Also difficult is the importance of pacing in RftG. If you need the game to slow down but your teammate needs to push the end game, you now have opposing goals. Maybe good teamwork would allow you to avoid this.

The interesting thing about your variant (assuming that I’m understanding it correctly) is that you can always choose the roles that are optimal for you without regard to how they help your opponents. The trick is, trying to guess which roles your opponent will select so that you can match them in the role you give them, decreasing the number of roles they use that turn. I suppose it could turn into a bit of a “Princess Bride” scenario at that point.

Board games require a certain amount of social understanding between the players. Rules define a lot of these, but there’s a lot of “rules” that are understood (e.g., you can’t take the board and tip it over). Computer games (mentioned as a good model for coop games) have the advantage of 1) requiring real-time decisions, and 2) restricting players in many more ways than is feasible to mention in a board game rulebook.

The trick for coop board games is designing enough constraint to prevent one player from running the game, but still allow players to coordinate strategies.

Passing an action card to your teammate is the same as Table Talk, only your opponents don’t get to hear it. Mechanically different might be to have 1 player from each team be ‘on turn’ – and the other player can pass them a card ‘requesting’ a role… so the decision can be made taking their input into account (and then the “on players” switch for the following round).

I made up a variant for 3 and 4 player RftG whch I’d hoped would make it feel more like 2-player – instead of playing 1 Action card, play 2… but play one to your right and one to your left. You resolve the 4 cards that are in front of you (your 2, and 1 from each of your neighbors).

Imagine that if you were a team with the player across from you!

You’re welcome to check out my posts on the subject – I have not taken the time to figure out how exactly to get these ideas into a game yet. Well, that’s not entirely true, but I have yet to get anywhere I like with it.