Death makes you stronger - Into The Rift
I havnt posted in like... 4 months and I've been doing a lot of playtests since then. Ive introduced a mechanic to my 3V1 game thats meant to make death fun, but still punishing.
In this game, 3 people play as heroes, and one plays as a boss. The goal of the boss is to reduce all heroes health to 0, before they reach their lair and start a final battle against them.
Each Hero gets 2 action points per round of battle, while the boss throws waves of monsters at them. Heroes should try as hard as they can to work with each other to keep their team safe from strong attacks as they fight their way to the final point of the game. They also need to be conscientious of their damage output, as too much overkill damage to monsters will make the boss grow stronger.
With all that being said, Ive created the "Doomed" mechanic (im sure others have done something similar), to where if you were to reach 0 health, you flip your card over and gain a new powerful passive ability, as well as a third action point for the remainder of the game. This serves to make killing other heroes harder, but also add a balancing act of "Okay, should I focus the sorcerer/Invoker, or try to whittle them down all at once".
You can be revived in this state, but you will keep the doom debuff and take damage after every round of battle for the rest of the game.
But if all heroes become "Doomed" and flipped over before killing the boss the heroes lose the game.
(Lore-wise, the Rift is a once-stable realm that once belonged to your people before it became unstable, corrupting all within. If your diamond contraption keeping you human becomes too damaged, you will not be able to return home and slowly go mad while within the Rift)