I played some bridge game at a convention a few years ago with my buddies. I wish I remembered the name... but the main issue was that it wasn't quite "hectic" enough to require so many people to be in so many different roles.
I used to play Starcraft Brood War at low-levels of competitiveness (maybe ~120 APM or so, D-rank Team Liquid. Very low end of competitive). I also enjoy Factorio and Pikmin, so I'm no stranger to multitasking.
Ideally, you want to have a game where so much is going on, that you *NEED* to split up the tasks to multiple teammates. I don't know, maybe have each of the players doing an "Overcook'd" style minigame, trying to do whatever their sections of the ship need to get done.
So the idea is that each player needs to actually focus their mind on their minigame, but _ALSO_ needs to juggle the discussion with the captain / bridge. I can't imagine how a game like that would work, but... sitting around calmly in a "Star Trek" style bridge isn't very fun IMO.
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I think we have an issue of expectations vs gameplay. Anything that requires a team of multiple humans would necessarily be incredibly hectic. (See DOTA, Counterstrike, Overwatch, and other team games).
But on the other hand, there are people who want to role-play Star Trek scenarios, which isn't... very realistic from a team perspective. Just as combat in Hollywood is unrealistic (1 vs 5 fight is really a sequence of 1 vs 1 fights 5 times in a row: every enemy waiting their appropriate turn with the hero...) Star Trek scenes progress logically and simply, for the audience to follow. Its almost the opposite of the chaos that requires a command structure of any kind.
"Archon" / Team Melee from Starcraft 2 / Starcraft Brood War was also a good bit of fun, since two humans playing 1-commander requires communication (make sure both players are going for the same build), and you naturally figure out how to split up work with your teammate.
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I guess a more appropriate "Bridge" game is "keep talking or the bomb explodes". At least for people who want "my" style of hectic team-based game with difficult communication going on. If someone can amp up the "difficulty" of bridge games up to this level, it'd be more interesting to me.
> I think we have an issue of expectations vs gameplay. Anything that requires a team of multiple humans would necessarily be incredibly hectic.
I used to develop simulations as part of the combat systems development team of a military ship builder. I have assisted to actual training which I guess you could view as the ultimate bridge simulator. I think the main issue with bridge simulator is that you can't really simulate a bridge without the complexity which requires having multiple people on the bridge but at the time you can't ask your players to follow days of formation before playing.
It seems to me that in the game simpler model, the roles which end up assigned to players are always somewhat arbitrary and convoluted. As they are so artificial, it's not surprising some people end up with little to do.
As an aside, amusingly, all the bridge simulators seem to have user interfaces which are both less user friendly and older looking than the actual ship interfaces I used to work on. I find that endlessly funny.
I think Captain Sonar (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/171131/captain-sonar) is a great example. I haven't seen an online version of this, which is disappointing - it's hard to get 8 people who are willing to play it in one place very often. It's PvP, so a bit different from the typical bridge simulator, but it has the feature of everyone playing different mini games, but the mini games have to sync regularly, and everyone needs to be fairly aware of the overview as well.
I haven't seen any other game that is this stressful/hectic, to the point that we typically take breaks between rounds because many people find their heart rates/stress levels become uncomfortable while playing.
> Ideally, you want to have a game where so much is going on, that you NEED to split up the tasks to multiple teammates. I don't know, maybe have each of the players doing an "Overcook'd" style minigame, trying to do whatever their sections of the ship need to get done.
Puzzle Pirates really nailed this for me; each ship had a number of action stations (with different kinds of puzzles) that did different tasks, such as providing speed/maneuverability to the ship, pumping the bilge, or keeping the cannons loaded. This all came together in ship-to-ship combat, where having the crew man the stations appropriately was integral to the captain being able to fight other ships... and then boarding was another game.
Since you mention Overcooked, when last I played we actually used a non-player "captain" who was watching for bottlenecks, environmental hazards, and upcoming food orders; as a player you can get tunnel vision when working your specific station(s) and having that coordinator really helps.
Some of the EmptyEpsilon scenarios are very much like this, and many have tunable difficulty settings to increase the number and frequency of things like enemy activity. The enemy AI is extremely simplistic, but the chaos on the bridge tends to balance it out.
Minigames come up pretty often for EE, with one problem being that they aren't fulfilling when there's less to do and overwhelming when there's more. The only station that has them in EE is the Relay/communications station, which models hacking other ships with puzzle minigames.
Space Alert[1] (board game) is awesome for that sort of chaos. When I played with friends, we decided we needed a non-player captain to keep us on track even though it isn't in the rules.
> ... sitting around calmly in a "Star Trek" style bridge isn't very fun IMO.
You need to embrace the whole experience. Your RL STDs? You've just been to a planet where you encountered a very demanding warrior queen. Can you get medical to sort it out before it wipes out your crew or your extracurriculars? Can you get Comms to alter the ship records? All the while acting normal at your station?
If it were simulation hard SF torchships or slower craft, that would be exactly it - you (hopefully) calmly observe you options and plan for a mostly automated very hectic encounter with the enemy ship screeching towards you at hundreds if not thousands of relative km/s, with the laws of physics making sure you will meet at this point. The waves of autonomous missiles you sent an hour ago might do something, but most likely your ship mounted weapons will have to do most of the work at a couple thousand km. No fancy jump drive to get you out of this - you have to fight your way out and make the other party into a cloud of expanding plasma!
I used to play Starcraft Brood War at low-levels of competitiveness (maybe ~120 APM or so, D-rank Team Liquid. Very low end of competitive). I also enjoy Factorio and Pikmin, so I'm no stranger to multitasking.
Ideally, you want to have a game where so much is going on, that you *NEED* to split up the tasks to multiple teammates. I don't know, maybe have each of the players doing an "Overcook'd" style minigame, trying to do whatever their sections of the ship need to get done.
So the idea is that each player needs to actually focus their mind on their minigame, but _ALSO_ needs to juggle the discussion with the captain / bridge. I can't imagine how a game like that would work, but... sitting around calmly in a "Star Trek" style bridge isn't very fun IMO.
--------
I think we have an issue of expectations vs gameplay. Anything that requires a team of multiple humans would necessarily be incredibly hectic. (See DOTA, Counterstrike, Overwatch, and other team games).
But on the other hand, there are people who want to role-play Star Trek scenarios, which isn't... very realistic from a team perspective. Just as combat in Hollywood is unrealistic (1 vs 5 fight is really a sequence of 1 vs 1 fights 5 times in a row: every enemy waiting their appropriate turn with the hero...) Star Trek scenes progress logically and simply, for the audience to follow. Its almost the opposite of the chaos that requires a command structure of any kind.
"Archon" / Team Melee from Starcraft 2 / Starcraft Brood War was also a good bit of fun, since two humans playing 1-commander requires communication (make sure both players are going for the same build), and you naturally figure out how to split up work with your teammate.
----------
I guess a more appropriate "Bridge" game is "keep talking or the bomb explodes". At least for people who want "my" style of hectic team-based game with difficult communication going on. If someone can amp up the "difficulty" of bridge games up to this level, it'd be more interesting to me.