Urgent & Important Tasks in Co-op Games

President Eisenhower supposedly once said

“I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important.”

His contemporaries assumed he was referring to his presidential duties, but historians now widely believe he was actually talking about modern cooperative board games.

The Pattern

Modern co-ops often split the player’s time between urgent tasks—which must be completed quickly to avoid a loss—and important tasks—which must be completed eventually to win the game.

My favorite example of this is the board game Pandemic.

Pandemic and other examples

In Pandemic, players split most of their time between picking up disease cubes and trying to cure the four diseases.

Picking up disease cubes is urgent. The disease cubes, if ignored, will end the game in a loss long before the players can cure all four diseases.

Curing the four diseases, on the other hand, is important. Some disease cubes may be ignored, but the players can only win by finding all four cures.

Not every coop game follows this model (The Crew doesn’t) but many do:

Why so common?

It’s the logical conclusion of having both loss and win conditions in the same game.

If you could find the cures in Pandemic faster than the disease cubes could end the game in a loss, there would be no point in picking up any disease cubes. Loss conditions must be urgent or else you could ignore them by rushing to the win conditions.

Once you’ve cured the last disease, however, it doesn’t matter how many disease cubes are on the board. The tasks to achieve a win conditions are important (i.e. required) whereas the tasks to stave off a loss are not—they exist only to buy time.

We now have urgent and important tasks, purely as a logical byproduct of having separate loss and win conditions in a game.

Time pressure

This model almost always comes with some kind of time pressure to complete the important tasks, like how reaching the end of the player deck in Pandemic triggers a loss. Time pressure forces the players to continuously make progress toward the important tasks, even at the risk of a loss.

This prevents the situation where players focus almost exclusively on preventing a loss and only work toward the win conditions when it’s most convenient.

With time pressure, players must balance their focus between completing enough urgent tasks to avoid a loss and making enough progress on the important tasks to complete them in time.

Conjunctive vs Disjunctive

Stay with me.

All urgent and important tasks should demand some attention from the players, but the way to make all tasks significant is different between loss and win conditions.

For example, the rule book for Sky Team identifies five different loss conditions, any one of which will trigger an instant loss. The loss conditions are disjunctive—each loss condition will independently trigger a loss—ensuring that no loss condition can be ignored. If the players only lost when every loss condition was met, players could pick one to actively prevent and ignore the rest.

The win conditions in Sky Team, on the other hand, must all be satisfied to succeed. You must land your plane at the airport, with no tilt, full flaps, landing gear deployed, and sufficient brakes, or else you lose. The win conditions are conjunctive—every win condition must be satisfied to achieve a win—ensuring that no win condition can be ignored. If only one win condition was necessary, players could pick one to actively target and ignore the rest.

In reality: Tracks & Tokens

Loss conditions are often not as definitive as in Sky Team. In Pandemic, outbreaks only move you one space down a track, and you only lose once 8 outbreaks have occurred. An outbreaking city will continuously trigger outbreaks, however, such that no city can be outright ignored.

Tactics vs Strategy

Urgent tasks tend to be reoccurring, like how in Pandemic disease cubes are added to the board after every turn, producing new urgent tasks for the players. This is due to the time-span you have to complete them. You must complete urgent tasks quickly, so in order to not run out of them, a lot of games periodically reintroduced them.

The reoccurrence of urgent tasks forces you to handle them reactively; they appear suddenly and must be completed soon, meaning that you can’t plan too far in advance how you might tackle them. This then creates an opportunity for players to deploy tactics against urgent tasks. In Pandemic, picking up disease cubes often requires clever movement patterns which new players might not even realize are possible.

Important tasks, conversely, are usually known to the players from the start of the game, giving you the opportunity to strategize about completing them. In Pandemic, players know that there are exactly four diseases to cure, that they need a set of 5 cards to cure each one, and where they need to be to trade those cards. This leads to players coordinating plans with each other to trade cards well in advance of actually doing so.

A summary (and other distinctions)

The urgent-important model naturally leads to common structure. Not all co-op games that follow the model will perfectly match this structure, but enough follow it to be noteworthy.

Urgent tasks:

• Must be completed to not lose.
• Must be completed quickly (if at all).
• Disjunctive—Can independently end the game in a loss.
• Reoccur—Urgent tasks tend to be added to the game over time.
• Often require tactics—To complete reoccurring, urgent tasks, the players often have to perform tactical moves.

Important tasks:

• Must be completed to win.
• Must be completed before time runs out.
• Conjunctive—All contribute to a win.
• Are fixed—Since important tasks take longer to complete, they tend to be known to all players from the start of a game.
• Allows for strategy—Since you know the tasks from the start, you and your teammates can coordinate a strategy for how best to complete them.

How to use this.

This is only something that I’ve noticed about board games, which makes it descriptive, not necessarily prescriptive. That being said, if you have a co-op, it might be insightful to compare your game to this pattern.

In particular, you should ask yourself:

• Can players win by rushing the victory condition and ignoring urgent tasks?
• Is it possible for some important tasks to become unnecessary, leading some player’s contributions to be wasted?
• Is there some form of time pressure, or can players focus exclusively on urgent tasks for as long as they want?
• Can some urgent or important tasks be completely ignored?
• Are the urgent tasks surprising and severe enough to demand tactics from the players?
• Is the player given enough time to complete the urgent tasks without it coming down to luck?
• Do players have enough information about the important tasks that they can plan and coordinate a strategy to complete them?
• Can the players ever run out of urgent tasks to complete?

There are no answers to any of these questions that are inherently wrong, but you may find, while reflecting on your answers, that you have an issue you’d like to fix.