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Simon Hackler's avatar

I personally have never played a competitive game where everybody loses. The concept sounds really interesting to me. Maybe sometimes it's worth it to sabotage to try to get the group to loose.

This mechanic made me also think about designs where everybody "could" win. Games like that could be interesting as well but sadly I haven't played any like that.

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Random_Phobosis's avatar

I think "everybody loses" is very hard to pull of in a competitive game.

From the game theory point of view, the outcome for players are as following, from most to least desired:

1. I win.

2. Everybody "loses", including me, so it's effectively a draw.

3. Somebody else wins, I lose.

This leads to the logic: "If I'm not winning, then it's better for me to force a draw rather than play to win". If there are more than two players, now you have a team that plays _for_ the game _against_ the single winning player.

This happened with our group in CO2: after we've identified the leader, everybody started to kill ecology like crazy, because avoiding loss is now leader's problem. I haven't played Infiltration though, it might be not a problem if players can't trigger more alarms on purpose, or if the leader is obscured.

I find thematical explanations such as "ah but your character dies if everybody loses, while you survive if somebody wins" or "but you destroy the ecology" very fragile. If we would play based on theme, rather than rules, then it would make sense to yield in chess to save your pawn's lives. Mechanically though, communal loss conditions can quickly wreck the game.

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