokyo	Battle Line Dominion Blokus Kingdom Builder Photosynthesis	Ticket to Ride Sorry 7 Wonders Settlers of Catan Carcassonne	Boggle Nmbr9 That’s Pretty Clever Guild of Merchant Explorers Bananagrams	Azul Cascadia 40 Below Ingenious Cryptid Kingdomino	Castle Panic Wolves Sub Terra Celestia	Pandemic Tesseract Switch & Signal Sky Team Burgle Bros.	Perspectives Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective Magic Maze Space Team MicroMacro: Crime City

Definitions:

Cutthroat (-4):
Players must actively eliminate opponent(s) to win.

Combative (-3):
Players directly battle each other. Gameplay and progress are based on taking detrimental actions against opponents. There is only one winner.

Contentious (-2):
Conflict is unavoidable, but not the focus. Players determine when to directly engage. There is only one winner.

Competitive (-1):
Conflict is available, but avoidable. Game is structured around a race or score accumulation. Players can exclusively
focus on progress towards their goal or they can take actions to inhibit others' progress.
There is only one winner.

Coexistence (0):
Players have no interaction. They work independently with the same resources to reach a goal first or produce some outcome better. Cannot affect other players.

Connected (1):
Players interact, but more from happenstance than malice or cooperation – for example through shared resources or the board. There is an individual winner.

Cooperative (2):
Players can work together when their goals align. When their goals do not align, they can compete.
They can succeed collectively or win individually by performing better towards a common goal.

Collaborative (3):
Players all work together towards a single common goal, all win or lose together;
players take individual turns.

Communal (4):
All decisions are made either individually with no communication or collectively with communication. Players work
toward a common goal. There are no turns. All players win or lose together.


Our goal is to provide context for a large class of games and gain insight into the nature of cooperation and competition. This scale does not capture all types of game interaction and is not intended to. There a games of one against many (Not Alone, City of the Great Machine, Betrayal at the House on the Hill); there are games with known and unknown traitors (Resistance, Shadows Over Camelot, Betrayal at House on the Hill); there are games whose level of cooperation and competition change during the course of the game (Green Team Wins) and there are games in which some players cooperate to compete with teams of other players (Captain Sonar, Bridge, CodeNames).

And there are party games whose primary goal is laughter or entertainment, with any competition or cooperation as an ancillary factor. It is difficult to capture the nature of these games with a single number. But the CoCo scale is a starting point, and as such, we have given a CoCo scale rating for almost all the games developed for the Gnomon deck. In particular, we have developed a game for every rating from -4 to 4 so that players can experience widely varying levels of positive or negative interaction with other players within the same basic context – the cards in the Gnomon deck.