We touched upon the idea of a Reverse-Overlord in Meeples Together and even mentioned the main source for the innovation: Mysterium (2015). As that section says, the Reverse-Overlord is an idea “ripe for further development”. Here’s a bit of that development.
The Overlord is a human adversary who replaces or supplements mechanical systems in a co-op to try and foil the cooperative players. They try to do so in one or more of four roles: administrator, fighter, storyteller, or thinker.
There can also be a Reverse-Overlord. Like an Overlord, they are super-powered, but they are on the side of the players, rather than being opposed to them. They typically know more and can do more than other players, but are limited in how exactly they can support their fellow cooperators.
The Power of Positivity (p. 61)
Like Overlords, Reverse-Overlord activities tend to fall into one of four roles, but each Reverse-Overlord role is a mirror to one of the Overlord roles. Whereas an Overlords administrates, fights, storytells, and thinks, a Reverse-Overlord knows, coordinates, storytells, and creates. Or at least that’s the theory. Games with Reverse-Overlords are very thin on the ground: there’s an understandable reluctance to put one cooperative player in a superior position to the others. So, when and if more appear, they may take other directions. But, these four Reverse-Overlord roles currently seem to be some of the primary theoretical opportunities (💡) for how Reverse-Overlords can impact cooperative games.
Know (Administrate). When an Overlord Administrates, they use extra knowledge given to them by the game system to set up and tear down the game field. It’s a role that’s entirely bureaucratic: there’s no thinking necessary. A Reverse-Overlord can similarly be given knowledge about the underlying game system, something that would make it more likely for the cooperators to win, but the trick is that they can’t reveal it to the other players — or at least they can’t do so in an obvious way.
Mysterium (2015) offers the definitive example of Knowing: the Reverse-Overlord (“ghost”) knows which ghost cards belong to which players. The whole object of the game is then to transmit that knowledge to the other players, but within very tight constraints (much like a team player must transmit knowledge in Charades or Pictionary). The way the Knower transmits their knowledge probably depends on which other Reverse-Overlord roles are in play. Most likely the player Coordinates in a way that supports their knowledge or Creates in a way that reveals it—with the latter being how Mysterium works.
Coordinate (Fight). A Fighting Overlord engages the other players in tactical warfare. They’re able to make moves that are smarter than the automated movements of games like the Dungeons & Dragons Adventure System or Gloomhaven (2017). They also may be able to engage in tactical conflict where it would be impossible to create a mechanical system due to the level of complexity. A Reverse-Overlord instead can Coordinate, which means that they engage in tactical conflict to the group’s benefit.
This is the major role that isn’t present in Mysterium (or any other major co-op game to date), so it’s even more wide open (💡) than the rest of the Reverse-Overlord roles. But it’s easy to imagine a game where due to communication limitations each player makes an individual tactical choice, such as playing a card. The Coordinator then gets to sort through all the cards and play them in the most tactically sound way. This also offers some nice balance. The non-Overlord players are the only ones who get to choose a tactical card, but the Coordinator is the only one who gets to order them.
A Reverse-Overlord who both Knows and Coordinates might have even more intriguing options. If they knew something about upcoming threats, they might make tactical ordering decisions that the other players thought stupid — but if the other players were paying careful attention, they might glimpse hints of the Reverse-Overlord’s Knowledge.
Storytell. The Storytell role for the Overlord is a weird one because it’s not actually adversarial. It’s just the Overlord helping to create the narrative for the game. A Reverse-Overlord is likely to engage with this role in exactly the same way. (It suggests that Storytell is always a Reverse-Overlord role, and an Overlord just takes on a little of that cooperative responsibility in some games.)
Create (Think). An Overlord uses their brains for destructive purposes. They decide how to move pieces (while Fighting), how to play cards, how to use resources, and generally how to hit the cooperators where it hurts. The Reverse-Overlord is the opposite. They’re using their brains for constructive purposes, and that’s where the Create role comes from: rather than being tactical, a Reverse-Overlord is creative, often coming up with thoughts and ideas that go far beyond the mechanics of a game.
It’s again Mysterium that shows how this could work. The Reverse-Overlord chooses a messy, confusing Vision Card that he hopes will give a player some hints about a less confusing Ghost Card. In picking that Vision Card, the Reverse-Overlord is letting their creativity run free, thinking about colors, shapes, themes, objects, references, and other elements on the one card that might hint at the other.
Reversing the Reversal (p. 61)
Not only can their be Overlords and Reverse-Overlords, but there can also be Reverse-Reverse-Overlords, or perhaps Reverse-Underlords. These are players who are in some way less privileged than their fellows.
Just One (2018) offered the primordial example of this sort of play by taking the core gameplay of team-based word-guessing games and turning it into a true co-op. Now instead of one player trying to get all of their teammates to guess a word, the teammates are now all trying to get the one unknowledgeable player to figure out the secret.
This reverses the Administrate/Know role of traditional Overlord games by creating a Don’t-Know role. It’s possible that other roles could also be meaningfully flipped to create a Reverse-Underlord.