Exploring Anonymity in Cooperative Board Games

Linderoth's study explores whether anonymous actions can serve as a game mechanic in cooperative board games, with the aim of informing inclusive educational design. The work begins from an expert-rated survey of ten popular titles, in which Pitch Car and Blokus scored highest for inclusivity (roughly 3.4 to 3.9 on a 4-point scale), while Pandemic stood out for players' chances of winning. Focus-group play testing of roughly fifteen cooperative games, organized around Gutschera's taxonomy of player-count and team structures, grounds these ratings in observed play.

The analysis finds that many titles marketed as cooperative in fact blend in competitive or suspicion-based dynamics. Cooperative one-sided team games such as Pandemic were found to suffer from "gameplay directing," in which a single player effectively dictates decisions for the group. Tragedy-of-the-commons and traitor mechanics address this problem, but only by sacrificing genuine cooperation. This gap motivated the central design challenge of the study: to create a purely cooperative game in which players' actions are anonymous. Drawing on the facedown card-play rule of Battlestar Galactica, the researchers prototyped "Casino Heist," a heist-themed game in which players hold secret characters and concealed actions, so the group knows what was done but not by whom.

Play testing of Casino Heist indicated that the anonymity mechanic functioned as intended. A stress-based accusation system, which eliminates players who are caught or who falsely accuse others, produced uncertainty, strong team spirit, and rich narrative role-play. However, the same mechanic suppressed explicit strategic planning and reduced discussion relative to typical cooperative games, while making mistakes socially low-stakes. The authors conclude that anonymous actions can support inclusive, collaborative face-to-face interaction, though with a tradeoff in planning depth. The underlying research draws on social science literature concerning identity, stigma, and community in gaming.