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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, The 27th Passenger	Star Realms, Small World, Root	Tsuro, Dominion, Blokus, Carcassonne	Ticket to Ride, Mille Bornes, Sorry, 7 Wonders, Settlers of Catan	Cascadia, 40 Below, That’s Pretty Clever, Cryptid	Azul, Beeeees (w/o stingers)	Castle Panic, Wolves, Sub Terra	Pandemic, Tesseract, Switch & Signal, Sky Team	Perspectives, Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective

Definitions:

Cutthroat (-4):
Players must actively eliminate multiple opponents to win.

Combative (-3):
Players directly battle each other. Gameplay based on taking detrimental actions against opponents.

Contentious (-2):
Players both work toward reaching their individual goals and work to prevent their opponents from reaching their goals.

Competitive (-1):
To win, a player must reach their goal first or better than opponents. Players can take actions that limits opponents’ progress. There is only one winner.

Coexistence (0):
Players have little or no interaction. They work independently to reach a goal first or produce some outcome better. Cannot impede 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. 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 collectively as players work towards a common goal, all 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.