The economy of a squad: co-op lessons that work at the office too

Well-made co-op is an organisation class disguised as fun. After a thousand hours in four-player squads, the patterns separating clean missions from disasters are the same ones from any small team.

Lesson one: complete roles beat overlapping roles. A squad of four flexible players loses to four specialists who trust each other. Overlap creates dispute; gaps create blame. The ideal design covers everything without duplicating.

Lesson two: communicate state, not instructions. 'Out of ammo, reloading behind cover' beats 'get off that one'. Instructions try to command the other player; state lets everyone decide with the same information. Teams trading state decide faster.

Lesson three: the plan includes the exit. Missions that only plan the advance die on the way back. Every objective needs an agreed exit criterion - time, resource or partial success.

Lesson four: review the loss together, briefly. Five minutes of 'what killed the mission' beats an hour of blame. The answer is almost always a state nobody communicated.

None of this requires a game. But a well-chosen game trains all of it in thirty-minute evenings - and Deep Rock Galactic remains the best team simulator with dwarves and mining.