I’m Not Talking to You – Games Where You Can’t Communicate

Recently I was watching a boardgame Youtube video about the creator’s top 10 things that they don’t like in games (sorry, I don’t remember who it was or I would link to them).

One of these “things he avoids” was “limited communication in games.”

That got me to thinking about a lot of things. Mostly that I haven’t done a true opinion piece in a while!

But also just what is the limited communication mechanism and whether or not it is good for cooperative games (because it doesn’t come into play in competitive games)?

Cooperative games have a long and storied history of both being games where you can introduce non-gamers to the genre because you can help them out, as well as having the “alpha gamer” who takes control and dictates everybody’s move.

If you’re going to be that type of player, why not just play multi-handed solo?

In recent years, a new mechanism for cooperative games has come out that solves that problem, though that might not have been the intent of it.

What I’m talking about is the idea that you can’t communicate with your fellow players, either in total or about certain things.

In a lot of cooperative games, everything’s out in the open (like Pandemic) and it’s very easy to have one person make all of the suggestions and everybody go along with it.

Nowadays, many cooperative games have secret information, usually a hand of cards that you can’t communicate with your fellow players what you have.

You can’t say “I have a yellow 2, so let me play there.”

This kind of eliminates the “alpha gamer” problem, but it also makes it so that a lot of these games can actually exist.

What do I mean by that?

Let me explain.

Let’s start with a less recent example, maybe one of the first? I don’t know, that would require actual research.

In The Game, players are trying to play all of the cards in the deck in four columns.

Two of them are going down from 100 to 1, while the other two are going up from 1 to 100.

Players go in turn order, playing cards to one (or two) of the stacks, completely blind because they have no information on what other players have in their hands.

Well, they might have some information.

You can indicate a stack and say “I really want to play there on my turn.”

But you can’t say “I have a 56” and point to the stack that has a 55.

Players are free to ignore what you said, or they might have to because any other play they could make would jump a stack from, say, 67 to 95.

In this game, you are actually able to play a card that resets a stack a little bit, by playing a card exactly 10 more (or 10 less if it’s an ascending stack) on it.

So if a stack is going 1-100 and there’s a 66 there, you could play a 56 and reset it a bit.

That might screw over the person who has the 67, but they’ll likely be able to play it at some point.

This limited communication is essential in The Game because without it, it really wouldn’t be a game.

Sure, you might still get stuck because somebody has a shitty hand, but if you could say “I have a 67, don’t play there” and then the other person said “well, I have a 56 so I want to play there,” what would be the point?

Even more so if another player said “oh, I have a 57, so go ahead and play the 67”, where’s the tension there?

Another perfect example of this is the excellent The Gang (I promise to brings games that aren’t just a word with “the” in front of them shortly).

In The Gang, players are trying to judge the relative ranking of each player’s poker hand (Texas Hold ‘Em, of course) without actually saying what they have.

After each stage of the game (the hole cards, flop, river and all of that), players will be taking ranking tokens indicating how strong their hand is.

Or at least how strong they think it is.

You can’t say what’s in your hand, but you can kind of talk a little bit.

Like you can say “it might mean something that I took the bottom ranked chip last time, but now am taking the top ranked one,” but you can’t say “oh, I have three of a kind now”.

This avoids the alpha gamer problem, but it also is a fact that, without the limited communication, there wouldn’t be a game here.

Who would care if you could say “I have 3 of a kind, what do you have?”

I love the various penalty or bonus (depending on whether or not you succeeded last round) cards that break these rules somewhat.

None of them break the “no communication” rule, except that some let you say (for example) how many face cards you have.

I love The Gang and I think it’s a perfect distillation of cooperative games with limited communication, where limited communication is the point of the whole thing.

Then we get to Sky Team.

This one is a 2-player no-communication game where you are trying to land a plane.

Without communicating.

What????

Yeah, you roll and place dice, but you can’t talk to determine where you should put the dice.

If you need to avoid flipping the plane upside down, you can’t say “I need to put a 4 on the Axis track. Please place a 4 or higher there”.

You can’t say “we need to slow down, but I’m going to put a 6 here” on the Engine.

You can talk as much as you want about strategy in between rounds, but as soon as the dice are rolled, no talking.

This is yet another example of “there wouldn’t be a game if you could talk,” because the only thing that would make you fail is your shitty dice rolls.

Now, you can fail because one of you placed your die in a bad position, not knowing that your partner couldn’t bail you out.

That’s tension!

Where’s the tension when you can talk about your dice?

Another great example is The Crew (and The Crew: Mission Deep Sea), a trick-taking cooperative game where you also can’t talk about your cards.

There is a “campaign” of ongoing missions that get tougher, but you can also just play one-off scenarios.

In this game, there are goals that each player is trying to achieve, and they involve winning (or not winning) tricks.

Nobody knows what you’re going for, and you also can’t say what you have in your hand so people know what they should play.

Above, you might have the “Win Exactly 2 Tricks” goal.

You have to avoid winning tricks after that second one, but other players may not know that and end up forcing you to win a third.

Again, with perfect communication, it would be way too easy, with defeat only coming if the cards don’t work out in your favour.

But when you can’t talk?

This one gets really tense.

There are many other examples that I haven’t played, I’m sure.

But these are ones that I enjoy and definitely show how limited communication is not only good for adding tension, but essential for making the games work in the first place.

Some recent cooperative games still have the “everybody sees everything,” like Slay the Spire.

When you have those, just don’t be a dick and avoid being that Alpha Gamer.

But in low-communication games?

It’s easy to avoid that.