Introduction to the Second Edition

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xxxv Introduction to the Second Edition Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev ў ў As we were writing the first edition of Building Blocks, we swung back and forth between thinking it was a terrific idea and a horrible idea. Games are so varied, and the creativity and imagination that designers bring to the medium are so expansive that it seemed quixotic and hubristic for us to attempt to draw boundaries around gameplay and say here is something that is worth naming and learning about. Getting laughed out of the room was a distinct possibility. Instead, we have been overwhelmed by the support this project has received since publication and gratified that it was accepted in the manner in which it was intended—as a stepping-stone to building a common vocabulary among game designers and not an exhaustive, definitive reference. It has been exciting to hear from teachers who have used it to give students a good grounding in core concepts, new designers looking for a place to start, and experienced designers brainstorming and drawing connections between mechanisms they may not have considered or may have simply forgotten about. Shortly after publication, we were approached by BoardGameGeek.com, the premier online database of board game information, about incorporating the nomenclature of Building Blocks into their mechanism classification system. We were very pleased to work with them to develop that and also to review the classification of new games as a way to help us hone our definitions of certain mechanisms and identify new and overlooked mechanics, many of which have been incorporated into this new edition. We were also approached by Matt Smith and Andrew Peterson of Ferris State University, who had incorporated the mechanisms into their curriculum and developed a card deck to help designers brainstorm and iterate

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xxxvi Introduction to the Second Edition through their designs. We were happy to support the project, which has since been published as The Rapid Prototyping Game by CRC Press. We are also very grateful and pleased that Building Blocks has been translated into several foreign languages, with more languages on the way. Creating a common design language means reaching across and bridging many language and culture gaps, and we have been lucky to work with partners from around the world who are as passionate as we are about game design. The success of the first edition has enabled the publication of this expanded and enhanced version. We have added many mechanisms which needed to be cut from the first edition due to space constraints, as well as incorporated color photographs of game elements to better illustrate certain mechanisms. We hope that you find this new version even more useful. For those who are familiar with the first edition, these are the new mechanisms that have been added: • ACT-19 Bingo • ACT-20 Layering • ACT-21 Slide/Push • ACT-22 Matching • ACT-23 Drawing • AUC-17 Bids as Wagers • AUC-18 Auction Compensation • CAR-07 Deck Constructions • CAR-08 Multi-Use Cards • CAR-09 Tags • ECO-20 Resource Queue • RES-23 Hot Potato • RES-24 Flicking • RES-25 Stacking and Balancing • RES-26 Neighbor Scope • UNC-12 Deduction • UNC-13 Induction • UNC-14 Questions and Answers • VIC-21 Ordering In addition, many of the mechanisms have been updated and expanded with new examples and considerations. We have also replaced some of the examples from the first edition in response to the revelations of unacceptable conduct and odious beliefs,

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xxxvii Introduction to the Second Edition including misogyny, violence against women, racism, homophobia, and transphobia among designers of many beloved and excellent games. When we wrote the first edition, we did not consider the impact of including these games in our discussion, and we now try to rectify that mistake. We have replaced references when we could find equivalent examples, but we did retain references that we felt we could not omit or substitute for because of their uniqueness or importance. This is an uncomfortable and imperfect compromise that we reached in consultation with a diverse group of advisers, including people directly impacted by the conduct in question. We hope we made an honorable and constructive decision, and we are grateful to everyone who guided us. This book is better thanks to their labor. Tanks again to the gaming community that has supported this project and made it a success. Isaac and Geoff

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Game Structure ў ў The first choice that designers make about a game is the game’s basic structure. Who wins? Who loses? What is the overall scope of the game experience? Will it be just one game or perhaps a series of hands? Maybe, the game will encompass many scenarios, with game-state information persisting from play to play? The last 20 years of tabletop gaming have brought us enormous innovation in game structures, with no signs of slowing down. Consideration of game structure raises the question of what it means to actually play the game. In a cooperative game, is the discussion among the players over which action to take the core of the gameplay, or is it the active player executing the action that is core? In games which limit communication, is the main gameplay overcoming the communication limits or solving the puzzle that the game presents? Designers need to be sensitive to participation issues in team games as well, because the game itself may force most of the action over to one teammate at the expense of another, which impacts player experience. An increasingly popular trend is the inclusion of multiple game structures in the same box. For example, Mage Knight includes ways to play competitively, cooperatively, and solo. This extends the potential audience for the game. In this chapter, we’ll consider both the traditional structures like competitive and team games, as well as the latest ideas in scenario-based, legacy, and consumable games. DOI: 10.1201/9781003179184-1

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STR-01 Competitive Games

Description

A game with two or more players and a single winner.

Discussion

This is the most familiar game structure, the one we encounter as children in games like Candyland and Snakes & Ladders. Competitive games still make up the large majority of the market for tabletop games. Tey typically offer a symmetry of expectations: putting aside the impacts of unusual luck and skill, each player begins the game with a roughly equivalent chance of victory. When this promise is broken, the game is considered imbalanced and may even be tagged with the label “broken.” As we’ll discuss later (see “Variable Player Powers” in this chapter and “Variable Setup” in Chapter 6), players may have perfectly symmetric factions and starting conditions or highly asymmetric ones. But, in both cases, it’s important that the game offers roughly even chances of victory to each player (Illustration 1.1). In many games, there is an asymmetry that in-game balancing alone can’t solve, like the first-mover advantage in chess or the service advantage in tennis. Competitive games often balance these advantages through meta-structures, like tournaments, that offer each player an equal number of chances to play from the advantaged position. In multiplayer games, this may be less practical. Instead, players may be offered other opportunities to balance any perceived or actual inequities, like the bidding in Bridge, betting in Poker, or the early alliances in Diplomacy.

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STR-01 Competitive Games The promise of balance in a competitive game gives rise to several related issues, like methods for determining victory and breaking ties. Tie-breaking (RES-18), in particular, is interesting because crowning a winner in a competitive game depends upon the game storing information that allows players to determine who played the better game. For many games, this information may not be available. Once we have to look beyond who scored the most victory points or who crossed some finish line first, there may not be relevant game-state information that could allow us to reasonably determine which of the tied players played best. And yet, in competitive games, many players disdain a game that ends in shared victory. Experience-oriented designers should consider that players tend to recall how a game ended more than the rest of the play experience, and hence the designers should seek to avoid an indecisive conclusion.

Sample Games

Acquire (Sackson, 1964) Candyland (Abbot, 1949) Chess (Unknown, ∼1200) Diplomacy (Calhamer, 1959) Senet (Unknown, ∼2600 bce) Snakes & Ladders (Unknown, ∼200 bce) Illustration 1.1 The Egyptian game Senet is one of the oldest board games known, going back to 2600 BCE. This set dates around 1350 BCE.

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STR-02 Cooperative Games

Description

Players coordinate their actions to achieve a common win condition or conditions. Players all win or lose the game together.

Discussion

Quite a few games call for cooperative play among players, including team games, one-vs.-many games, role-playing games, and games with secret traitors. These can be viewed as belonging to a hierarchical category of cooperative games. Some might even include solo games in this group. For our purposes, we’ll treat each of these as separate categories and limit ourselves here to “pure” cooperative games in which all players play on one side and win or lose as a group. Since 2008, when Matt Leacock released Pandemic, the genre of cooperative tabletop games has exploded. Earlier games like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, Arkham Horror, and Lord of the Rings laid a foundation and enjoy enduring popularity, but Leacock started a wave of innovation in cooperative gaming that continues to reshape modern gaming a decade and more later. Cooperative gaming is accessible because it lowers barriers to entry for a game. Disparities in skill level can often make a competitive game a sour experience both for the expert and the newcomer. Complex competitive games can be intimidating to new players. Being coached by your opponent in such a game introduces some negative play dynamics because of the misaligned incentives of helping your opponent. The power imbalance between the players can also create awkward social dynamics. Cooperative games put

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STR-02 Cooperative Games players on the same team and foster comradery while allowing experienced players to help teach both the mechanics and strategy of the game, without facing conflicting incentives. For many new players, cooperative games are not only a gateway into gaming but a mainstay of their ongoing consumption of games. Cooperative games can broadly be placed into two categories: those with artificial intelligence (AI) and those without. Cooperative games with an AI, like Sentinels of the Multiverse and Mice and Mystics, feature an opponent or opponents who behave according to a simple artificial intelligence, encoded by the designer. In Sentinels, the AI is driven by a deck of cards that governs the actions of the enemy villains and the players they will target. Mice has a simple algorithm that players use to control the play of enemy figures. Non-AI games like Hanabi, the revolutionary Antoine Bauza title, and Mysterium present players with a puzzle to solve and limitations on time, resources, and interaction that players must contend with. However, these games have no villain or opposing force that drives the action and actively confronts the players. Another consideration for the designer of cooperative games is keeping the difficulty consistent while scaling with a number of players. If each player has a set number of actions they may perform on their turn (as in Pandemic, for example), four players will have twice as many actions per round as two players. While there are many techniques, a very common design pattern is alternating between a player taking a turn and the game taking a turn—basically alternating “Good thing” (player actions) with “Bad thing” (game actions). This scales naturally as the number of players increases. Another distinction between different kinds of cooperative games is whether each player retains agency over their in-game resources, actions, and choices or they seek consensus for all decisions, even if they nominally represent separate in-game characters. We might call the former game a partnership game and the latter a collaborative one. In general, cooperative games will tend to be played collaboratively unless the rules specifically and sub-stantially impede this collaboration and force players to make independent decisions rather than build consensus. Examples include limits on communications, time, and focus. For some players, collaborative play contributes to the “alpha player problem,” also known as “quarterbacking,” in which some player takes control of the group discussion and decision-making and creates a negative play experience by overriding other players. There are many possible reasons for the

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rise of an alpha player problem, many ways that problem can manifest, and a thicket of contributory social dynamics that are beyond the scope of this work. While some players and designers believe that the alpha player problem is a group-composition problem or a problem of unshared assumptions rather than a design problem, some design choices will make a game more vulnerable to alpha player takeovers. In particular, when all players share the same information and the game state is not too complex, alpha player behavior becomes likelier. At the other end of the spectrum are games which cannot be taken over by an alpha player. Magic Maze and others of its type make player communication a game mechanism, such that players can’t freely share information or advise one another on how to play. The Mind takes this to an extreme by forbidding players from having any kind of communication about which cards they hold. These types of communication limitations (UNC-06) may be presented like any other rule, but they do not actually create a bright line of which conduct is and is not permitted. Rather, these games can be played somewhat differently by each group, with the precise contours of allowable communication varying by tacit or overt agreement. This approach is deeply polarizing, and some players will utterly reject these kinds of games or cast doubt on whether they are games at all. That said, these communication restrictions have the potential to create incredible experiences that connect participants to one another on an almost mystical level. Communication limitations are only one approach to preventing players from achieving consensus-based play. Space Cadets, Space Alert, and FUSE introduce a real-time element that forces players to make independent decisions because there is no time for players to collaborate. Other games attempt to strongly connect players to their roles, provide them with hidden information, or make operating their roles especially complicated. Mechs vs. Minions and Spirit Island both make it challenging for players to decipher each other’s powers and possibilities. Sentinels of the Multiverse attempts something similar by providing each player with a unique preconstructed deck. Escape room games from T.I.M.E Stories to the Exit and Unlock series sometimes bar players from sharing information too specifically as well. The variety of challenges and puzzles these games offer, and even the various roles that players can take in the solving effort, all help ensure that every player finds a satisfying way to participate in the game. Another notable trend in cooperative game design is the conversion of one-vs.-many, “overlord”-style games into co-ops with the assistance of an app. Mansions of Madness: Second Edition and Star Wars: Imperial Assault

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STR-02 Cooperative Games both introduced apps that allow the games to be played cooperatively. More generally, games are being released with cooperative and solo modes alongside competitive modes of play. Sometimes, as has been the case with Orleans and Oh My Goods!, cooperative modes have been introduced in expansions to competitive games. The ongoing design exploration of cooperative games and their possibilities is one of the most exciting and fruitful trends in tabletop gaming today. Designers are encouraged to experiment with this popular and adaptable game structure.

Sample Games

Arkham Horror (Krank, Launius, Petersen, and Willis, 1987) Exit: The Game (Brand and Brand, 2016) FUSE (Klenko, 2015) Hanabi (Bauza, 2010) Lord of the Rings (Knizia, 2000) Magic Maze (Lapp, 2017) Mansions of Madness (Koneisczka, 2011) Mechs vs. Minions (Cantrell, Ernst, Librande, Saraswat, and Tiras, 2016) Mice and Mystics (Hawthorne, 2012) The Mind (Warsch, 2018) Mysterium (Nevskiy and Sidorenko, 2015) Oh My Goods! (Pfister, 2015) Orleans (Stockhausen, 2014) Pandemic (Leacock, 2008), and the complete line of Pandemic games Sentinels of the Multiverse (Badell, Bender, and Rebottaro, 2011) Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Tames Murders & Other Cases (Edwards, Goldberg, and Grady, 1981) Space Alert (Chvátil, 2008) Space Cadets (Engelstein, Engelstein, and Engelstein, 2012) Spirit Island (Reuss, 2017) Star Wars: Imperial Assault (Kemppainen, Konieczka, and Ying, 2014) T.I.M.E Stories (Chassenet and Rozoy, 2015) Unlock! series (Various, 2017)

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STR-03 Team-Based Games

Description

In team-based games, teams of players compete with one another to obtain victory. There are a variety of possible team structures, including symmetrical teams like 2v2 and 3v3, multiple sides like 2v2v2, and even One vs. All.

Discussion

Team-based play is an ancient human pastime and is prevalent in sports, classic card games, and war games. Tematic board games that model some conflict often have to deal with a bilateral narrative, whether in the conflict of good vs. evil like in War of the Ring, the eponymous conflict of Axis & Allies, or the entirely fabricated battle between villagers and their lycanthropic tormentors in Werewolf. Team games allow designers to faithfully recreate these two-sided conflicts while making space for more players at the table. Most team games assign players to one team or another at the outset and allow collaboration and communication among partners. In some cases, partners may share territory and resources or even move each other’s pieces around the board. Early editions of Axis & Allies, for example, featured Commander-in-Chief rules to model the historical reality of coordinating attacks by multinational armies.

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Discussion

Score-and-reset is a very common game structure that is well represented among classic games from Bridge to Backgammon, and in modern games like Red7, Ravenous River, and Incan Gold. Card games are especially amenable to this structure, which matches well with playing out a hand of cards, shuffling and redealing. Games with a strong turn-order advantage can take advantage of a score-and-reset structure by having players take turns in the lead position and using cumulative scoring to measure who played best over a series of rounds. Stacking games like Rhino Hero use score-and-reset because once the shared structure is toppled, there’s a need to collect up the cards and pieces anyway, and this represents a natural end point. Whether players do in fact record wins and losses or points is to some extent a matter of the dynamics of

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the game group itself. By contrast, dexterity games like KLASK and BONK reset after each goal, but scoring is rigorously tracked. Score-and-reset structures can be somewhat informal. Players might play a series of games of Hive and declare a victor after one player reaches some total number of victories. There’s not a sharp line between score-and-reset and round structure in general. Amun-Re features two ages, in which gameplay is identical, but the board itself does not fully reset. Pyramids built in the first age persist in the second age and influence the valuation of territories. In Blue Lagoon, the board is reset between the first and second half of the game, with the exception of the huts players lay out in the first half. However, the rules of placement change profoundly—where players were free to lay explorers on any sea space in the first half; in the second half, they must begin laying explorers adjacent to their huts.

Sample Games

Amun-Re (Knizia, 2003) Blue Lagoon (Knizia, 2018) BONK (Harvey, 2017) Hive (Yianni, 2001) Incan Gold (Faidutti and Moon, 2005) KLASK (Bertelsen, 2014) Ravenous River (Shalev, 2016) Red7 (Chudyk and Cieslik, 2014) Rhino Hero (Frisco and Strumph, 2011)

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STR-10 Legacy Games STR-10 Legacy Games

Description

A legacy game is a multisession game in which permanent and irreversible changes to the game state carry over from session to session.

Discussion

The first legacy game, Rob Daviau’s Risk Legacy, came from the unlikeliest of places: Hasbro. Daviau, by his telling, half-shepherded, half-snuck the audacious design past the gatekeepers at the company and emerged with a genre-defining hit. Famously, the game was sealed with a sticker that had to be broken to open the box, and which warned ominously, “What Is Done Cannot Be Undone.” This irreversible permanent change is what legacy games are all about (Illustration 1.2). Legacy games are difficult to playtest, require generating quite a lot of content, and are tricky to produce and price properly. Curmudgeons will rightly point out that RPGs and campaign games are essentially legacy games, except that you don’t have to destroy your game as you play. Yet that permanent destruction, the tearing of a card or writing on a board, generates a visceral response that those other games don’t. Breaking this taboo and permanently altering a game can be a stressful and cathartic experience at the same time.

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Legacy games aren’t simply about destroying components and defacing boards. Another element common to these games is unlocks: gated content that can only be opened and accessed after some condition is met. We’ll refrain from specific examples so as not to spoil these experiences for the uninitiated! Unlocks differ fundamentally from gated content in non-legacy games (see “Gating and Unlocking,” ACT-15) in that unlocks usually occur at game-end, their impacts will only be felt in the next session, and these unlocks are typically not simply buffs and de-buffs to existing statistics, but rather, entire new mechanisms, characters, factions, maps, etc. These unlocks can also radically change the narrative or move the camera and offer players new perspectives and surprises. Like campaign games, legacy games require a substantial commitment to complete, and they typically call for the same group to come together ten or more times. Pandemic Legacy can theoretically take 24 sessions to complete! Publishers, and thus designers, can feel trapped between offering a novel and essentially unrepeatable experience, on the one hand, while still providing sufficient re-playability to players, despite the consumable nature of the game. Most legacy games do allow players to keep playing the game even after the campaign is concluded, but anecdotally, it seems that few players do so. It appears that the market is expanding to allow for a broader range of possible games such that at the right price point, even a single-play game like the Exit series can be a hit. Games like the Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle Illustration 1.2 The exterior seal in Risk Legacy. This helps place the player in the proper headspace for the game.

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STR-10 Legacy Games deck-building game have used unlocks, but not destructibility, and are fully resettable. Gloomhaven takes a similar approach with reusable stickers to pro-vide changes that are campaign-permanent but otherwise reversible. Fabled Fruit is even more easily reset, requiring nothing more than reordering a deck of cards. However, it is difficult to distinguish it structurally from, say, a deck-building game in which any given play session may include a completely different subset of cards. Legacy games are a still-emerging category and definition. Elements we’ve identified may not exist in every game, and new elements may yet emerge, especially as legacy games and digital apps converge. Concerns about reusability and the environment do appear to have shifted designers away from requiring the destruction of components. In Zombie Teenz Evolution, a 2021 nominee for the prestigious Spiel des Jahres award, gameplay elements are mostly resettable, but a comic strip included in the rules is composed of sticker panels that are unlocked during gameplay. From a product design perspective, the game can be given to another group to play after one group completes it, but some aspects of the experience are only available to the purchaser of a new copy.

Sample Games

Betrayal Legacy (Daviau, Cohen, Honeycutt, Miller, Neff, and Veen, 2018) Charterstone (Stegmaier, 2017) Fabled Fruit (Friese, 2016) Gloomhaven (Childres, 2017) Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle (Forrest-Pruzan Creative, Mandell and Wolf, 2016) Legacy of Dragonholt (Valens, Clark, Flanders, and Mitsoda, 2017) Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (Daviau and Leacock, 2015) Risk Legacy (Daviau and Dupuis, 2011) Zombie Teenz Evolution (Lobet, 2020)

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Turn Order and Structure ў ў One of the elements that separates “games” from “play” is the introduction of structure. This takes many forms, including restrictions on how players perform activities and when they may perform them. Out of this arises the concept of a turn—an order or structure within which players take their actions. The concept of taking turns is one of the first game-based concepts taught to young children. Many simple games, like Candyland, exist to teach how to wait your turn, among other early building blocks of playing games. The turn structure of a game can set the tone for the entire experience, whether it is playful, strategic, or intense. Selecting the appropriate turn structure for the game is an important part of the design process. This section includes a wide variety of these structures, including some that, while appearing unstructured, like Real-Time Games, actually contain their own internal structure, logic, and design challenges. DOI: 10.1201/9781003179184-2

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Terminology For this book, we have adopted the following commonly used terminologies when describing turn structure: A Turn is typically one player taking a series of Actions or Steps, although sometimes other players may interrupt or otherwise participate. A Round is composed of multiple Turns taken by several players. This can be a fixed number of turns or variables depending on player actions or random events. For example, Agricola consists of 14 Rounds. In each Round, there is a Start Player, who takes the first Turn. During that Turn, they perform two Steps: Placing a worker and performing the Actions designated by the space where the worker is placed. Players continue to take Turns in clockwise order until all workers have been placed. This concludes the Round. There may be activities that take place at the beginning or end of a Round. For example, in Agricola, you may need to feed your workers or new Actions may be added to the available options.

TRN-04 Progressive Turn Order Poker. In this game, the first position is typically considered the worst, while the last, “the button,” is the best, as seeing what other players do before you make your decision gives you more information to work with. Terefore, in Texas Hold’Em Poker, once the player is in the best position, the button, they gradually move closer and closer to the worst position, the small blind. Ten the player jumps from being in the worst position to the best. (One might view the small blind as receiving some turn-order compensation for having the worst position, in that they must only stake half as much money as the big blind, which is the player following them in turn order.) Progressive games can leave a large gap between player turns. For example, in a five-player game, when a player moves first, the next round he or she will move fifth. That means that it will be nine turns until the player gets to go again (eight opponent turns). Depending on the game, this can lead to serious downtime. For this reason, Progressive is most effective in games with short turns or where players take actions during other player turns. The latter is done in Puerto Rico, where the other players get to perform a less powerful version of the action selected by the main player (ACT-08). Typically, games that use Progressive Turn structure are played to the end of the round in which the end-game condition is triggered. Terefore, the issue with players having an unequal number of turns does not arise as it does in Fixed Turn Order games. Sometimes, a mechanism is included to ensure that each player has the same number of opportunities to go first (often by setting the number of rounds equal to the number of players or a multiple of that number). A less-used variant on Progressive Turn structure is Regressive, where the First Player token passes counter-clockwise, while turns are taken clockwise. Much of the discussion in Progressive applies here, in terms of psychology and gaps between turns. However, there is one important difference: in a Regressive structure, the player who goes last in one round will go first in the next. Players having two turns in a row can be extremely powerful, particularly when a player knows it is happening and can plan accordingly. The game needs to be designed and structured to either take advantage of that or blunt it in some fashion. For example, in Dead of Winter, a semi-cooperative potential hidden traitor game (STR-05), the hidden traitors would do well to reveal themselves to be the traitors in the round in which they go last, as they will have two successive turns in which to wreak havoc. Regressive is unintuitive to players, because so many games go clockwise. Having a turn which moves clockwise, but a token which moves counter-clockwise, is an additional cognitive burden that should only be imposed for some specific design reason.

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Sample Games

Progressive The Little Prince: Make Me a Planet (Bauza and Cathala, 2013) Puerto Rico (Seyfarth, 2002) Quadropolis (Gandon, 2016) Terraforming Mars (Fryxelius, 2016) Texas Hold’Em (Unknown) Regressive Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game (Gilmour and Vega, 2014) Kepler (Bariot and Montiage, 2012) Viticulture (Stegmaier and Stone, 2013) Walk the Plank! (Steely and Tinney, 2013)

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TRN-05 Claim Turn Order TRN-05 Claim Turn Order

Description

In each round, there is a First Player, and turns are taken clockwise from the first player. There is an action that may be taken to claim a place in the turn order (typically, but not always, first) for the next round, with play proceeding clockwise from the First Player. If no one takes the action, turn order remains unchanged.

Discussion

Similar to Stat Turn Order (TRN-02), Claim Turn Order Action gives more control to the players over the turn order, as they need to do something to seize control over the first player marker. Caution and finesse need to be employed by the designer when using this system, as there are a number of pitfalls. This technique is often used in Worker Placement (Chapter 9) or Action Drafting (ACT-02) games, and players will need to use one of their workers or actions to go first next time. This means that they are sacrificing their action now, effectively losing a turn, to gain that advantage. Balancing the cost can be tricky, as the value of going

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first can vary from situation to situation and player to player. The value of simply going first may not be that great, so players may avoid using an action to be the first player. In this case, the same player gets to remain the first player without losing an action. Tey simply remain the first player by default and reap the rewards at no cost. Designers can sweeten the value of claiming turn order by including other resources or abilities with it. For example, in Agricola, the player who chooses the First Player action may also play a Minor Improvement (Illustration 2.1). More importantly, the player to the left of the player who chooses to go first gets a great boon. Tey will get to play second, which, while not as good as going first, was obtained with absolutely no effort on their part. Agricola suffers quite a bit from this issue, as it is of great benefit to be to the left of the player who chose to go first and frustrating to be the player to the right, who will now go last, through no fault or action of their own. First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express deals with this issue by giving bonuses to all positions when the First Player token is chosen as an action. In a four-player game, the player who chose to go first gains two coins, the third player may take a Train Card, and the fourth player may either take or upgrade a Train Card. The player who will now be going second receives no bonus—being able to go second in the round while not giving anything up is deemed sufficient compensation. The First Class system gives the designer a lot of flexibility in balancing the different player positions. Illustration 2.1 In Agricola, a worker must be placed in this space to become First Player. When placing here you may also play a Minor Improvement.

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TRN-05 Claim Turn Order Another pitfall to avoid is scripted play—obviously best moves by players. In earlier editions of the game Twilight Imperium, players chose an Action card on their turn to perform. One of them gave a Victory Point to the player choosing it, which was very powerful, and another let a player become First Player. Because the free Victory Point card was so strong, play almost always followed a scripted pattern. The first player to go would take the free Victory Point card, and the second player would take the card to become First Player, thus ensuring they would get the free Victory Point next turn. Turn order ended up simply moving around the table, devolving into a Progressive turn structure. However, the presentation of turn order as a choice made it seem as if the game had more flexibility than it actually did. The forcing moves for the first two players made for a much less interesting play experience. A similar issue arises in Stone Age, where expanding fields and gaining workers are invariably the first two actions chosen in each round. Sometimes, the action that determines turn order is tightly integrated into play. High Society has players bidding on objects, and the winner of an auction begins the bidding for the next auction. Trick taking games, where the winner of a trick takes the lead, are a similar example, which will be explored in more detail in Chapter 13. In both of these examples, play proceeds clockwise from the new start player. A variant of this mechanism is seen in Age of Empires III: The Age of Discovery and other games. In these, players take an action to secure their place in the turn order, but more than one player can do this. The first player to do so becomes the first player in the next round, the second player becomes second, and so on. Players who do not take this action are moved to the back of the turn order. This has similar issues to both the classic version of this mechanism and the Pass Order mechanism (TRN-06). Players must give up the opportunity for an action to improve their place in the turn order, and players that are currently early in the order have less incentive to spend an action there. Also, players that are early in the turn order have a better opportunity to keep it because they will have a first chance of using later round actions to maintain their turn position. However, it does mitigate some of the issues of the base version of this mechanism, as it puts more control into the hands of the players, albeit in an inequitable way.

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Sample Games

Age of Empires III: The Age of Discovery (Drover, 2007) Agricola (Rosenberg, 2007) Bridge (Vanderbilt, 1908) First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express (Ohley, 2016) Hearts (Unknown, 1850) High Society (Knizia, 1995) Stone Age (Brunnhofer, 2008) Twilight Imperium (Petersen, 1997)

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TRN-06 Pass Order TRN-06 Pass Order

Description

On their turn, players may either take an action or pass. The first player who passes becomes the new first player for the next round. The second player who passes becomes the second player for the next round, and so on. Reversing pass order and turn order is also possible when going later in turn order is more advantageous.

Discussion

Pass Order attempts to address the issues created by more static turn-order mechanisms, or those which order all players based on the actions of a single player. With Pass Order, players are presented with a choice: take additional actions this turn or be earlier in the turn order for the entire next round. Players have to estimate whether continuing to take actions in the current round is worth more than having an earlier choice on actions in the following round. A good place for this mechanism is in a game that features some type of drafting (CAR-06). In Caylus, players place workers on buildings (“Worker Placement,” Chapter 9) to receive certain benefits. Each building can be occupied by only one player each round, so players are drafting from a limited pool of possible actions. Going earlier in turn order ensures players can

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select the buildings they desire most. But taking additional actions later in the turn order can yield additional benefits (Illustration 2.2). Games in which players are very likely to take an equal number of actions in a round are a poor fit for this mechanism. For example, if players only have three actions in a turn, most likely they will all be passing after the same number of turns. If players take six or more actions in a round, the cost of losing later actions in the round is much reduced. An important consideration with Action/Passing is the fate of the last player who has not passed. This is an issue that affects any game in which players end their round by choosing to pass. For example, in The Networks, players receive more money or victory points for passing early, rather than turn-order position. Nevertheless, because The Networks is a Rochester draft (see “CAR-06, Drafting” in Chapter 13), there are relatively few limits on the ability of the last player still active to sweep up whatever cards remain on the ability of the last player to gain too much advantage by requiring expending a limited pool of workers to activate the remaining buildings. Caylus addresses this issue in a different way, by making it increasingly expensive to place workers as more players pass. Finally, in Sentient, players who pass first go last, which actually provides them with the advantage of sweeping the board. Designers using this structure should be careful to align the turn-order reward (first or last) with the game. The mechanism works best when turnorder preference is strong, when players act many times over the course of a single round, and when there is some hard limit on the total number of actions a player can take. Rewards other than turn-order advantage can be employed as an alternative or in addition. Illustration 2.2 The pass track from Caylus, as illustrated in the instruction manual. The first player to pass places their disk in the rightmost slot, showing they will go first next turn. As players pass, they place their disks in each successive position.

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TRN-06 Pass Order Two final notes of caution. First, designers must provide some physical affordances for tracking who has passed and in what order. Ideally, these are combined so that when a player passes, they move some indicator to show that they have passed and when they will play in a future turn. Second, designers should also pay attention to the amount of downtime experienced by the first player to pass.

Sample Games

Caylus (Attia, 2005) The Networks (Hova, 2016) Sentient (Kevern, 2017)

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TRN-07 Real-Time

Description

There are no turns. Players play as quickly as possible, subject to certain constraints, until the game or phase is completed. Playing quickly confers some type of advantage.

Discussion

Real-Time Games bring a lot of excitement to the table, as players frantically work to completely execute their actions. However, they also bring a lot of challenges for the designer. First, Real-Time Games need to be very simple. Anything that causes confusion requires the players to stop the action, resolve the issue, and then continue, or just carry on with a confused player who stops enjoying the experience or possibly violates the rules unwittingly. This can place very real constraints on what can and can’t be done from a design standpoint. The designer also needs to address timing issues if players are conflicting in actions they wish to perform. There are several ways to deal with this: • Players play cards onto stacks. The sequence in the stack indicates the order.

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Discussion

Time Tracks have a number of inherent advantages: • Clarity: It is obvious who goes next, even though turn order jumps around a lot. • Player Control: Players have some choice over who goes next, allowing for additional tactical play. • Balance: The designer can include powerful actions but can give them a long time duration to compensate. However, there are, of course, downsides to this technique. It can lead to players being out of the action for some time if they have taken long-duration options. Admittedly, they have chosen to do this, but an option available to players should not result in them having a less enjoyable experience.

TRN-16 Lose a Turn the players still get a turn, and there is some excitement in seeing if the player will win, it still can become frustrating if it lasts many turns. Similarly, games like Sorry! require certain values to leave “Home” and, in essence, start the game. Again, this can result in many consecutive turns of inactivity, which leads to frustration and boredom. In Monopoly, players can be sent to Jail, where they will need to roll doubles to escape. Monopoly has some remediation to this “Lose a Turn” effect, as players may choose to pay to get out of Jail and will be let out after a maximum of three lost turns elapse. In later stages of the game, players may prefer (and hope) to remain in Jail to avoid the possibility of paying high rents for landing on properties with hotels. There are other effects that are similar to losing a turn. In a Worker Placement game (Chapter 9), losing a worker for a round is equivalent to losing a turn. In an Action Retrieval system (ACT-03), the turn that the Actions are retrieved can feel like a lost turn to players. In a shedding card game where cards are shed one per turn (like UNO), having to draw cards is similar to “Losing a Turn” in terms of tempo, although it does not impinge on the player’s participation in the game. Similarly, when some players gain extra turns, this is equivalent to the others losing a turn. However, due to psychological framing effects, these more modern takes do not feel as bad. Tus, giving extra turns to other players or removing resources can be a better solution for including “Lose a Turn” effects. If the reason that a turn is lost is in control of the player, then this anti-pattern is remediated. If players choose to take a risky course or over-spend Illustration 2.3 The Jail space in Monopoly may cause players to lose up to three turns. Initially, this can be harmful to a player’s position, but in the late stages of the game, it can be a respite from possibly landing on others’ properties.

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a resource that leaves them unable to take a turn, that can be an effective design, as turn loss results from player action and is not perceived as unfair by players. As an example, in the Passed Action Token game, Camelot (TRN14), players who play too slowly may miss a turn if the other Action Token catches up to them. Instead of making a game slow and frustrating, this adds excitement, as players can see the Action Token getting closer and can speed up their play to avoid losing a turn.

Sample Games

Camelot (Jolly, 2005) Monopoly (Darrow and Magie, 1933) Snakes & Ladders (Unknown, ∼200 bce) Sorry! (Haskell, Jr. and Storey, 1929) Trouble (Kohner, Kohner, and Kroll, 1965) UNO (Robbins, 1971)

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TRN-17 Interrupts TRN-17 Interrupts

Description

This is a meta-mechanism for Turn Order. Players may take an action that interrupts the normal turn flow.

Discussion

This mechanism can be used with almost any of the turn structures discussed. The ability to interrupt an opponent during their turn can be an important part of the design. The interruption can be a standard ability that players have and can be based on cards in their hands or other special tokens. Squad Leader is an example of the “standard ability” style. During the Movement Phase, one player moves their pieces or stacks one-by-one, one space at a time. The other player (the “defender” for that turn) may, at any time, interrupt movement to take a Defensive Fire opportunity at the moving units. This is an option that is always available to units; no special ability is required. Magic: The Gathering, by contrast, features cards that are labeled as Instants. These cards, but no others, can be played on the opponent’s turn in response to an opponent’s action. Other games frequently will call these cards Reactions. If you don’t have a Reaction card, you will not be able to take a Reaction. Incorporating Interrupts into the design has several positive features. First, it keeps players engaged. If players can interrupt their opponents and find the perfect opportunity to strike, they are incentivized to pay attention to the action at all times. This reduces downtime, or perceived downtime. Before Squad Leader, war games mostly had a strict “I Go, You Go” structure, which made it appealing for players to mentally check out when it was not their turn. In Squad Leader, even if defenders never take a Defensive Fire shot, they were still engaged throughout their opponent’s turn because they were always evaluating the option to fire. Similarly, in games where players can play reaction cards, players need to monitor the action continuously.

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Interrupts add uncertainty and chaos to the game and undermine the ability of players to create a perfect plan. Players cannot be certain that their squad will make it across the street or that the monster will successfully attack. This can be positive or negative depending on the goal of the design. Interrupts give a leg up to players who are more familiar with the game than new players. Understanding the range of possible opponent responses gives experienced players an advantage when formulating their plans. Even if they can’t be perfect, they can plan contingencies for possible opponent responses. Because of their asynchronous nature, Interrupts require rules and conventions around their play to give players the opportunity to react and also to adjudicate if multiple players want to react at the same time. In Squad Leader, for example, there is a specific rule that a player moving a stack of units must pause briefly after entering each space, to give an opponent the opportunity to announce Defensive Fire. This requires the cooperation of the players to keep these pauses long enough for players to decide but short enough not to unduly lengthen the game. Conventions may be developed, such as a player being allowed to request a few extra seconds to make a decision. Similarly, when playing reaction cards, there needs to be an opportunity for players to play them. Some designs allow Interrupts to themselves be interrupted. Obviously, the system needs to prevent infinite Interrupts, such as requiring the play or discard of a card and/or resource(s) to execute an Interrupt. There also needs to be a system to handle the order of resolving multiple Interrupts. Magic: The Gathering uses a LIFO system and an Instant stack. If a player wants to play an Instant in response to another Instant, they play the card on top of the earlier card. When all Instants have been played into this stack, they are resolved from the top down. The first card to be played will be the last to be resolved. Some games will allow the Interrupt to change the turn order. For example, in Mille Bornes, a player may respond to a Hazard card being played on them by playing the matching Safety. If they do, the interrupting player— the one who played the Safety—immediately becomes the active player and takes a normal turn. The players between the old active player and the inter-rupting player are skipped, losing their turn (TRN-16).

Sample Games

Magic: The Gathering (Garfield, 1993) Mille Bornes (Dujardin, 1954) Squad Leader (Hill, 1977)

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Actions ў ў When watching a movie or seeing a play, the story progresses independent of the viewer. Games, however, require action by the player to move things forward. These actions may be based purely on luck, rely solely on the player’s skill, or lie somewhere in between. But a fundamental differentiator of games from many other activities is that the players must act. While later chapters will discuss what those specific actions might be, this one describes different ways that the players are permitted by the designer to take actions and the way that those flow. Tus, the mechanisms discussed here should be viewed in conjunction with the Turn Structures of Chapter 2. An Action is an atomic step or series of steps that a player chooses to perform. For example, moving a piece, picking up a cube, selling a share of stock, or initiating combat may all be Actions. An Action may also be compound, allowing a player to both pick up a cube and sell a share of stock, depending on the structure and metaphor of the game. The selection and integration of Actions into the game can give play a specific feel. These Action systems control the complexity of the game, in terms of the number of Actions a player may perform consecutively and how they interrelate, the interaction between players, and other features. Manipulation of the Action system, as in a Rondel (ACT-10, Rondel Games) or Action Queue (ACT-06), can become the focus of the game itself and a key mechanism. Or it can simply provide a framework that fades into the background. If a game is not interactive enough, or if it overwhelms players with too many choices, the root of the problem is frequently in how Actions are made available to the players. Looking closer at that part of the design may pay dividends. DOI: 10.1201/9781003179184-3

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ACT-01 Action Points

Description

A player receives a number of Action Points on their turn. Tey may spend them on a variety of Actions.

Discussion

This is a broad mechanism that is isomorphic to a variety of game structures. However, some generalities can be discussed. A common implementation is that a player receives a fixed number of Action Points on their turn and can spend them on any combination of Actions, each of which spends one of those points. Pandemic, for example, gives a player four Action Points each turn, which can be spent on several Actions, such as moving to another city or removing a disease cube. Tikal takes a similar approach, but Actions may cost more than one Action Point. Each player gets ten Action Points for the turn, and the cost of Actions ranges from one to four. This can dramatically increase the decision space for players, so the designer needs to be cognizant of the additional weight this will add to the game (Illustration 3.1).

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ACT-01 Action Points A game may have multiple currencies of Action Points. Trough the Ages: A Story of Civilization has two types of Action Points: Civil and Military. Each may only be spent on specific types of Actions. Variations of this mechanism may also limit players to only performing an Action one time per turn. Some allow players to leave some Action Points unused to be carried over to the next turn, and others require that all be spent or lost. Many games use this mechanism without explicitly awarding Action Points to the players. For example, the game may simply tell players that they may take two out of three possible Actions, or even one. In Feudum, each player simultaneously selects four out of eleven Action cards available in a personal pool to use each turn. This makes it obvious whether an Action can be performed multiple times, or just once, depending on how many copies of the same Action card are in the deck. A variant Action Point system is found in Starship Samurai. Here, players select the Action they wish to perform from a limited menu. Tey must also use one of their order counters, which are numbered from one to four. The number determines the number of times the Action may be executed. For example, if players choose the Move Action and use their “3” token, they get to move 3 units. Illustration 3.1 The Action reference from Tikal. The cost of each action is indicated by the small red circles to the right. Players have ten Action Points to spend each turn.

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Action Point systems give the players a lot of flexibility in how they approach their turn. The pace of the game can be controlled by the designer by changing the number of Action Points available each turn. Small values will lead to quicker turns. Larger values will lengthen turns but also open up more space for combos.

Sample Games

Android Netrunner (Garfield and Litzsinger, 2012) Feudum (Swanson, 2018) Forbidden Island (Leacock, 2010) Kemet (Bariot and Montiage, 2012) Pandemic (Leacock, 2008) Starship Samurai (Vega, 2018) Trough the Ages: A Story of Civilization (Chvátil, 2006) Tikal (Kiesling and Kramer, 1999)

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ACT-02 Action Drafting ACT-02 Action Drafting

Description

Players select from an assortment of Actions in a shared pool. The available Actions are limited in quantity, and once a player has chosen an Action it may not be chosen again.

Discussion

This mechanism creates player interaction within the Action selection itself. While many games have Actions, typically if an Action is chosen by one player, that does not deny it to another. Action Drafting creates a marketplace for Actions, with players competing to select them. Action Drafting is a very common mechanism that goes by a variety of names, such as Role Selection or Worker Placement. In a Worker Placement mechanism, players place pawns (“workers”) onto Action spaces on a board, perform the Actions, and deny the use of those Action spaces to their opponents. Because of the variety and importance of Worker Placement, we have dedicated Chapter 9 to exploring its considerations and variations. The issues discussed there, such as the strength of the first player advantage, apply to most of the mechanisms discussed here as well. Citadels is an example of a Role Selection implementation of Action Drafting. In Citadels, the start player takes all the role cards (which show their associated actions), selects an Action card, and then passes the remaining cards to the

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player to the left. Because the card chosen is secret, this system generates information asymmetry (UNC-05). Puerto Rico and Race for the Galaxy are similar examples of Role Selection, as in each round, every player selects (drafts) a role and gets to perform associated actions. Puerto Rico allows all players to perform a less powerful version of the action the drafting player selected, only the player may select a given role each round (see “Follow, ACT-08” in this chapter). In Race for the Galaxy, players also can Follow with a weaker version of the action another player selected, but multiple players can select the same role and get the stronger version of the action. Frequently this mechanism is implemented with a Dice Pool. At the start of the Action Selection phase, dice are rolled, with results corresponding to a specific action. In La Granja, for example, all the 4s rolled are placed into the “Take 4 Coins” action space. Once all dice are placed in their boxes, the players take turns selecting a die and performing the associated action. In a separate twist, there is an extra die left over after all players have selected two action dice, and every player gets to perform that final action. An Action Drafting system based on a dice pool works against perfect plans, as players need to adapt to whatever actions are available. In addition, it forces players to consider not just their own plans but also what their opponents may need. Players may consider taking a sub-optimal selection in order to deprive their opponents of the option (so-called “hate drafting”). Another variant on this mechanic is found in Dungeon Lords. In this game, players secretly select three out of six possible Action cards, placing them face down in front of them in order. Each player then reveals their first card and places tokens on the corresponding spaces (with ties in order being broken by a Start Player token). The players who claim Action space earlier can perform more powerful versions of the Actions. In War of the Ring, each player has their own pool of action dice and players take turns selecting one of their dice. These systems are not really drafting, in that players are not denying their opponent an Action. However, it does restrict the range of possible Actions, gives players flexibility, and an understanding of the possible Actions available to their opponent.

Sample Games

7 Wonders (Bauza, 2010) Agricola (Rosenberg, 2007) Citadels (Faidutti, 2000)

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ACT-02 Action Drafting Coimbra (Brasini and Gigli, 2018) Dungeon Lords (Chvátil, 2008) La Granja (Keller and Odendahl, 2014) Puerto Rico (Seyfarth, 2002) Race for the Galaxy (Lehmann, 2007) War of the Ring (Di Meglio, Maggi, and Nepitello, 2004) Yspahan (Pauchon, 2006)

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ACT-03 Action Retrieval

Description

Each player has a set of Actions available to them, represented by cards, tokens, or some other component. Once the Action is performed, the component is spent and the Action may not be performed again until the component is retrieved. Action Retrieval may be an Action taken as part of a turn or it may consume an entire turn.

Discussion

Action Retrieval rewards efficiency. Because retrieving the used cards takes an Action, players that retrieve more frequently will be at a disadvantage, as they will conduct fewer Actions that advance their cause. The Actions available to players usually span a gamut of discrete options that affect different aspects of the game. For example, Assault of the Giants has the actions Move, Attack, Recruit, Make Alliance, and Leader. Once players use Move, they cannot play it again until they take a Retrieve turn, which restores all action cards used since the last Retrieve. This stops players from repeatedly selecting a specific Action over and over again, forcing them to adopt balanced

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ACT-03 Action Retrieval strategies, and to plan several turns ahead. Terefore, a game that incorporates this mechanism will have a much more strategic feel. Action Retrieval also allows for additional tactical play, as your opponents will know, for example, that you do not have a Move action available and will not be able to respond to opponents moving to different areas (Illustration 3.2). Many games introduce additional wrinkles to reward planning and sequencing. Assault of the Giants, for example, makes Actions more powerful as more Actions are played. For example, if the Move card is played as the first card after a Retrieve, only one unit can move. But if Recruit and Attack have been played before Move, then three units may move. In Champions of Hara, cards have a “play” effect and a “retrieval” effect. An action is required to play them from the hand, which triggers the play effect. In a future turn, an action must be used to retrieve the card back into the player’s hand, at which time, the card’s retrieval effect is triggered. Another variation on this mechanism is a mix of one-time and recoverable cards. Gloomhaven has some action cards that can only be used one time during a scenario. Others may be recovered by having a character Rest. Illustration 3.2 When the Tribune card is played in Concordia, the player retrieves their action cards and gains a bonus. The more cards played prior to retrieval, the larger the bonus.

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Sample Games

Assault of the Giants (Parks, 2017) Century: Spice Road (Matsuuchi, 2017) Champions of Hara (Barber, VanNest, and Zimmerman, 2018) Concordia (Gerdts, 2013) Gloomhaven (Childres, 2017) Spirit Island (Reuss, 2017)

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ACT-04 Action/Event ACT-04 Action/Event

Description

On their turn, the player plays a card that shows Action Points and an Event. Tey must choose to either use the Action Points or perform the Event. If they choose to use the Action Points, typically the Event may be performed by another player.

Discussion

This mechanism builds on a basic Action Point system and allows designers to integrate a lot of flavors and special actions into a system to emphasize the theme. It was pioneered in historical simulations as a way of introducing historical events without unduly adding rules overhead. For example, Twilight Struggle, a simulation of the Cold War, has a card that can be used either for two Action Points or the Fidel event. If the Action Points are chosen, there is a standard list of Actions on which they can be spent (ACT-01) (Illustration 3.3). Many games incorporate an Event Deck (ACT-17), which is another way to include special effects and deeper theming. However, the Action/Event system gives players another layer of choice, rather than simply imposing global effects. Often, games using this system add another layer of player decisionmaking by having some or all events only eligible for specific players. For example, in We the People, a simulation of the American Revolution, certain events may only be performed by the Colonists and others by Great Britain.

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If a player is not eligible to use the event on a card, they must use the Action Points. Similarly, some events are dependent on specific locations, control of particular areas, the presence of certain characters, etc. In Empires of the Void II, for example, events can be tied to specific planets, and if those planets are not in play or the planet’s condition does not match the event’s prerequisites, the player may only use the card for its point value, rather than the event. In World War II: Barbarossa to Berlin, there are prerequisite events that must be triggered before other following events may be used. This helps pre-vent anachronisms in games that model historical events. It can also ensure proper cause-and-effect in the narrative flow of a game. Twilight Struggle takes this enforcement of sequencing even further by automatically triggering your opponent’s Event when you play a card featuring such an event for its Action Points. For example, the Warsaw Pact event is a USSR event. If the US player plays the card, he or she must use the three Action Points, but the USSR will still get to perform the Event. On the Illustration 3.3 The “Fidel” card in Twilight Struggle can either be used for two Action Points (the number in the upper left) or for the Fidel event. The Red Star icon shows that the event favors the Soviet player and will trigger even if the US player uses the card for its Action Points.

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ACT-04 Action/Event other hand, if the USSR player plays the card, they must choose between the Event and the Action Points. Generally, used cards are recycled into the deck several times over the course of the game, but some cards are permanently discarded after their event is triggered. Once again, this helps with chronology—Anwar Sadat takes control of Egypt only once—but it also adds complexity to the choice of Action or Event and the sequence of play. It may be better to forgo playing your own Event, and using the Action Points instead, in hopes that the card will reappear in your opponent’s hands and they will be forced to trigger it. Twilight Struggle and We the People are two-player games. This system is extended to multiplayer in The Expanse Board Game, which supports up to four players, each of whom represents a faction. Between two and four factions are eligible for each event, and if a player uses the Action Points, the other players are given the option to perform it, in a priority order. In 1960: The Making of the President, players may trigger their events when their opponent plays a card for its action points by spending a Momentum Marker. However, players may also pre-empt an event from being triggered by their opponent by paying two Momentum Markers when they play the card.

Sample Games

1960: The Making of the President (Leonhard and Matthews, 2007) Empires of the Void II (Laukat, 2018) The Expanse Board Game (Engelstein, 2017) Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage (Simonitch, 1996) Twilight Struggle (Gupta and Matthews, 2005) We the People (Herman, 1993) World War II: Barbarossa to Berlin (Raicer, 2002)

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ACT-05 Command Cards

Description

Players have a hand of cards that allows them to activate and perform actions with a subset of their units.

Discussion

Players have a hand of cards that represent different geographic regions or unit types and must play one each turn. When a geographic region card is played, units in the region(s) indicated may take Actions. If a Unit Type card is played, only units of that type may take Actions. In Memoir ’44 the cards represent the center, left flank, or right flank; or a set of units, for example, all Tank units. Players can plan their future actions based on the cards in their hands. Hand-size limits help define the information horizon and amount of look-ahead players can engage in. Players may try to build a bank of cards in a particular sector to orchestrate a multi-pronged attack, or they may riskily move a unit out of cover to take a better shot, despite not having another card in hand to move the unit to safety the next turn. Like in real battles, players may not be able to execute the tactics

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ACT-05 Command Cards they believe are best. The system is quite elegant as an abstraction of breakdowns in communication and command-and-control that occur in warfare (Illustration 3.4). In a traditional war game, players can take actions with all of their units each turn. Command Card systems limit this to a subset of units, which reduces the length of turns and simplifies decision-making, giving the game a lighter feel. Some games, such as Risk: Star Wars Edition, give players a range of one to three possible activation choices, building in greater flexibility and planning. In the extreme limit, with one unit at a time being activated, this mechanism reduces to a Chit Draw system (TRN-11).

Sample Games

Battle Cry (Borg, 2000) BattleLore (Borg, 2006) C&C Ancients, Napoleonics, etc. (Borg, 2006–2018) Combat Commander: Europe (Jensen, 2006) Memoir ’44 (Borg, 2004) Risk: Star Wars Edition (D’Aloisio, Rucker, and Van Ness, 2015) Illustration 3.4 Command Cards from Memoir ’44. While all are Recon cards, each may only activate units in the highlighted region.

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ACT-06 Action Queue

Description

Players create Action Queues and perform them in sequence.

Discussion

While this mechanism has many different implementations, at its core, the idea is that players must plan their actions and commit to a specific sequence of execution. For example, players may have to plot the movement of a robot by placing three Action cards in sequence that may, for example, cause the robot to move forward two spaces, then turn left, and then move one more space. The types of actions, the way they are revealed and resolved, and other specifics have several variations (Illustration 3.5). Action Queues emphasize planning but can also introduce chaos as players commit to a course of action several steps or turns in advance, keep them hidden from the other players, and have limited opportunity to change the plan. This introduces Yomi (UNC-01), as players try to guess what other players will do and what the board state may look like in the future. Actions are typically represented by cards, as they can contain a lot of information about the preconditions and resolutions. Tiles can also be used but need to be simpler. Queues can either be Rolling, where the Action at the head of the queue is revealed and performed as a new Action is added to the end, or Batch, where a set number of cards are added to the queue at one time and then all are resolved in order.

Players place Order Tokens into regions, indicating what they want to do in that particular region of the board. After all the tokens are placed, they are executed in sequence.

Discussion

This mechanism combines an Interleaved Turn Structure (TRN-15) with an Action Queue. Players are in essence creating multiple Interleaved Action Queues during a planning step and then resolving them. The tokens are typically placed face down, so opponents know where you are planning to act but not which actions you will take. If more than one order may be placed in a location, tokens are stacked to indicate their sequence. Because players alternate placing orders into different areas, they must balance a variety of factors. Which actions do they wish to perform early? Will committing to a region alert an opponent to your intentions to operate there? What actions are the opponents planning? The resolution of the Order Token stacks can be performed in several ways. First, they may either be resolved from the top down, so that tokens that were placed last are resolved first (LIFO, Last-In-First-Out),

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or the token stack may be flipped over, so that the earliest tokens are resolved first (FIFO, First-In-First-Out). Some games (such as A Game of Trones: The Board Game) don’t consider the placement order of the tokens and simply turn them all over and resolve them in turn order, over the course of three phases. Only tokens of particular types may be resolved in each phase, so in the Raid phase, only Raid tokens may be executed, and players who have not played any Raids are skipped in the turn order (Illustration 3.6). Resolution order has a great impact on the strategy and feel for placement. LIFO gives the game a “chicken” feel, as players want to be the last into a region with key actions so that they are executed first, but it also increases cognitive load, as players need to remember the reverse order of tokens in the stack and modify their plans as they go. With a FIFO structure, players can gradually just build up their plans in their minds as they proceed, which is less cognitively taxing. Illustration 3.6 In Victorian Masterminds, players place order tokens face down in different areas, stacking them on top of other tokens already there. When there are three tokens in an area (image 2), the stack is flipped over, and they are resolved in a first-in-first-out order.

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ACT-09 Order Counters Either way, this is a moderately complex mechanism, which is best reserved for heavier strategy games.

Sample Games

Forbidden Stars (Bailey, Kniffen, and Konieczka, 2015) A Game of Trones (Petersen and Wilson, 2003) Starcraft: The Board Game (Konieczka and Petersen, 2007) Victorian Masterminds (Bauza and Lang, 2019)

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ACT-10 Rondel

Description

The available Actions are represented as pie wedges in a circle. Each player has one or more tokens on Rondel’s wedges. On their turn, they may move their token around the Rondel and perform the Action indicated by the wedge where they stop. It is typically more costly to move further around the Rondel.

Discussion

This mechanism is related to a basic Action Point system (ACT-01), as the Rondel represents a menu of available actions. However, the cost of the actions varies for each turn, for example, to move more than one space typically incurs some cost (money or some other currency). If a player wishes to move one space at a time, they incur a little cost but may not be most efficiently performing the actions (Illustration 3.7). Rondel systems emphasize trade-offs, planning, and efficiency as players need to balance taking the action that they want to do now, and paying a cost, with waiting and paying no or a reduced cost. There are several variations on this mechanic. In Finca, players have several tokens on the Rondel and may choose one of them to move. The distance that it may move is based on the number of tokens in the starting wedge, and the power of the action is determined by the number of tokens in the ending wedge. This makes for a highly interactive, yet, relatively simple system and also begins to blur with a Mancala mechanism (MOV-12).

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ACT-10 Rondel

Sample Games

Antike (Gerdts, 2005) Concordia (Gerdts, 2013) Finca (Sentker and zur Linde, 2009) Imperial (Gerdts, 2006) Navegador (Gerdts, 2010) Illustration 3.7 The Rondel in Imperial. Players may select an action that is up to three spaces away from where their marker currently is at no cost. If they wish to move further, they must pay to do so.

increases by one, accelerating the sinking of the island and the danger facing the players. Pairing a player power unlock with a penalty or disadvantage is another common pattern for this mechanism. In Zombie Teenz Evolution, players can unlock character powers such as the ability to build a blockade or to reroll a die. However, on that character’s turn, players must also roll an additional die that can summon more zombies onto the board. More generally, legacy games take the fullest advantage of gating and unlocking to introduce new powers, mechanisms, threats, opportunities, and narrative developments, whether during the course of a single game or in between sessions of the same campaign.

Sample Games

1830 (Tresham, 1986) Agricola (Rosenberg, 2007) The Expanse Board Game (Engelstein, 2017) Lords of Waterdeep (Lee and Tompson, 2012) Mechs vs. Minions (Cantrell, Ernst, Librande, Saraswat, and Tiras, 2016) SpaceCorp: 2025-2300 AD (Butterfield, 2018) Trough the Ages: A Story of Civilization (Chvátil, 2006)

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ACT-16 Tech Trees/Tech Tracks/Track Bonuses ACT-16 Tech Trees/Tech Tracks/Track Bonuses

Description

During the course of the game, new Actions become available to specific players, or existing Actions are improved.

Discussion

This is similar in many ways to the meta-mechanism of Gating and Unlocking (ACT-15). New actions and abilities are introduced as the game progresses. The differences in this mechanism are subtle but important. First, these new and upgraded Actions are typically only available to a single player. It is possible that multiple players can earn the same additional Action, but it needs to happen individually. Some games allow other players to take advantage of another’s personal Actions, either by paying the owning player some fee, obtaining the ability by force or trade, or by having the owner’s monopoly on them expire after a number of turns, making them available to all. These upgrades frequently do not make entirely new Actions available to a player. Instead, they make specific Actions more efficient or powerful. Whereas Gated upgrades usually trigger on a timed or global schedule (as in Agricola’s one new Action space per turn system) in a Tech system players

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need to accumulate and spend some resources in order to gain them. This can be a general currency, such as money, as in Civilization, or a specialized “research” currency as in Eclipse or Trough the Ages: A Story of Civilization. There are games where techs are given out freely, although these still have an opportunity cost as players must forgo other choices. Technologies do not have to be themed as research to use the mechanism. In many games, hiring people or building certain structures unlock new or advanced abilities. Puerto Rico is one of many examples of this. Growing, evolving, building, and training are other common metaphors for research. Upgrades may have prerequisites that need to be satisfied or may be easier to obtain if you have an earlier tech. This results in a Tech Tree. For example, in Stellar Conquest, if you have researched Industrial Technology, it is less costly to then obtain Robotic Industry. Tech Trees may also be expressed as Tracks. As players advance their markers along one or more tracks, they may pass certain spaces, which gives improved actions or abilities. Orleans and Russian Railroads both utilize this mechanism. There may also be physical markers placed along these tracks so that the first player to reach those spaces gains those markers and a special bonus. Other players will still receive bonuses printed on the track. Tech Trees may be disguised thematically. In Titan, players recruit creatures into legions. The creatures that may be recruited into a legion depend on their current composition. Tree Ogres may recruit a Troll, and three Trolls may recruit a Colossus. These creatures are more and more powerful, and some have special abilities such as flying (Illustration 3.8). This type of system gives the designer fine-grained control over Actions available to players and gives a path to offer different strategic options, as players can choose which Actions and Abilities to invest in. Having a limited number of these Techs also forces player interaction and competition.

Sample Games

Agricola (Rosenberg, 2007) Civilization (Tresham, 1980) Clash of Cultures (Marcussen, 2012) Eclipse (Tahkokallio, 2011) Kemet (Bariot and Montiage, 2012)

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ACT-16 Tech Trees/Tech Tracks/Track Bonuses Orleans (Stockhausen, 2014) Puerto Rico (Seyfarth, 2002) Russian Railroads (Ohley and Orgler, 2013) Stellar Conquest (Tompson, 1975) Trough the Ages: A Story of Civilization (Chvátil, 2006) Titan (McAllister and Trampier, 1980) Twilight Imperium (Petersen, 1997) Illustration 3.8 The Muster Diagram from Titan, showing which creatures may recruit other creatures. The creatures at the bottom (Ogre, Centaur, Gargoyle) are the basic ones. They may recruit creatures one level above them in the terrain type shown. The separation of the Gargoyle–Serpent tree from the other creatures creates interesting tactical and strategic options for players.

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ACT-17 Events

Description

Actions occur outside the control of players that cause an immediate effect, change the state of the game, or impact subsequent actions.

Discussion

Events can add variety and themes to a game. Many gamers’ first exposure to events comes through Monopoly, in the form of Chance and Community Chest cards. These may immediately affect one or more players. This type of event is also found in Empire Builder, a railroad building game where cards may cause derailments, or floods wipe out tracks crossing rivers. However, their usefulness is multiplied by affecting the overall game state for an extended period of time. Other events in Empire Builder may cause blizzards, which affect train movement near mountains, or storms that affect certain regions. This forces players to reevaluate their plans to try to avoid or take advantage of the changed circumstances. Sometimes this can be interesting for the players, but if it is too random and negative, it can feel punishing. Events can also affect the global game state. In Evo, the overall temperature strongly impacts which dinosaurs will survive. Each turn, a die is rolled to determine how the temperature changes. The new environment affects all players. Similarly, in night missions in earlier editions of Warhammer 40,000, dice are rolled each turn to determine how far units can see.

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ACT-17 Events Core Worlds: Galactic Orders delays the implementation of Events. Each round an Event is drawn, and all players can see what it is. However, it does not go into effect until the end of the round. This gives all players an opportunity to adjust to take advantage. Events in Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island have an immediate effect and may further impact play unless the players resolve them in some way over several turns. Terra Mystica gives players broader visibility to an Event of a sort—random scoring tiles. At the start of the game, tiles are placed that show what will give bonus points for each round. Players can see what is coming up and plan their strategy accordingly. A delayed Event mechanism is used in Trough the Ages: A Story of Civilization. In this game, players play Event cards into a stack that may, for example, give a bonus to the player with the strongest military. While the player who added that card to the stack knows it will be drawn in the future, the way that the events are played from stacks makes it very uncertain how many turns will elapse before it is drawn. While a player may have had the strongest military when they played the event into the stack, they may not by the time it is actually drawn.

Sample Games

Core Worlds: Galactic Orders (Parks, 2012) Empire Builder (Bromley and Fawcett, 1982) Evo (Keyaerts, 2001) Monopoly (Darrow and Magie, 1933) Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island (Trewiczec, 2012) Terra Mystica (Drögemüller and Ostertag, 2012) Trough the Ages: A Story of Civilization (Chvátil, 2006) Warhammer 40,000 (Chambers, Johnson, Priestly, and Torpe, 1993)

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ACT-18 Narrative Choice

Description

Multiple action options are presented to the players via a narrative format.

Discussion

With the rise of Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s, game designers looked for new ways to incorporate storytelling into game design. One of the earliest to do this was the late-1970s Choose Your Own Adventure book series, which began with The Cave of Time. In this series, at the end of short chapters, the reader would be presented with a series of choices, which would lead to other pages, and ultimately a good or bad conclusion. This system has been adopted as part of more traditional tabletop games, with an early example being Tales of the Arabian Nights. In this game, after moving to a space, players are directed to read a numbered paragraph in a large book to reveal what adventure the character is experiencing. These vignettes offer choices of actions for the players, for example, “Bribe the Guard” or “Fight Your Way In.” These lead to other numbered paragraphs, which give the result, and their impact on the game state. Frequently, these systems use Stat Checks (RES-02) to determine the out-come. For example, if you choose to “Fight Your Way In,” you may need to make a check against Strength or some other ability. You will proceed to different paragraphs depending on the outcome. Sometimes, not all the actions will be available to you unless you previously found some item or built up some stat to a sufficient level.

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ACT-18 Narrative Choice The strength of this mechanism is in the ability to bring a more structured narrative and flavor to the game, without the players needing to create a narrative from abstract game elements. However, the weakness of Narrative Choice systems is that the adventures they present can be disconnected from the main course of the game and thus can lack context. Arabian Nights ties the adventure to the player through the use of different environments (sea, desert, etc.) and player status (married, despondent, cursed) that impact the adventures. But the adventures themselves do not combine into a single coherent narrative. Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game attempts to deal with this contextual issue by the Crossroads mechanism. The player to the right of the active player draws a Crossroads card that applies to that turn. The card begins with an action trigger, such as entering a certain location, which is not revealed to the phasing player. If the player takes the trigger action, the Crossroads cardholder interrupts the action and presents the mini-adventure to the player. This means that the game designer can write an adventure knowing, for example, that it will specifically take place at a certain location. This mechanism has two different implementations that are worth noting. In the tabletop version, the Crossroads cards were written so that players were told what the outcome of each choice would be prior to making the choice. In a digital implementation, the outcome of each choice is hidden from the players. This is another example of input vs. output randomness, but in the context of making a meaningful narrative choice, hiding the mechanical, in-game out-comes creates a more character-driven experience. Games such as Ambush! and Action Castle maintain narrative cohesion at the expense of replayability. In these games, players are presented with specific triggers or situations. For example, in Ambush!, moving into a specific space during a certain stage of the mission will always trigger the same paragraph to be read. Action Castle emulates computer adventure games and has players interact with the game via short phrases (such as “take sword”), but the same phrases will always work the same way in the same situation. Other games strive to maintain cohesion by locking narrative choices so they only appear at specified times. In Near and Far, some of the narrative passages are tied to the game’s campaign mode to preserve a more cohesive story. Risk Legacy uses a gating mechanism (see “ACT-15” in this chapter) to ensure that specific story beats are only revealed once players have progressed the campaign sufficiently to make the story fit. Legacy of Dragonholt, a role-playing-style game, is built nearly entirely on the Narrative Choice mechanism. A tracker sheet for both the characters and the scenario allows for lots of stat-checking to determine progress. Scenarios often

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come with a map of areas to visit. Each area, when visited, will have different options open to the players based on a few factors. If you come to a store at night, the store will be closed. If you go to market on market day, there will be lots to explore. In addition to tracking time of day and day of the week, players also track when they complete specific story points, as instructed by the game book. These story points create a kind of memory for the system, so options presented to players may depend on their having marked a specific story point. If, for example, the innkeeper goes missing, the game will instruct players to mark, say, story point B7. Later options might direct players to read different texts if point B7 is marked, to ensure that there is story continuity and that the innkeeper who went missing isn’t behind the bar the next morning. Legacy of Dragonholt shares more in common with pencil-and-paper interactive fiction books than with traditional tabletop board games, but it is an excellent example of how flexible the Narrative Choice mechanism can be.

Sample Games

Above and Below (Laukat, 2015) Action Castle (Soren, 2009) Ambush! (Butterfield and Smith, 1983) The Cave of Time (Packard, 1979) Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger (Uncredited, 2018) Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game (Gilmour and Vega, 2014) Dungeons & Dragons (Arneson and Gygax, 1977) Legacy of Dragonholt (Valens, Clark, Flanders, Mitsoda, and Spyridis, 2017) Near and Far (Laukat, 2017) Risk Legacy (Daviau and Dupuis, 2011) Tales of the Arabian Nights (Freeman, Goldberg, Kaufman, Maroney, and Rolston, 1985)

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ACT-19 Bingo ACT-19 Bingo

Description

Game elements are selected at random, and each player needs to use the elements for their own actions.

Discussion

This mechanism will be familiar to most players due to its use in the eponymous and popular Bingo. As such, it can be applied to a wide range of complexity levels, from low to high. Bingo has the useful property of being able to take luck out of randomness. All the players are using the same sequence of random numbers, so if players are taking actions based on the random selection, it makes them perceive that there is less luck in the game. This typically is not strictly true, as players still must take risks based on a certain element being chosen in the future, but it still has this psychological effect. A classic example that uses this mechanism is Take It Easy. In this game, each player has the same set of numbered hexagons, each of which has three

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colored lines on it. One player is designated as the “caller” and each turn draws one tile at random. Tey then announce the tile number to the other players, and each retrieves their copy and places it on their board. Players score based on making continuous lines of a single color. Take It Easy has no direct player interaction, but, because each player is using the same random sequence, there is a competition to see who will do better with that sequence. This mechanism is at the heart of many “roll & write” games, where a dice roll or card flip is shared by all players, who then mark something on their player sheets. Examples of this include Cartographers, Railroad Ink, Welcome To…, and Super-Skill Pinball. Again, in these usages, the common random sequence somewhat reduces luck by giving all players the same random sequence, turning the random into the strategic. As mentioned, both card (or tile) draws and dice rolls are used for this mechanism. Cards or tiles, unless shuffled frequently, will give a more strategic edge to the game, as players can make decisions based on a diminishing pool of possibilities. Dice, on the other hand, present the same possibilities at all points during the game. If the designer wishes to give more control with a dice-based Bingo game, they may consider luck mitigation systems such as special limited-use abilities to add or subtract from rolls, or to take specific “wild” results. Allowing players to earn these over the course of the game will give more of a sense of progress and narrative arc to the game. On a high-level basis, Bingo systems are used in some tournament formats such as Duplicate Bridge. In Duplicate Bridge, each partnership in the tournament plays the same randomly generated deals. Using a Bingo mechanism in this case preserves the random nature of Bridge deals, while allowing partnerships to be compared to each other directly with how they performed with the same randomness.

Sample Games

Bingo (Unknown) Cartographers (Adan, 2019) Duplicate Bridge (Vanderbilt, 1908) FITS (Knizia, 2009) Railroad Ink (Hach and Silva, 2018) Rise of Augustus (Mori, 2013) Super Skill Pinball (Engelstein, 2020) Take It Easy (Burley, 1983)

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ACT-20 Layering ACT-20 Layering

Description

Components are placed above other components and can overlap in various ways. Only the topmost visible icons/areas are active.

Discussion

This mechanism is usually implemented with cards, because they afford easy stacking. To organize the layering, the cards are laid out with grids. Patchistory and Circle the Wagons, for example, use a 4×4 grid.

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As cards are added to a player’s tableau, they may overlay cards that were played previously. Some games have specific rules about overlap—such as at least two squares must be overlaid—while others are more freeform. The rules for overlapping are typically driven by how the visible icons are used. In Patchistory, for example, the icons give you resources or actions. The most efficient way to build would be to not overlap at all, as that will leave the most visible icons. Terefore, there is a rule that you must overlap, with certain rules about overlapping (e.g., water squares may not be built on) and maximum grid size that create interesting decisions for the players. In Circle the Wagons, the player scores by having contiguous groups of the same color, so just sprawling outwards is rarely the best play. By cleverly over-lapping the cards, players can form large groups. Terefore, there are very few rules governing how cards can be placed. While cards to be placed are usually the same size, sometimes they are not. Smartphone Inc. has players overlap two 2×3 grids of icons (cleverly themed to look like apps on a phone screen) to determine which actions they will perform. Some icons, such as raise or lower prices, cancel each other, so careful orientation is important. During the game, players may earn Improvements, which are small extra tiles with a 1×2 grid of icons that can be placed over the main grids. This gives the players more flexibility and an upgrade path, while preserving the central nature of the main grids (Illustration 3.9). Illustration 3.9 A sample action configuration formed by overlaying two cards in Smartphone, Inc. The visible icons are executed.

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ACT-20 Layering The layering mechanism, tile placement, and jigsaw puzzles appeal in similar ways. All have a spatial element that involves twisting and matching up pieces, and all give the players the feeling that there is an answer and a “best” placement. However, layering is typically more complex than tile placement, as there are more options for placement, and the overlapping can be more challenging to visualize than, for example, the edge matching in most tile games, such as Carcassonne. The physical implementation of this mechanism requires careful consideration. Cards are typically best because they are easiest to stack in uneven and irregular patterns and are unlikely to become unbalanced and topple over. However, even cards have a thickness, and the stacked tableau can get messy. Cards can slide and shift once the stack goes above three or four cards deep. Ticker cards or tiles will have even more of an issue as they are stacked. The sample games discussed so far are about building up the layers as the game progresses. However, a game can start with layers already built, and gameplay then proceeds with removing cards. There are many traditional solitaire games, such as Klondike (Patience) and Pyramid, that start with the cards layered on top of each other. The player is only allowed to remove cards that have no other cards covering them. This mechanism is also used in 7 Wonders Duel, where the cards are laid out in a pyramid, and Dragon Castle, which has Mahjong-style tiles placed in a stack, with only the top-most ones available for play. In this implementation, layering limits the Actions available to players. Where the tableau is shared, it also presents a level of interaction, as removing an item will uncover other items for your opponents. Another expression of this system uses transparent cards so that icons on earlier cards are still visible and have an effect. Gloom and Mystic Vale are examples of this technique. Unlike the earlier games discussed, transparent cards are typically layered exactly on top of each other, not rotated or staggered. Icons are placed strategically at specific locations so newly placed cards can cover or leave revealed certain symbols. In Mystic Vale, these transparent cards are placed into plastic sleeves, to combine into a single playable card. Tey are “constructible” in that players can choose how to combine the transparent elements to form very powerful single cards. The horror game Hecatomb has pentagonal creature cards with transparent edges. Players stack the cards to create hybrid Abominations that combine powers.

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In Gloom, players try to make their own characters as unhappy as possible, while cheering up those of their opponents. The transparent cards can be used to cover up undesirable icons while leaving desirable ones behind. Cards are not removed, so the stack of cards can be looked at after the game, as they preserve a history of that character’s life. This meshes nicely with the game’s intended experience of having players generate stories about these characters and their odd lives. Transparent cards are more expensive to produce and the printing on them is not as bright. Care has to be taken to ensure visibility through whatever stack depth is required for your game. Splaying is a subset of Layering. In Splaying, cards are typically arranged so that one side of a lower card pokes out of the side of a card above it, revealing icons along that edge. This can give the player a choice of which edge they wish to have exposed (related to CAR-08 Multi-Use Cards), or the main power of the lower card (located in the center) is covered up, leaving a residual power along the edge. Innovation cards have icons on three edges, and deciding which to splay out is a key strategy. Similarly, the letter cards in Paperback Adventures have symbols on both right and left sides, and when spelling and playing a word, the player needs to decide whether to splay to the left or right, gaining the effect of the revealed icons. In …and then, we held hands, players must re-splay their entire tableau to match their position on the board: if they are on the left side of the board, they may only see and use the left side of their tableau and vice-versa. In Lotus, cards are splayed in sets to look like flowers, which achieves a beautiful visual effect, albeit without any gameplay effects. A distantly related implementation of this mechanism can be found in the game Fold-It. Each player has a cloth with a 4×4 grid of food items on each side. A target card is flipped, which shows three or four food icons. Players must then race to fold their clothes along the grid lines to be able to only have those exact icons showing. The players, in essence, are using folding to create layers that hide the icons they do not want to show.

Sample Games

…and then, we held hands (Chircop and Massa, 2015) 7 Wonders Duel (Bauza and Cathala, 2015) Circle the Wagons (Aramini, Devine, Kluka, 2017) Dragon Castle (Hach, Ricci, Silva, 2017) Fold-it (Goh, 2016)

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ACT-20 Layering Gloom (Baker, 2005) Hecatomb (Elliott and Tweet, 2005) Innovation (Chudyk, 2010) Klondike Solitaire (Unknown, 1783) Lotus (Goddard and Goddard, 2016) Mystic Vale (Clair, 2016) Paperback Adventures (Fowers, Larsen, 2022) Patchistory (Jung and Kim, 2013) Pyramid Solitaire (Unknown) Smart Phone, Inc. (Lashin, 2018)

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ACT-21 Slide/Push Definition Players slide a token, and other tokens ahead of it are pushed.

Discussion

Slide/Push can be broadly broken up into two main categories: quantized and freeform. Quantized slides have the pieces move to specific locations, while freeform allows the pieces to move anywhere on the play surface. The classic abstract Abalone is a good example of a quantized slide mechanism. Marbles are placed onto a hexagonal grid, and a turn consists of pushing a marble in a chosen direction. The marble will push other marbles ahead of it. Marbles always settle into specific grooves, marking a delimited play area with a set number of spaces. Another example of quantized sliding is Masters of Renaissance: Lorenzo il Magnifico – The Card Game (quite the game name!), which has a 4×3 tray grid where differently colored marbles are placed. Each turn, the active player selects a row or column and gains resources based on the colors. Tey then take a spare marble and push it in the chosen row or column, changing the configuration for the next player. The player needs to consider not just what they want but also the position it will leave for the next player. There are several gameplay considerations for slide mechanisms. The first we will look at is the number of pushing axes that are used. Being on a hexagonal grid, Abalone has three axes of slide movement. Masters of Renaissance, sliding on a rectangular grid, has two axes of slide

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ACT-21 Slide/Push movement. There are also games that have a single axis of slide movement, with pieces pushing in a line, almost as a queue. An example of this is Panamax, which is about transiting the Panama Canal. In this game, players control container ships attempting to move through the canal. In the narrow canal zones, ships may not pass each other. Terefore, when a ship at the back of the line is moved, it also moves the ships ahead of it. Positioning your ships so that other players will move them for you by pushing their ships behind yours is a key strategy. In general, increasing the number of axes increases player options. This can make decision-making more complex and adds to the weight of the game. These three examples also illustrate very different features that Slide/Push can bring to player interaction. In Abalone, the players may push in a variety of directions and can become intricately entangled. The goal is to push the opponent’s marbles off the edge, so keeping marbles in the center of the board is important, and in general, tactical placement considerations are paramount. In Masters of Renaissance, the player interaction is indirect, and each time the grid is pushed, a marble will fall off and be recycled. The removal of a marble is very transient—it will be reintroduced into the grid the next turn. This creates a lower-key interaction than Abalone, as it is not the player’s pieces that are being slid. The mechanism creates a constrained way for players to impact resource collection. A similar approach can be found in Ulm, where players slide action tiles into a 3×3 grid and take all three actions in the row or column they pushed into, including the tile they added. The tile that is pushed out of the grid does not activate. Finally, the player interaction in Panamax is progressive in that it pushes another player’s ship forward, which is always beneficial to that player and helps the ship progress towards scoring by providing it a free move. This interaction gives Panamax a bit of a taste of playing “Chicken,” as players try to make their opponents’ actions benefit them too. In Abalone, by contrast, sliding is never intended to benefit the other player, and making such a move is a blunder. Note, however, that this is a function of the zero-sum nature of a two-player game, rather than an inherent characteristic of the mechanism. A key design decision that impacts the nature of the slide mechanism significantly is what happens to pieces that are pushed off the grid. Often, these pieces are eliminated or scored. However, it is possible to reintroduce them back into the grid immediately into the now-vacated position (a wraparound effect) or on a future turn. In Ulm, for example, players can collect these tokens and reintroduce them to the grid later or spend them for other benefits as part of a different subsystem in the game’s economy.

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Freeform Slide does not have a specific grid where pieces move. Instead, there is an open surface where pieces can be pushed, collide, and react in a freeform way. Many bear a similarity to the arcade “penny pusher” machines, where a coin or token is dropped onto a surface and a mechanical arm pushes them forward, and the player keeps any coins that get pushed off the edge. An early example of this is Niagara. In this game, the player’s canoes are placed on acrylic disks onto a “river” track with raised sides. As more disks are added, the canoes move closer to the waterfall at the edge of the track and eventually will fall off. More recent examples are Kabuto Sumo and Redcap Ruckus, where disks of various sizes are pushed onto a raised platform. Players are attempting to knock their opponent’s disks off the platform. Another is Via Appia, where players push disks of different sizes into a quarry. Tey then gain resources based on the disks that fall off the edge. A key design feature of these games is to introduce uncertainty into the pushing. You cannot be sure what is going to fall off the edge, and this can lead to a lot of excitement and surprising situations. The figure showing Via Appia illustrates this nicely. Note that the sides of the quarry flare outwards as they near the edge of the platform. This adds a healthy dose of uncertainty to what will fall off, far more than a straight chute would provide (Illustration 3.10). Illustration 3.10 The Quarry in Via Appia. Players insert a disk into the narrow end and get all disks that fall out the wide end. The angled sides make the outcome less predictable. Photo by Daniel Danzer.

RES-01 High Number

Description

Each player is represented by a numeric “strength,” and the higher strength wins the conflict.

Discussion

This is a basic and common way of resolving conflicts. The base strength can be represented by a fixed value for the piece, as in Magic: The Gathering, or by the position on the board, as in Cosmic Encounter, where each defending token adds 1 to the total defender strength. Sometimes, strengths may be determined randomly. In War, players flip cards to compare strengths. Many games include a “roll-off” mechanism, where each player rolls a die and the high roll wins the contest. Frequently, base strength can be modified by some factor. In Magic: The Gathering, there are a variety of cards that impact the Power and Toughness of creatures (comparable to an Attack and Defense strength). In Cosmic Encounter, each player secretly plays a number card which is added to the number of tokens on their side, including allies. Modifiers need to be carefully considered by the designer. Teir inclusion increases the complexity of the resolution, particularly if they come from multiple sources. For example, a game may grant the defenders a +2 modifier because they are defending in the mountains and a −1 modifier because they are infantry defending against artillery. While the math seems simple, having a long list of modifiers for the players to apply can be burdensome. It is better to have these factored into intrinsic strengths, or through card play or dice pools whose outcomes model the probabilities desired. The dungeon-crawler Descent: Journeys in the Dark uses a High Number mechanism combined with a Dice Pool. The characters, weapons, and

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RES-01 High Number situation add or remove dice from the attacker’s and defender’s pools. Tey then each roll their dice and count hits (for the attacker) or shields (for the defender). The higher number prevails. If the hits exceed the shields, the defender takes damage based on the difference. This attrition-style mechanism, where damage is based on the delta between the final strengths, is common. A less common alternative is Winner Takes All, where the losing side is completely eliminated at no cost to the winner. The game 4000 AD implements this mechanism, which can lead to tension and wide swings, as a 10-strength fleet will completely eliminate both a 1- and a 9-strength fleet at no loss to itself. The lack of realism can impact theme and immersion. An Ordered High Number system is used in the Risk series of games. In these games, Attacker and Defender typically roll multiple dice. The highest roll of the Attacker is compared to the highest of the Defender, secondhighest Attacker roll to second-highest Defender roll, etc. Because of the simultaneous ordering of the rolls from highest to lowest, this system has lower variance than just making N independent rolls. It also offers a much simpler way to give an advantage to the player with greater numbers without resorting to modifiers. If a player has a 3:1 numerical advantage, they simply roll three dice versus the opponent’s one, which is much simpler than gaining modifiers to the die roll. An interesting twist on this system is to switch whether the high or low number is the winner within the same game. For example, in Battleball, a simulation of futuristic football, players are represented by dice of different sides—six-sided, eight-sided, twelve-sided, or twenty-sided. When moving, rolling higher is better. High rolls allow a player to move farther. The D20 wide receivers are great at dashing down the field. The D6 linesmen are much less mobile. But when trying to tackle, both players roll their die against each other, but now, the low number wins. So, linesmen will usually tackle wide receivers. However, this system leaves open the possibility for surprises in both running and tackling. In numeric comparison systems, some means to deal with ties need to be included. In combat simulations, these ties typically are awarded to the defender; however, any tie-breaking mechanism can be used. High Number and Stat Check mechanisms can be combined for a more nuanced mechanism. See the Stat Check section for more details.

other effects. For example, the attacker or defender strength can be modified, the final die roll can be modified, or the column used can be shifted left or right. This flexibility has led to its continued popularity in the war-gaming community. Designs have taken the CRT in a wide variety of directions. Squad Leader eschews strength ratios and simply has the column chosen by the firepower of the attacker. It also includes a mechanism called Cowering, where if doubles are rolled (two dice are rolled in Squad Leader), the column used is shifted one to the left, to a weaker column. Elite troops are typically immune to Cowering. This is a good example of the opportunities CRTs offer to differentiate and apply various effects. Some games have the column selected by a differential between Attacker and Defender rather than a ratio. This has the benefit of simplicity, as division can be confusing when the strengths get large. Differentials are less realistic, however, as they will treat a 10–8 attack the same as a 3–1 attack. But, if the values are bounded within a reasonable range, differential CRTs can give a lighter feel. Some games use charts with various conditions as columns to resolve Actions and random events. Down with the King has charts that players roll on to determine the result. For example, there are separate charts for Gambling, Seducing, and Carousing. The solitaire game B-17: Queen of the Illustration 4.1 Combat Results Table from The Guns of August. The modified die roll is cross-indexed with the Combat Odds.

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RES-04 Ratio/Combat Results Table Skies includes charts for damage from German fighters, bombing accuracy, and the result of crew member injuries. While charts can encapsulate a large amount of information and give a lot of flexibility to the designer, they can be intimidating to players and tedious to use and are considered old-fashioned. However, in the right situations, they can be quite useful.

Sample Games

B-17: Queen of the Skies (Frank and Shelley, 1981) Down with the King (Rahman and Rahman, 1981) France 1944: The Allied Crusade in Europe (Herman, 1986) The Guns of August (Beyma and Davis, 1981) Gettysburg (Roberts, 1958) Squad Leader (Hill, 1977)

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RES-05 Die Icons

Description

The player rolls dice, and any die showing the target icon is a success.

Discussion

This mechanism is typically a subset of High Number (RES-01) or Stat Check (RES-02), as the number of successes ultimately reduces to one of these. However, we are listing this as a separate mechanism due to some subtleties in the implementation and player interaction. The use of Die Icons has several advantages over traditional dice with numbers on the sides. First, using an icon makes it simpler for players to interpret the result, if they are properly chosen. Counting icons is inherently simpler from a cognitive perspective than adding numbers or checking to see if numbers on dice exceed certain values. This ease increases as the number of dice rolled increases and is particularly true if the target value may vary depending on the game situation. In this case, icons are easier to parse at a glance, especially if they are thematic. For example, contrast Warhammer with Memoir ’44. In Warhammer, a player may roll 4 dice for an attack, looking for a 5 or higher for a success (a 5+, in the parlance). After rolling, the player needs to look at the dice, remembering the target number. Memoir ’44, like Warhammer, bases

RES-09 Alternate Removal

Description

The player with fewer units removes one. Ten players alternate removing units until reaching a set number, one player is out of units, or some other stopping mechanism.

Discussion

The system of Alternate Removal was first introduced in the 1980 game Civilization. Conflict in Civilization only needs to be resolved if the total number of tokens in an area exceeds its carrying capacity (representing the fertility of the particular area), which ranges from one to five. If the total quantity exceeds this, the Alternating Removal process is initiated. Tokens are removed, starting with the player with the fewest until the total number of tokens no longer exceeds the carrying capacity. If players have equal numbers of tokens, the tied players each remove a token at the same time.

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RES-09 Alternate Removal This system has a variety of intriguing features. First, it is strictly deterministic. It is a determinative process with no hidden information. This is rare among conflict resolution mechanisms. Second, coexistence in an area is allowed and common. Many games with conflict or battles for areas only permit a single player to ultimately occupy an area or control it in the case of Area Majority games (ARC-02). This gives more flexibility for players to negotiate and settle borders. Finally, it gives the design hooks for special abilities later in the game. For example, if only one player in a Conflict has Metal Working, they are always the last to remove a token. Inis uses a similar removal system, except that players have the option of removing a unit or discarding a card. In addition, players have the option, after taking a casualty, to withdraw from the battle rather than pursuing the conflict. Notably, this doesn’t trigger a retreat from the disputed territory.

Sample Games

Civilization (Tresham, 1980) Inis (Martinez, 2016)

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RES-10 Physical Action

Description

A Physical Action needs to be performed by one or more players to determine the outcome of the action.

Discussion

Adding a physical element for resolving player actions makes for an intuitive, tense, and exciting play experience by adding Performance Uncertainty (Chapter 6). Physical Action resolution is somewhat skill-based but also acts as a randomizer. However, its use does give a game a lighter, toyetic feel, as players interact with the game pieces. In a highly strategic game, this can lead to a disconnect, as the strategy is undercut by what can feel like a highly variable resolution mechanism. It also can make players that are poor at performing the activity feel like they are at a disadvantage throughout the game, and it is not something that they can compensate for, leading to a negative experience. The most common implementation of Physical Action is flicking, which is covered in its own entry, RES-24. Games with balance and stacking elements are also common and are covered in RES-25. While flicking is a popular implementation of a physical resolution mechanism, there are many alternatives. Flip Ships has a form of flicking, with a ship being placed on a platform and flipped off of it. Dungeon Fighter has players bounce a die off the table surface to land on a target.

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RES-10 Physical Action Wallenstein introduced the Cube Tower. This is a tower with internal ledges. Players resolve a conflict by taking a specific number of cubes of different colors (the attacking and defending cubes, for example), and throw them into the tower. The cubes that emerge at the bottom determine the out-come. Cubes that get stuck inside are left behind and may emerge in future conflicts. If a player knows he or she has many cubes stuck in the tower, he or she may be more inclined to initiate conflicts, for example. Other games have objects being removed, like Ker-Plunk and Don’t Break the Ice. There are also games that combine removal with stacking, including Jenga and Villa Paletti. Finally, there are a variety of outlier physical mechanics, including throwing darts in Dart Wars, distinguishing items by feel in Space Cadets, eggremoval in Gulo Gulo, the pie launcher of Pie Face, finger gymnastics of Climb!, and popping balloons in Kamasutra. A comprehensive listing of these is beyond the scope of this book. Another variation on the physical resolution is Speed Matching. Cards are flipped up, and players need to see if two match, and either slap the cards or grab a totem. Games that incorporate this type of system include Jungle Speed and Scan. The inclusion of physical action can give players an opportunity to feint and induce a mistaken grab by other players, leading to a penalty in some games. Jungle Speed incorporates this tactic. Introducing a physical action gives the designer a chance to add physical handicaps to mix up the challenges and make them harder. It also ups the “zaniness” factor, giving games a lighter feel. Dungeon Fighter has players act with their non-dominant hands, eyes closed, and various other physical challenges.

Sample Games

Animal Upon Animal (Miltenberger, 2005) Ascending Empires (Cooper, 2011) Bausack (Zoch, 1987) Catacombs (Amos, Kelsey, and West, 2010) Climb! (Michaud, 2008) Dart Wars (Reymond, 2006) Diskwars (Gelle, Hardy, Jolly, and Petersen, 1999) Don’t Break the Ice (Uncredited, 1965) Dungeon Fighter (Buonfino, Silva, and Sorrentino, 2011)

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Flick ’em Up (Beaujannot and Monpertuis, 2015) Flip Ships (Klenko, 2017) Gulo Gulo (Granau, Kramer, and Raggan, 2003) Jenga (Scott, 1983) Jungle Speed (Vuarchex and Yakovenko, 1997) Junk Art (stacking) (Cormier and Lim, 2016) Kamasutra (Faidutti, 2000) Ker-Plunk (Goldfarb and Soriano, 1967) Meeple Circus (Millet, 2017) Pie Face (Uncredited, 1964) Scan (Glass, 1970) Seal Team Flix (Ruth and Tomas, 2018) Space Cadets (Engelstein, Engelstein, and Engelstein, 2012) Villa Paletti (Payne, 2001) Wallenstein (Henn, 2002)

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RES-11 Static Capture RES-11 Static Capture

Description

Pieces are captured when another piece occupies or passes over their space.

Discussion

This is one of the oldest conflict resolution mechanisms, going back thousands of years. Typically combined with a movement system, a token is affected in some way when another enters its space. For example, it may be captured (Chess, Checkers), be sent back to start (Parcheesi, Trouble, Sorry!, Backgammon), or switch sides (Shogi). In order to make capturing challenging and meaningful, the movement of pieces needs to be restricted in some fashion. Chess and Shogi allow pieces to move to defined squares, while the Parcheesi family of games uses a randomizer and the moved piece must, typically, move the full amount. More information about Movement schemes is in Chapter 10, but a few features are worth noting here. In most cases, the moving piece will make the capture on its final space of movement. This is particularly true of games where movement is controlled by a randomizer, with pieces typically needing to land on an opposing piece by exact count to make a capture. There are exceptions,

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of course. Sorry! has specific areas where a piece may slide through multiple spaces, sending all pieces encountered back to start, and in Checkers pieces make jumps to capture and can string together multiple jumps as a single move. Motion is not a requirement for this mechanism. Trough the Desert allows players to claim Palm Trees for points by extending a chain of camels across the board. Camels do not move once placed, but players may only add to chains in certain ways. Expedition has a similar chain mechanism, as players attempt to “capture” certain cities on the board to earn points. Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends has players placing pieces on the board, trying to achieve certain patterns. When those patterns are realized, enemy pieces may be captured. While not truly Static Capture, there are games that feature pushing as a means to capture, including Abalone. In these games, there are typically restrictions on which pieces can move and be captured. In these games, pieces or groups of pieces may push other pieces, typically with the intention of pushing them off the board or into a dead space. Because of the physical nature of pushing, particularly chain pushing, the physical design of the board and pieces usually facilitates the mechanism. Abalone has a grooved board that makes it easy to push marbles in the six hexagonal directions.

Sample Games

Abalone (Lalet and Levi, 1987) Backgammon (Unknown, 3000 bce) Checkers (Unknown) Chess (Unknown, ∼1200) Expedition (Kramer, 1996) Onitama (Sato, 2014) Parcheesi (Unknown, 400) Shogi (Unknown) Sorry! (Haskell, Jr. and Storey, 1929) Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends (Chvátil, 2013) Trough The Desert (Knizia, 1998) Trouble (Kohner, Kohner, and Kroll, 1965)

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RES-12 Enclosure RES-12 Enclosure

Description

Players try to surround pieces or key areas.

Discussion

Dating back thousands of years, Go is one of the most famous examples of this type of conflict resolution. If a group of connected stones has no empty spaces adjacent to it, it is captured. While the stones themselves are static, the evolution of groups gives Go a dynamic feel. Reversi implements Enclosure by allowing players to flip tiles of the opposing color that are between two tiles of their own color. The nature of Enclosure games makes certain regions of the board more or less desirable. In Reversi, the corner and edge spaces are more valuable, as it is harder or impossible to surround pieces located there. Similarly, in Go, players typically start near corners, where it is easier to enclose territory and make stones safe, and then extend down the sides and toward the middle (Illustration 4.3). Elements of Enclosure games can also be seen in games like Samurai, where the objective is to surround board elements with tiles. These are both

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Enclosure games and a type of Area Majority (ARC-02), where tiles can be placed so that they are adjacent to multiple objectives, contributing strength toward both. In general, good enclosure games are designed so that pieces are both trying to enclose and at risk of being enclosed themselves, or there are several possible ways they can be used for Enclosure.

Sample Games

Go (Unknown, 2200 bce) Reversi (Mollet and Waterman, 1883) Samurai (Knizia, 1998) Trough the Desert (Knizia, 1998) Illustration 4.3 A game of Go in progress. White has surrounded territory on the lower left and upper right.

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RES-13 Minimap RES-13 Minimap

Description

When a conflict is initiated, pieces are moved to a separate board for resolution.

Discussion

This is a meta-mechanic, as it is a way of organizing conflict, and relies on one of the other methods discussed here to actually resolve individual attacks. One of the earliest examples of the Minimap mechanism is the 1962 game Bismarck. In this naval game, players secretly move task forces around a search board. When they discover each other, task forces are moved to the Battle Board, where the conflict is actually resolved (through a Stat Check mechanism in Bismarck’s case). It is like “zooming in” on the battle to get more tactical. Video games like Master of Orion and Heroes of Might and Magic implement a similar system. The Battle Board was later extended in Titan, where players move groups of monsters (Legions) around a master board. When two opposing Legions meet in the same space, they are transferred to a battle board to actually fight the battle. Titan is notable in that it has a different battle board for each type of terrain, and the side the defender sets up on depends on the direction from

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which the attacker entered the space. This makes battles extremely variable and tactical (Illustrations 4.4a and 4.4b). A variation on this can be seen in Buck Rogers: Battle for the 25th Century, which has both a solar system map and separate maps for each planet, co-located on the board. Unlike Titan, which has many, many Jungle spaces, all Illustration 4.4a When a battle takes place in a Hills space in Titan, the battle is conducted on this separate board. Each board has different combinations of terrain. This board features Hill spaces that confer a combat advantage to occupiers and Forest spaces that are impassable. A much simpler version of this mechanism is used in Axis & Allies, which uses a Battle Board not to give tactical options to the players, but as a player-aid to help organize and keep track of the strength of units, what they need to roll to hit, and which units are still able to fire. This is more of a graphic design technique than a mechanism. A similar system is seen in many Force Commitment games (ARC-06).

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RES-13 Minimap of which resolve on the Jungle board, here the planet maps are very specific to the planets in the solar system and act as a place for units on the planet to be located and for ground battles to be resolved.

Sample Games

Axis & Allies (Harris, Jr., 1981) Bismarck (Roberts and Shaw, 1962) Buck Rogers: Battle for the 25th Century (Grubb, 1988) Titan (McAllister and Trampier, 1980) Illustration 4.4b The battle board in Axis & Allies: Europe. The boxes are used to organize units by combat strength and track casualties. It obviates the need for players to memorize the combat strength of all the different units.

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RES-14 Force Commitment

Description

The players select how many of their forces they will commit to the battle to different categories. The players then reveal their assignments and resolve.

Discussion

This is a meta-mechanic that builds on other Resolution means. Typically, players will reveal their strengths in different categories, with the High Number gaining the benefit (RES-01). If the allocation portion of this mechanism is done secretly, it is a Sealed Bid Auction, so considerations noted in that section (AUC-05) apply here. In one of the earlier implementers of this system, Dune and its successor, Rex: Final Days of an Empire, have players allocating to just two categories: in the battle or out of the battle. Units that a player commits to a battle will be lost. In addition, all units from the loser are eliminated. This system makes the players evaluate whether to give themselves a higher chance to win by committing larger forces or preserve as much of their force as possible by committing fewer forces. Dune augments the mechanism by allowing the players to also commit leaders and bonus cards along with forces. This uncertainty is critical for this

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RES-14 Force Commitment system to work so that the player with the larger force cannot just bid one more than the size of the smaller (Illustration 4.5). A modified form of this system has the loser only losing part of its force, not the full force. This makes the decision of Force Commitment for the larger side more challenging, as it introduces more Yomi (UNC-01) by giving a broader possible strength range of the commitment of the smaller force. Cry Havoc and Rising Sun give more options to players for Force allocation. In Cry Havoc, players may allocate forces to take control of the area being fought over, cause casualties, or take prisoners. Control and Prisoners are executed by the player with the most forces in that region, while Cause Casualties is executed by all players who have units there. Tactics cards can also be played to affect the battle in various ways. Rising Sun has a similar system to Cry Havoc, except with slightly different assignment options (the ability to sacrifice your own units for victory points, for example). Also, while Rising Sun uses the same simultaneous secret assignment of forces, Cry Havoc has the Attacker allocate first, followed by the Defender. Secret assignment emphasizes the guessing nature and leads to a lighter, more random feel, while sequential assignment removes luck but Illustration 4.5 The Combat Wheel in Dune. Players select the strength they are committing to the battle and may also add a leader disk and cards. This is held in the hand and then simultaneously revealed.

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may give an advantage to the side that places last (the Defender, in the case of Cry Havoc). These types of systems give the players a lot of flexibility in the goals they want to achieve in a battle. Are they trying to hold ground? Cause losses? Earn points? The player can use the options to pursue a variety of strategies.

Sample Games

Cry Havoc (Rodiek, Oracz, and Walczak, 2016) Dune (Eberle, Kittredge, and Olatka, 1979) Rex: Final Days of an Empire (Eberle, Goodenoungh, Kitteredge, Konieczka, Olatka, and Petersen, 2012) Rising Sun (Lang, 2018) Scythe (Stegmaier, 2016)

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RES-15 Voting RES-15 Voting

Description

Players vote on whether a proposed action will occur or not.

Discussion

The Voting mechanism is often used in games with a political theme, although some, like Die Regeln Wir Shon, are more abstract. In some games, each player gets one vote. In others, players may have multiple votes that they can apply. Voting is in many ways an Area Majority mechanism (ARC-02), except that players are either on the “Yay” or on the “Nay” sides, rather than only able to win something individually. This can lead to shifting coalitions of players on either side of an issue, as interests align and diverge, underscoring the political nature of this resolution means. The item being voted on can fit at various levels in the game. In Junta, players are voting to decide whether the budget proposed by El Presidente passes and the money is distributed to the players. This is an example of a sub-system of the game that links to other key mechanisms. The Republic of Rome is similar in that players are voting on which characters should gain offices, how wars are conducted, and even the execution of characters. These decisions then feed into other systems to propel the game forward (Illustration 4.6). Some games have players vote on actual changes to the rules themselves. Democrazy and Das Regeln Wir Shon are prime examples of this, as

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Exploding Kitten, they are eliminated unless they hold a Defuse. This gives the players a clear loss condition and basic tactics—try to avoid drawing cards if you can or get a defuse card—but it is vague enough to allow players to determine combos and timing within that framework. Traditional Hot Potato-style games like Exploding Kittens and Electronic Catch Phrase focus the action on a single player and perhaps the player after them (see Neighbor Scope, RES-26)—but usually for a brief moment. Electronic Catch Phrase (now just “Catch Phrase”) takes advantage of this feature for an easy-to-play part game. In this game, there is an electronic “puck” that passes around a circle. The player holding it must give clues to their team to guess the phrase shown on the screen. If they guess it correctly, the puck is passed to a player on the other team. The team that is holding the puck when the built-in timer goes off is penalized. Unlike Charades and similar team party games, in Catch Phrase, the teams rapidly switch turns as the puck moves around the circle and players avoid being stuck with it. Preserving this sense of momentum and looming disaster is a key feature of the “round the circle” version of this mechanism. In Old Maid-style implementations of Hot Potato, one of the players has the losing item, but nobody except that player knows who has it. This allows the game to incorporate bluffing and feelings of paranoia as players know when the card moves to other players. Dread Curse is a modern game that incorporates this idea, as a player that ends the game with the “black spot” coin cannot win, but stealing from and trading with other players is a key mechanism, which makes stealing have a Push-Your-Luck edge (UNC-02). This highlights a potential weakness of the Old Maid style, since if the Old Maid is drawn from you, you are traditionally not supposed to show emotion or gloat, as the other players will not draw from that player for fear of gaining that card. This makes it more challenging for children to play but also opens the door for bluffing as players may pretend that the Old Maid was drawn from them when it has not. Hot Potato can be used as a submechanism. In Civilization, there are disaster cards mixed in with trade goods. Players may trade these to other players during the trade phase, who may then trade them on. Whoever is left with the disasters at the end of the trade phase suffers their effect. As in Old Maid, most groups adopt an unwritten rule that you keep it secret when you trade a disaster away to another player, so they have the opportunity to pass it on.

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RES-23 Hot Potato A more subtle implementation of Hot Potato is an End Game Elimination condition, where a player is eliminated from contention not because of a specific element they have (like the Black Spot Coin in Dread Curse) but due to some characteristic of their position. For example, in High Society, players spend money to earn prizes that ultimately determine victory. However, the player with the least money cannot win the game, regardless of the value of their prizes. Cleopatra and the Society of Architects does a similar thing with corruption, which players may earn by doing more powerful actions. The state of having the least money or most corruption in these games is a form of Hot Potato in that it is something that may change players and causes the loss of the game.

Sample Games

Catch Phrase! (Williamson, 1994) Civilization (Tresham, 1980) Cleopatra and the Society of Architects (Cathala and Maublanc, 2006) Exploding Kittens (Inman, Lee, Small, 2015) Falling (Ernest, 1998) High Society (Knizia, 1995) Hot Potato (public domain) Old Maid (unknown, 1874)

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RES-24 Flicking

Description

Players use a finger or cue to strike a token and propel it toward a target.

Discussion

Flicking games sit on the line between toys, games, and sports. Flicking is an essential technique with no single or settled definition of what constitutes a flick. Crokinole is among the oldest flicking games that remains popular today. It can be played with either fingers or cues, with cues winning out over fingers in high-level play. It is a specific example of RES-10, Physical Action. Flicking games test a player’s accuracy, power, and control in various ways. In PitchCar, players flick a round disk representing a race car. Players seek to traverse the course as quickly as possible, which calls for powerful flicks. On the other hand, players must also keep their disks on the board, which requires control. In many instances, players must navigate their disks through small openings, or carom their disk at a specific angle off of a barrier, or even another player, which requires excellent accuracy. Flicking introduces dynamism to the game that is unusual compared to most board games. In many flicking games, players stand and move around the play surface to find the right angle from which to take their shots. The

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RES-24 Flicking drama of flicking makes games more suitable to spectators, and the atmosphere of flicking games is more social and celebratory than is typical for tabletop games outside of the party genre. Because flicking is a learnable skill, there can be a sharp skill gap between players, similar to the skill gap in classic abstract games. When novice players play, flicking introduces randomness in the game’s outputs, because players don’t typically succeed in flicking as precisely as they intended. However, when experts play, there is very little randomness, and thus, it is near-certain that a skilled player will convincingly defeat beginners. The most important aspect of flicking design is the physicality of the game. The object being flicked, the method of flicking, and the surface being flicked on must be carefully selected and manufactured. Ascending Empires, a 4X game, had players flicking ships across a puzzle-cut board to travel through space. Unfortunately, the production was marred by a warped board. The jigs of the puzzle would sometimes ride up in their pockets and create seams that interfered with the smooth travel of the ships in unintended ways. Cosmic Kaboom took this lesson and had players flicking across their own tables or any other surface of their choice. ICECOOL went in the other direction, creating several nested cardboard boxes that are laid edge-to-edge and clipped together to create a large and consistently smooth surface. Mars Open: Tabletop Golf uses a novel approach by creating a folded chipboard component that is flicked into the air. Flip Ships has players flicking ships through the air from an elevated platform. Players can create courses on their tables or throughout their homes simply by placing the tee box in one place and the green somewhere else, and letting players navigate their way to the hole. Sorry Sliders provides chipboard ramps with plastic rails that create a level surface and help keep players from making invalid flicks. The characteristics of the flicked object are another opportunity for creativity. ICECOOL’s ball-bearing-mounted penguins can be flicked to consistently make them curve and jump, allowing for impressive shots and hilarious goofs. The Mars Open folded chipboard golf “ball” can similarly be manipulated to hook or draw shots, as in real golf. In Flick ’Em Up, players flick a larger disk to move their cowboys around and a smaller disk to simulate shooting. In Tumblin’ Dice, players flick the eponymous dice down a tiered set of platforms. The dice bounce in surprising ways as they tumble, making for an unpredictable and thrilling experience. Some games use flicking for its destructive capacity rather than to traverse a distance accurately. Crossbows & Catapults asks players to launch disks to

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knock over their opponents and their fortifications. Flicking and knocking over opponents as an abstraction of shooting or striking enemies is common to several games including the aforementioned Flick ’Em Up, Catacombs, and SEAL Team Flix.

Sample Games

Ascending Empires (Cooper, 2011) Catacombs (Amos, Kelsey, West, 2010) Cosmic Kaboom (Loomis, 2016) Crokinole (Unknown, 1867) Crossbows & Catapults (Frigard & Sala, 1983) Flick ’Em Up (Beaujannot & Monpertuis, 2015) Flip Ships (Klenko, 2017) Furnace (Lashin, 2021) ICECOOL (Gomez, 2016) Mars Open: Tabletop Golf (Hoyle, 2018) PitchCar (du Poël, 1995) SEAL Team Flix (Ruth & Tomas, 2018) Tumblin’ Dice (Grayson, Nash & Soued, 2004)

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RES-25 Stacking and Balancing RES-25 Stacking and Balancing

Description

Players must add, remove, or rearrange objects from a stack, a balancing contraption, or a playing surface.

Discussion

Dexterity mechanisms generally test both physical skill and the ability to evaluate the consequences of the physical act. Flicking games (see [flicking reference]) test both the flicking itself and the judgment of accuracy, angles, and ricochets. Stacking and balancing games test the steadiness of a player’s hands, as well as their judgment about fulcrums, levers, weights, and densities. Somewhere between balancing and flicking lies pushing and sliding, which we will also discuss in this section. Note that while most games in this section are properly dexterity games (and a subset of RES-10 Physical Action), there are some notable exceptions. While stacking and balancing games have existed in an oral culture for thousands of years, two of the most well-known modern stacking games

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are Jenga and Blockhead! Each is an example of two primary approaches to creating stacking games. Jenga uses uniform (though not perfectly identical) pieces, while Blockhead! uses pieces in a variety of odd shapes and sizes, with unusual angles and non-level planes. The advantage of using more uniform pieces is that the tower can typically reach much higher heights than can be achieved with non-uniform pieces. Non-uniform stackers, like Animal Upon Animal, offer up interest in how odd shapes, angles, and even curves can support and counterbalance one another. Catch The Moon tries to capture the best of both worlds by asking players to stack ladders in a jumble. The ladders are similar but not identical, and players roll a die to determine whether the new ladder must touch one or two ladders or if it must be the highest ladder in the jumble after it is placed. These simple instructions, and the varied opportunities for how ladders can hook and support one another, create structures that are both tall and compelling to behold. Jenga and its many spiritual successors, like Rhino Hero, have players perform both a removal and an addition to the tower. In Jenga, players must remove a block from the tower before adding it to the top of the tower. In Rhino Hero, the tower is built out of two kinds of cards: folded cards played as walls and flat cards played as roofs. The flat cards show an action that is triggered when the roof is played onto the tower, and one such action requires the next player to remove the eponymous wooden rhino meeple from wherever it is in the tower and to place it on top. The physics of removing this dense, heavy object—relative to the cards themselves, anyway—to place it at the top of a wobbly, swaying structure are tricky, to say the least! Yura Yura Penguin takes this concept even further by offering more objects to stack, including ice crystals, penguins of different shapes and sizes, and even a polar bear. Stacking and balancing typically take center stage in a design, but hybridizing the mechanism is also possible. Kapitän Wackelpudding has players stacking wooden shapes onto a small ship, and then pushing it around the board, pick-up-and-deliver-style, to various ports. Goods that fall off of the ship are negative points, and at the end of the game, the player who knocked off the fewest goods wins. MegaCity Oceania has players constructing futuristic skyscrapers out of opaque and translucent plastic pieces that are piled on top of cardboard tiles and then sliding the tiles to join the rest of the skyscrapers already on the board. Players build and place skyscrapers to score points based on specifications in building contracts, adjacency to other tiles, and overall building height. If a building loses pieces during its journey to the central area, the player is penalized with a loss of their turn.

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RES-25 Stacking and Balancing In Tokyo Highway, players use wooden cylinders and popsicle sticks to create roadways that pivot and loop over and under one another. Tey then add cars to these roadways—a privilege granted by successfully accomplishing the feat of crossing over another roadway as the highest crosser or crossing under it as the lowest crosser. The winner is the player who places all their cars, but even placing cars is fraught with peril. At any point, knocking over anything will cause a player to take penalties. Tokyo Highway differs from most balancing games in that the challenge is less about balance and more about positioning. The wooden roads balance reasonably solidly on the flat sides of the cylinders, and building roadways is not particularly challenging. However, maneuvering your fingers and wooden pieces through the thicket of roadways that quickly springs up and positioning your body to maintain stability in order to place roadways in scoring configurations are quite challenging. In some ways, the game is the inverse of Jonchets or its modern successor, Pick-Up Sticks, in which players remove narrow wooden sticks from a jumble, without causing any other sticks to move. Both games require intense concentration and fine motor skills but are less about finding balance and equilibrium in a structure. There is a danger in creating hybrid games. Players may be frustrated by strategizing properly but losing because of failures of dexterity. Or, players may find the physical aspects of the game more compelling and fun than the strategy. In some cases, the dexterity aspects of the game simply may not work well and consistently enough to work as a game, rather than as an activity. Coaster Park, a game about assembling cardboard roller coasters and running a steel ball bearing through them, suffered greatly from this. Players assumed that the game was signifying, for example, that the largest starting hill would generate sufficient momentum through gravity alone to climb the next-highest hill or to complete the loop-the-loop but, in fact, it took quite a bit of skill in flicking the marble—to say nothing of carefully assembling and angling the joints between sections—to make the roller coasters work at all. For many players, the difficulty of the physical mechanism made the game as a whole unplayable as intended, but for many players, the issue was not simply the difficulty, but their expectation that the game was not a dexterity challenge at all and that the roller coaster was a novelty and a gimmick, not a gameplay mechanism. Another hybrid, Terror in Meeple City (nee Rampage), has players as kaiju monsters who seek to destroy buildings made of meeples that hold up tiers of cardboard tiles. Players can use one of several techniques, including flicking, dropping, and even blowing air from their mouths, to try and dislodge the meeples and destroy the tower. Scoring is relatively complex and includes variable scoring cards that define how sets of different colored meeples score,

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penalties for allowing meeples to escape the city, and penalties for being struck by other monsters. While Terror in Meeple City is quite ambitious in directly translating a kaiju attack into a dexterity board game, perhaps the most ambitious hybrid dexterity game is Beasts of Balance, an app-supported game featuring a virtual world. In Beasts of Balance, a central platform, called the Plinth, has an NFC (Near Field Communications) reader that can scan and read the specially shaped, oversized plastic creatures that are stacked atop it. The Plinth also keeps track of the weight of the objects piled on top of it. When players add a creature to the Plinth, the app displays that creature being added to one of three regions in a virtual world. Adding multiple creatures to a region can lead to the breeding of hybrid creatures, and some creatures prey on others. The dynamic environment and evolving creatures are all virtual, while players interact with that world almost solely through stacking creatures and special objects on the Plinth. When anything comes dislodged from the Plinth, it must be re-stacked within a few moments, as the Plinth recognizes the overall change of weight in the stack. These moments do pro-vide opportunities for rearranging the stack. Note also that Beasts of Balance is a cooperative game (though a competitive variant is included in the rules), and we will return to this point later. Stacking and balancing games are close cousins to Push-Your-Luck games (see UNC-02) in that players are uncertain about the exact impact of their actions on the physical equilibrium of the game. Causing a collapse is similar to busting and, typically, safe moves evaporate as the game progresses. Auctions are one method designers use to give players control over risk, and a series of very similar games offer several approaches to implementing an auction in this context. In Bausack, there are a variety of stacking shapes. The active player chooses one and offers it to another player, who may accept it and add it to their personal structure or discard a bean to avoid it. A player without beans can no longer avoid a block, and players are eliminated when their structures collapse. In Bandu, the core gameplay is the same, but the auction element is even stronger. The active player chooses a block and selects to run a “Use” or “Refuse” auction. The winner of a Use auction or the loser of a refuse auction places the piece. This game offers quite a lot of agency to the players, in selecting the piece up for auction, evaluating whether it is relatively easy or difficult to place for each player, given the current state of their tower, and deciding on the auction type to hold. In Sac Noir, there are several additional variations on this same gameplay, including building a shared central tower, a set of more difficult shapes, and additional auction types.

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RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Balancing games often include a central contraption whose instability defines the underlying physics of the game. Unlike the level, though small, stage of the Plinth in Beasts of Balance, Topple features a plastic, tiered platter that looks something like a step pyramid that balances on a long plastic pole, or perhaps the skirt of a ballerina’s tutu as they stand on pointe. Players play plastic counters onto the “board” and score points for creating rows and stacks of the same color. When a player causes a topple, all the other players are awarded points. Other interesting central contraptions include the wire hanger structure of Suspend, the anthropomorphic and eponymous waiter in Don’t Tip the Waiter, and the giant wooden pirate ship featured in Riff Raff. Like hybrids mentioned earlier, Topple is something like Connect Four combined with physics. Leverage features a board balanced on a fulcrum, like a teeter-totter. Play is similar to both Checkers and Chinese Checkers but for two players only. Players move, jump, and capture using pawns of three different weights and sizes. As players advance their pawns, the equilibrium of the board shifts, sometimes causing the board to rest on one player’s side. That player must remove one or more special scoring pawns from their back row until the board reaches equilibrium again and is suspended in mid-air again. When a player runs out of scoring pawns to remove, they lose when the board touches down on their side again. A similar, more broadly available game is Rock Me Archimedes, which features this same teetering board and central mechanism. In both Leverage and Rock Me Archimedes, there is no dexterity element of any kind. Placing and moving pieces is not a challenge of execution, and accidentally toppling pieces lies outside the scope of the rules and is not penalized. The skills being tested, beyond the spatial and tactical skills of maneuvering pawns on the board, are skills of evaluation of weight and equilibrium. These may be the exceptions to the general rule of balancing games as dexterity games. Indeed, in most games, there are specific rules about how the pieces may be handled: with one or two hands, within some time limit, and more. In Lift It!, players cannot use their hands at all and instead strap a crane to their heads, using a headband, to build structures together. Rules like this point to a general concern for accessibility in balancing games. Balancing games are particularly difficult to make accessible to players with various physical limitations, be they limited vision, mobility challenges, or unsteady hands that can accompany normal aging. However, balancing games do provide affordances for managing skill differentials among players, such as playing with an off-hand. Stacking and balancing games appeal to designers who are designing for younger audiences, precisely because of how easy they are to explain. While

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most games abstract complex systems, these games leverage simple physical phenomena that can be understood even by the very young. There are some developmental and psychological realities, however, that designers should consider when creating games for families and younger players. For instance, while many stacking games end with a collapse, which can be a cathartic and hilarious moment, this can be a devastating moment for younger children, a moment of deep frustration and even anguish. Adults are not immune to these feelings, which may explain why cooperative stacking and balancing games have emerged in recent years. Menara is a cooperative stacking game in which failures are punished by making players stack to an even higher height to win. This intensification of difficulty is a common trope in cooperative games but is novel in the genre of stacking games. Turning these games into co-ops appears to take some of the stings out of failure and amplifies the aspects of social fun, rather than mastery, in the game. Creating physical games requires designers to focus sharply on the specifications of the materials of the game pieces. Teir weight, shape, the friction of their surfaces, and the ease with which they can be manipulated in hand all play an enormous role in how they work in the game. Manufacturing considerations need to be taken into account quite early in the process, relative to non-physical games. The overall weight and size of these games can be a major limiting factor in terms of the game’s marketability and price point (Illustration 4.7). Illustration 4.7 The stacking in Junk Art can be both challenging and aesthetically pleasing.

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“pivot,” where players need to transition between building and scoring. This can be an interesting puzzle for players to work through.

Sample Games

Carcassonne (Wrede, 2000) Codenames (Chvátil, 2015) Dominion (Vaccarino, 2008) Eclipse (Tahkokallio, 2011) Go (Unknown, 2200 bce) Kemet (Bariot and Montiage, 2012) Lords of Waterdeep (Lee and Tompson, 2012) Nexus Ops (Cantino and Kimball, 2005) Splendor (André, 2014)

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VIC-03 Temporary and Permanent Victory Points VIC-03 Temporary and Permanent Victory Points

Description

Some Victory Points (VPs) are never lost. Others depend on the game state and may be lost if that state changes.

Discussion

This mechanism is typically used in games where the ending condition is a player reaching a certain number of VPs. For example, in Catan, the game ends when a player reaches 10 points. In Kemet, it ends when a player reaches 8 points. Gaining permanent VPs is important to help drive the game to a conclusion. If all points are temporary, it encourages players to try to take down the leader and pull them further away from winning, which can lengthen the game. Munchkin, where player level is a proxy for VPs, has this issue, as do Dune and Cosmic Encounter, which require players to hold a certain number of spaces. Having a mix of temporary and permanent points is a good way of dealing with this issue, as it both drives the game toward a conclusion and offers opportunities for players to make a sudden grab for victory or move their opponents away from victory if they have a lot of temporary points (Illustration 5.1). Kemet is a good example of this technique. Permanent VPs are gained through winning battles, controlling temples, certain Power cards, and other

Azul (Kiesling, 2017) Small World (Keyaerts, 2009) Suburbia (Alspach, 2012) Tigris & Euphrates (Knizia, 1997) Vinci (Keyaerts, 1999)

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VIC-06 End-Game Bonuses VIC-06 End-Game Bonuses

Description

Players earn bonus VPs at the end of the game.

Discussion

This is a popular technique for giving players strategic direction. Giving players a specific goal to earn points early in the game gives new players an idea of what they should be doing. End-Game Bonuses can be either Personal or Public. Points from Personal goals can only be earned by the owner, while Public goals may be pursued by multiple players. In some games, goals are non-exclusive and can be scored by multiple players, while in others, only the player who achieves the goal “the best” receives the points. Public goals provide a natural interaction point for players and can be used where there is not as much player interaction through the other mechanisms. In their simplest form, public goals are a method for turning any puzzle into a competitive game. In Dimension, for example, players use the same set of spheres to build a pyramid that satisfies as many of the six public goals as possible. Private goals help differentiate players and can give a strong direction to their play. For example, in Ticket to Ride, the tickets tell players which cities to connect to, but points are awarded (or lost) only at the end of the game. This gives players a literal roadmap of their goals.

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There are a number of benefits of keeping personal goals hidden, like making it impossible to precisely determine who is winning and adding an element of deduction as players attempt to block each other. Ticket to Ride with exposed goals would be a very different, and more frustrating, experience. Another design consideration is when and how goals are assigned. Sometimes they are random, and sometimes players must construct or choose their goals. A concern for designers is that if goals are assigned randomly, later in the game, players may luck into points by being randomly dealt a goal that they have already achieved. This is one reason that earlier assignment of bonuses is generally preferred unless countered by a penalty for not achieving them (as in Ticket to Ride). Games such as Race for the Galaxy may give players access to a random selection of possible End-Game Bonuses, but players may choose to build them or not. Concordia allows players to draft cards which will give bonus points in specific categories. Having more cards in a given category increases the point value. Terraforming Mars has an interesting approach to assigning end-game goals. Players may use an action and spend money to unlock specific public End-Game Bonuses. The amount of money required increases each time a new goal is unlocked, so waiting until you are certain about what you want to unlock means spending more resources. Only three goals at most can be unlocked, putting more pressure on players to decide which goals they think they can win at. Designers should also consider the ratio between points earned during the game and points earned at the end. If the ratio is very large and bonuses are complex or hidden, it can be very difficult for players to know where they stand. This increases the skill and experience required to play the game well. For example, in Concordia, all points are earned from End-Game Bonuses. To offset that issue, the game includes an optional intermediate scoring step which is basically a practice scoring so that players can make sure they under-stand the available bonuses, as well as get a better feel for their relative position.

Sample Games

Concordia (Gerdts, 2013) Dimension (Luchau, 2014) Race for the Galaxy (Lehmann, 2007) Suburbia (Alspach, 2012) Terraforming Mars (Fryxelius, 2016) Ticket to Ride (Moon, 2004)

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VIC-07 Race VIC-07 Race

Description

The winner is the first player to reach the end of a track.

Discussion

This mechanism is both a way of determining when the game ends and determining a victor. Both typically occur at the same time as one or more players cross a finish line or reach a goal. Some of the oldest games in human history are Race games, including Senet, Backgammon, Snakes & Ladders, and Parcheesi. Tey are intuitive about the goal and it is clear who is in the lead at any point. There are a variety of games that are mechanically Race games but don’t have the trappings of a physical race. Any game that has players trying to reach a certain target quantity of VPs is, in essence, a race game. Catan is a race to get to ten points. Empire Builder is a race to get to $250,000,000. Conversely, there are games that appear to be a Race but that are actually not. Typically, these involve betting on the outcome of a race, as in Royal Turf, Downforce, and Long Shot. These are actually equivalent to VIC-01 Victory Points from Game State, where the situation on the board feeds into a point total. More discussion on actual Race mechanisms is included in Chapter 10, “Movement.”

Sample Games

Ave Caesar (Riedesser, 1989) Backgammon (Unknown, 3000 bce)

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Catan (Teuber, 1995) Empire Builder (Bromley and Fawcett, 1982) Formula De (Lavauer and Randall, 1991) Hare & Tortoise (Parlett, 1973) Kemet (Bariot and Montiage, 2012) Lord of the Rings (Knizia, 2000) Mush! Mush!: Snow Tails 2 (Lamont and Lamont, 2013) Parcheesi (Unknown, 400) Senet (Unknown) Sky Runner (Glimne, Karlsson and Sevelin, 1999) Snakes & Ladders (Unknown, ∼200 bce) Sorry! (Haskell, Jr. and Storey, 1929)

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VIC-08 Player Elimination VIC-08 Player Elimination

Description

The winner is the only player remaining in the game.

Discussion

Player Elimination is typically considered an anti-pattern, a mechanism to be avoided. From a purely practical standpoint, elimination may result in a player not being able to participate with the group for an hour or more, leading to awkward social situations. However, it can be effectively used in shorter and lighter games that may be played multiple times in rapid succession. If being eliminated means that you are out of the game for 5 or 10 minutes, as in Love Letter or Liar’s Dice, that is very different than being eliminated early from a game of Risk or Monopoly. Player Elimination can also be effective if it fits into the narrative and theme of the game. For example, winning in Nuclear War requires all players but one to be eliminated. However, when a player is eliminated, they are given a special Final Retaliation turn where they can launch all the missiles that remain in their hands at the players of their choice. This is both satisfying and thematically consonant and results in many plays having no winner at all. A different social dynamic arises in team-based games with elimination, like Werewolf. After being eliminated, players can still participate vicariously, as they may still be part of the winning team. Werewolf also benefits from being interesting for non-participants to watch.

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VIC-14 Connections Twixt, often become static and have an optimal strategy. It is more typical to allow players to cross or even parallel other players’ connections by paying a penalty or increasing resource cost to do so, and/or by requiring a special tile.

Sample Games

18xx (Tresham, 1974) Age of Steam (Wallace, 2002) Android (Clark and Wilson, 2008) Cable Car (Henn, 2009) Empire Builder (Bromley and Fawcett, 1982) Santa Fe (Moon, 1992) TransAmerica (Delonge, 2001) Twixt (Randolph, 1962) Illustration 5.2 Nearing the end of a game of TransAmerica. The first player to connect all five of their cities (one of each color) wins the round.

The Ares Project (Engelstein and Engelstein, 2011) King of Tokyo (Garfield, 2011) Nexus Ops (Cantino and Kimball, 2005) Illustration 5.3 Controlling the center Monolith in Nexus Ops allows players to draw special cards. Photo by Board Game Geek user Mijjy.

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VIC-18 Catch the Leader

Description

The game systems advantage players that are behind or disadvantage players that are ahead.

Discussion

This is a meta-mechanism that can be implemented in a variety of ways. For example, Power Grid changes turn order based on who is leading. The player in last always takes the most advantageous position. Age of Steam forces players to reduce their Victory Points (VPs) based on how many they have. Players who have more points must lose more. Other games may give special tokens or abilities to players that are lagging. While these are all overt, some Catch the Leader mechanisms are more subtle. A King of the Hill mechanism (VIC-17) typically exposes the leader to attack, and not other players—or players that are further behind are less attractive targets. This will naturally incentivize players to try to pull back the leader. The designer should consider the severity of the Catch the Leader mechanism. If it is too strong, it can be advantageous for players to sandbag and try to stay back to make a strong late move rather than be penalized earlier.

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VIC-18 Catch the Leader Depending on the theme and nature of the game, this may or may not be desirable. Designers should also look out for the opposite of a Catch the Leader mechanism (“snowballs”), where the game mechanisms make it easier for players in the lead to get further ahead. Economic games are susceptible to this, as the measure of victory (money) is also the resource that helps growth and power. Monopoly is an example. Splitting the victory currency from cash can alleviate this issue. For example, players may need to use cash to buy antiques, which actually give VPs. This forces players to decide when to turn their working resource into a victory resource. See Victory Points as a Resource for more details (VIC-04).

Sample Games

Age of Steam (Wallace, 2002) The Expanse Board Game (Engelstein, 2017) Monopoly (Darrow and Magie, 1933) Power Grid (Friese, 2004)

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VIC-19 Tug of War

Description

A marker is moved up and back on a track toward or away from a neutral position.

Discussion

Tug of War can be both a scoring mechanism and an end-game trigger. In its simplest form, two players will move a marker back and forth along a track, with each of them owning one end of the track. If the marker reaches the end of a track it typically triggers an event, such as ending the game, as in Twilight Struggle. In this case, it also triggers victory for the player who moves the marker to their end (Illustration 5.4). It may also trigger a scoring event, as in Guardians, where each location has a short tug-of-war track. If the marker reaches the end of a track, the Illustration 5.4 The Military track in 7 Wonders Duel. If either player reaches their end, they score a military victory. In addition, they gain bonus tokens the first time they reach certain spaces on their side.

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VIC-19 Tug of War player owning that end scores points for the location, and it is removed from the game and replaced. Tug of War is not limited to two players. When there are three or more sides represented, each has a branch leading from a central neutral point. Churchill is a three-player game, with players debating over issues around World War II. Each issue starts in the center of the track. When a player influences an issue, it moves toward their track, or, if it is on another player’s track, first toward the neutral point and then up their track. Churchill also has a special trigger if an issue reaches the end of one of the tracks. In that case, the issue is locked for that player, and it can no longer be influenced up and down the tracks. The game also features multiple issues on the tugof-war track at the same time, allowing the designer to introduce more complexity and player options by allowing multiple issues to be influenced with one action or special bonuses for certain types of issues. Another example of multiple players influencing multiple items is Starship Samurai, where players are trying to sway factions to their side. Each player has a track on the alliance board, and if a faction is on another player’s track, in order to sway them to your side, you first move the faction token down toward a neutral zone off of that player’s track and then up your track. The location of the marker can also award points or abilities at certain times. In Twilight Struggle, for example, if no Sudden Death conditions are triggered (VIC-15) and the game ends by concluding the final turn, the winner is decided by the location of the marker on the track. The location of the markers at Conference end in Churchill at the end of the debate phase determines who gets to decide on the outcome of the issue. Starship Samurai awards Victory Points or resources based on the location of each faction at the end of the round. This mechanism is very clean and easy for players to understand, particularly in the two-player version. It is easy for players to see where they stand and what actions influence the track. When used for an end-game condition, it is typically used as a Sudden Death condition, as requiring that the marker reach the end means that there need to be some means to drive the game toward a conclusion. It also means that as one player moves closer to victory, the other moves further away. This can reduce tension as compared to a Completing Targets system (VIC-11), where all players may be close to victory at the same time.

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Sample Games

7 Wonders Duel (Bauza and Cathala, 2015) Churchill (Herman, 2015) Guardians (Flores, 2018) Starship Samurai (Vega, 2018) Twilight Struggle (Gupta and Matthews, 2005)

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VIC-20 Highest Lowest VIC-20 Highest Lowest

Description

Each player’s score is equal to the lowest value of several categories. Whoever has the highest lowest value is the winner.

Discussion

As the title of this Highest Lowest mechanism may be a bit unclear, here is a more lengthy explanation using the diagram above. Let’s say players are collecting the four icons in the image above—swords, fish, leaves, and grapes. Player A has 10 swords, 5 fish, 7 leaves, and 2 grapes. Teir final score will be the lowest of those four—in this case, the 2 grapes, so 2 points. First used in Knizia’s Tigris & Euphrates, this scoring mechanism forces players to pursue multiple paths equally. Specializing in gaining red, for example, will not be a winning strategy. This forces players to generalize and typically encourages player interaction as they compete in the same areas. Tigris & Euphrates has players collecting cubes of different colors to determine the final score. When using cubes, this system is the same as collecting sets of one of each color. Later implementations like Ingenious and Wendake use tracks, which can make it easier to visualize the current score, as it is just the lowest track marker. Ingenious adds an additional twist, as while final scoring is based on the lowest color value, during the game, bonuses are awarded for getting a high

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value of a particular color. So, tension is introduced between staying balanced and specializing. Wendake has two separate pairs of tracks, and the value of each pair is equal to the lowest of the two. Ten, the scores for each pair are added together to determine the final score. Adding this additional level of detail groups certain aspects together and opens up more strategic design space.

Sample Games

Between Two Cities (O’Malley, Pedersen, and Rosset, 2015) Ingenious (Knizia, 2004) Tigris & Euphrates (Knizia, 1997) Welcome to Centerville (Jensen, 2017) Wendake (Sabia, 2017)

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VIC-21 Ordering VIC-21 Ordering 4♠ Q♠ 7♠ 10♠ 6♣ K Definition The objective of the game is to rearrange a group of game elements from a disordered to an ordered state.

Description

For many of us, our earliest exposure to this mechanism is Patience Solitaire (called Klondike or just Solitaire in the US and Canada). A deck of cards is dealt out into seven columns, and the objective is to convert the random shuffle into four stacks, each of a single suit ordered from ace to king. The strength of the Ordering mechanism is the clarity of the goal. In addition, it takes advantage of a combinatorial explosion to create a huge number of potential starting positions. However, depending on the rules, it may be impossible to achieve the goal, and the game may be lost before a single move is played. People seem to be more accepting of this in solitaire games. In Klondike Solitaire, for example, about 20% of deals are impossible to win— and that is assuming that the player knows where each of the 52 cards is in the deck. However, this has not diminished the popularity of the game.

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Ordering has a puzzle-like feel, making it a good fit for cooperative games. The different elements can be randomly distributed to the different players, who need to follow rules to reach the winning configuration. Two examples that use numeric sequences, like Patience Solitaire, are Hanabi and The Mind. The main component in The Mind is a deck of cards numbered from 1 to 100. Players are randomly dealt a hand, and they need to collectively play them in ascending order to a pile in the center of the table. In Hanabi, there are five color suits with values from one to five, and players need to play cards of each suit in numeric order. Both these games work because of Communication Limits (UNC-06). The Mind prohibits all direct communication, forcing players to rely on inter-preting pauses and the occasional raised eyebrow. Hanabi has players place their cards outwards, so their partners know what they have but not themselves, and restricts players to ask specifically defined questions to determine what to play. In both cases, the simplicity of the goal gives the designer more space to explore the communication restrictions and how those manifest. In the competitive space, the popular game Rack-O uses this mechanism. Rack-O has a deck of cards numbered from 1 to 60, and 10 are dealt randomly to each player. Players must put them into their rack in the order they were received. Each turn, players draw from the deck or discard and replace a card in their rack. A player wins when they have an ascending sequence. Like Rack-O, most competitive games that use Ordering are Race games (VIC-07). Players win by being the first to achieve the ordered state. While all the examples so far have been numeric, this is not required. Some notable examples are the 10 Days series, Space Sheep, and Rail Pass. 10 Days is similar to Rack-O, except that instead of numbers, the cards have geographic areas (states in 10 Days in the USA and countries in 10 Days in Europe, for example) or means of transportation (airplanes and cars in 10 Days in the USA). The goal is to put together a series of cards that represents a valid “trip” where you can get from one card to the next in order. In the 10 Days in the USA version, you can travel by foot between states that share a border, by airplane between two states of the same color, and by car between two states that are separated by a third state. The general play follows the same rules as Rack-O—draw a card and replace an existing card in your rack. Space Sheep is a cooperative game that has planets, sheep, and shepherds of different colors. At the start of the game, the positions are randomized and

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VIC-21 Ordering the goal is to move the sheep and shepherds to their matching planets. Each planet has a different instruction about how pieces may be moved away. Space Sheep emphasizes the puzzle nature of the Ordering mechanism, as players endeavor to figure out how to untangle the situation. Like Space Sheep, Rail Pass also uses color ordering. Each player represents one or two colors, and cubes of those colors are randomly distributed. Players must use trains, following various rules, to shuttle the cubes between each other in an attempt to deliver the right colors to the right locations. Both Space Sheep and Rail Pass use a real-time mechanism (TRN-07) to prevent players from being able to exhaustively analyze the situation to determine the best moves. This serves a similar purpose as the communication limits in Hanabi and The Mind.

Sample Games

10 Days in the USA (Moon, Weissblum, 2003) Hanabi (Bauza, 2010) Klondike Solitaire (Unknown, c. 1780) The Mind (Warsch, 2018) Rack-O (Uncredited, 1956) Rail Pass (Green, 2019) Space Sheep (Rubbo, 2013)

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Uncertainty ў ў Games, like life, are full of uncertainty: the roll of the dice, the turn of a card, and the cube tumbling through the cube tower. But even in games of perfect information, such as Chess, our opponents’ choices make our knowledge of how the game will unfold imperfect. The source of uncertainty and how uncertainty is perceived contribute much to the shape of the overall player experience. Uncertainty that comes from a truly random process, like a die roll, creates a lighter and more chaotic feeling for players—even if the design calls for throwing enough dice enough times to smooth out the worst ends of the distribution curve. Players participating in a rock-paper-scissors contest, however, will feel a greater sense of agency and will harbor a belief, right or wrong, that the outcome of the contest is not random. Uncertainty lurks in many unexpected places. Can you rely on your memory? Did the King of Hearts already go out? Did you properly deduce where Jack the Ripper moved to? What is your partner signaling to you with that drawing? Who is the werewolf? Can you balance Rhino Hero on the next card up the tower? Uncertainty can create chaos, but players can also manage uncertainty using different tools. Betting, bluffing, and even deck-building all help manage card-draw randomness. Letting players see the result of a random process before needing to make a decision about it, such that the random result is an input in their decision-making—input randomness—makes randomness something players respond to, rather than rely on. On the other hand, forcing players to make a high-stakes decision contingent on a random outcome— output randomness—creates enormous drama and tension. Because uncertainty can have a powerful impact on the game experience, designers often seek to control its influence in a variety of ways. In some DOI: 10.1201/9781003179184-6

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cases, this is baked into the design itself, through the distribution of cards in a deck or the number of dice that must be rolled, and similar systemic design elements. In many cases though, the power to mitigate uncertainty is given to players. Dice manipulation powers, card- and deck-manipulation powers, and other kinds of special abilities do give players greater agency. While there is a loud contingent of players who disdain randomness and luck in games, a word to the wise: the most successful commercial games typically have far more luck in them than the most highly regarded hobby games. Games with more uncertainty and randomness tend to be accessible to more players and facilitate enjoyment even when there are large skill differences between players at the same table. Having a clear focus on the intended market for your game will serve as a crucial guide in determining how to handle uncertainty. Designers have a broad palette of colors to paint with when it comes to the sources of uncertainty, its framing, and how players experience it. Managing uncertainty properly is key to the art of game design.

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UNC-01 Betting and Bluffing UNC-01 Betting and Bluffing

Description

Players commit a stake of currency or resources to purchase a chance of winning everyone’s stake, based on some random outcome like being dealt a superior set of cards or rolling a higher number. Players typically have partial information about the overall game state and may “bluff” by representing through their in-game actions that they hold a stronger position than they do. Conversely, players may “fold” or quit the contest and limit their losses to whatever they had already staked.

Discussion

Some of the oldest games in human memory are betting games, often involving dice, and rather than trying to recapitulate every type of betting game and mechanism, we’ll restrict ourselves to how the mechanism is used in the modern board-gaming context. Nevertheless, a field trip to your local casino is highly recommended for extended study of these topics.

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One common group of games that feature betting is trick-taking games, like Tichu, where players place a “bet” by predicting the number of tricks they will take. The role of betting in these designs is to allow players to self-balance the outcomes of a random card deal. Players will bet more aggressively with a stronger hand. Racing games like Camel Up offer wagering to allow players to wager for the same reason. One might pedantically note that the game doesn’t actually simulate or model camel racing as much as it models wagering on camel races. Nevertheless, this is a very popular way for designers to make games about racing, while sidestepping many of the challenges of modeling an actual race. The games above have wagering, without any real bluffing elements. Conversely, there are games like Coup which feature bluffing but not any wagering. In Coup, players hold role cards that enable certain actions. These cards are held in hand, as secret information, and a player can declare that they possess any card and take any connected action. As long as no player challenges, the action occurs, but if a challenge is issued, the active player must show the card they claimed and force the challenger to discard a role card, or the player must discard one of their own role cards if they do not hold the role card they claimed. Players who discard their last role cards are eliminated from the game. This dynamic is present in many social deduction games, which we discuss in a dedicated section (see “UNC-04” in this chapter). Other games that are only about bluffing include Skull and Roses, Liar’s Dice, Cockroach Poker, and the classic game Cheat (which our saltier readers may know by its more bovine name). What these games share in common is that they have no currency to wager and that when a player makes a challenge, uncertainty exists only based upon player actions. A key design element for including bluffing is not only hidden information, of course, but also some form of information transmission. In poker, the information is in the form of betting patterns, and the community cards visible on the table. In Coup, the character a player chooses gives them special abilities. The actions a player may perform based on the role give context to the choice and the possibility of the bluff. It is better if the hidden information doesn’t change too frequently, to give a history to the choices a player makes. If the hidden information constantly changes, it reduces the opportunities for players to try to see through a bluff, leaving players with a random guessing game. Bluffing is common in the party game space, but Wits & Wagers introduced betting into the trivia genre. Players answer numbers-based questions and arrange their numerical answers on a betting line in order from lowest

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UNC-01 Betting and Bluffing to highest. Players may then make two bets on which answer is closest to the actual answer printed on the card. By cleverly allowing players to make two wagers, the game expands from being only about how much confidence players have in their own knowledge to a richer set of choices. Players must consider whether their wagers are revealing too much to their opponents, while also looking to how other players bet to try and suss out likely answers based on those betting patterns. If you’re playing with a doctor, for example, you might follow their bets on biology and medical topics—until they catch on to your strategy and lay a trap for you! One of the most interesting places to find bluffing and wagering is in modern resolution mechanisms for combat, some of which are discussed in Chapter 4. In various games, players put forward some combination of known strength, and some hidden amount of strength, and simultaneously reveal and then resolve abilities to determine a winner. The hidden strength may be represented by a number on a die, as in Tiny Epic Kingdoms, a leader card, as in Dune, or a battle card, as in Kemet. Combat is entirely deterministic, and all possible combat modifications are also known, such that in many combats, players know which player will win if they spend their maximal strength. The game is in out-thinking or out-guessing your opponent as to how much strength he or she will spend. These combat systems are what we might call all-pay, in that the committed resources are discarded. This is a key distinction between auctions and wagers more generally: in auctions only the winner pays, but in a wager, the losers pay. The ability to read and out-guess your opponents, to know their minds, is described by the Japanese word “Yomi.” Yomi is especially prominent in games with a simultaneous reveal mechanism like 1v1 fighting games. However, role-selection games (ACT-02) like Race for the Galaxy have this flavor too: assessing which roles your opponents will select, and thus, which you should select is the Yomi experience. In The Mind, that same notion is pushed to the limit, but in a co-op game. In The Mind, players must, without communicating, somehow play hands of cards in ascending numerical order. There are no turns, and not all cards are dealt from the deck, so players must simply play based on their instincts and their ability to sense what their partners might hold.

Sample Games

Camel Up (Bogen, 2014) Cheat (Unknown)

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Cockroach Poker (Zeimet, 2004) Coup (Tahta, 2012) Dune (Eberle, Kittredge, and Olatka, 1979) Kemet (Bariot and Montiage, 2012) Liar’s Dice (Unknown, ∼1800) Manila (Delonge, 2005) The Mind (Warsch, 2018) Race for the Galaxy (Lehmann, 2007) Skull and Roses (Marly, 2011) Tichu (Hostettler, 1991) Tiny Epic Kingdoms (Almes, 2014) Wits & Wagers (Crapuchettes, 2003)

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UNC-02 Push-Your-Luck UNC-02 Push-Your-Luck

Description

Players must decide between settling for existing gains and risking them all for further rewards. Push-Your-Luck is also known as press-your-luck.

Discussion

A good example of a game whose central mechanism is Push-Your-Luck is Sid Sackson’s Can’t Stop. In Can’t Stop, the active player rolls 4 dice and advances up to 2 pawns in tracks numbered from 2 to 12, based on matching the sum of any 2 dice to the numbers on the tracks. The player may choose at any point to stop rolling, and lock in their progress along the tracks, or reroll to attempt to advance again. However, if after rolling, the player cannot match the sum of the dice to any of the three active tracks the player is advancing on, the player “busts,” and all progress from that turn is lost. PushYour-Luck is a type of wager in which players have less control over the ante or the stakes than in most casino games. An important dynamic in push-your-luck games is how changes to the stakes can alter player behavior. In Can’t Stop, when a player reaches the top of any numbered track, the track is closed, and nobody else can score it. The

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first player to reach the top of three tracks is the winner. Players may be more timid at the start, but when one player is close to reaching the top of a track, competitors also racing up that track usually become much more aggressive and risk-tolerant, as they attempt to close the track themselves. This is doubly so when a player is close to winning the game, and the other players try to win it all themselves in one epic turn. When there’s nothing to lose, why not press-your-luck? Some of the behaviors and emotions that Sackson evokes in Can’t Stop stems from behavior that echoes the sunk-cost fallacy, in which investing additional resources into some goal is based not on the chances for succeeding, or the expected return on the investment, but on an emotional connection to what has already been invested in the past. In addition, Sackson is also depending on the difficulty in computing probabilities in Can’t Stop. Avid gamers, whether raised on Backgammon or Catan, are adept at calculating probabilities featuring 2d6, but calculating the probabilities of successfully rolling at least one of two or three different numbers on 4d6 is the kind of thing that few players can do in their heads. This obfuscation is critical since games in which expected values can always be calculated exactly can feel stale and boring. Can’t Stop is unforgiving. A single miss, a single roll of the dice that fails to advance a runner on a track, leads to a bust. In Yahtzee, players roll five dice and may choose to keep any number and reroll the rest before being forced to score the results. However, players are limited to a total of three rolls. In Favor of the Pharaoh, there is an additional restriction that players must keep, or lock, at least one die result before rerolling the remaining dice. In Tiny Epic Galaxies, players may spend a specific resource to purchase additional rerolls. Alternatively, instead of focusing on the die roll, Push-Your-Luck can be implemented in the chase for rewards. In Roll Trough the Ages: The Iron Age, players race to build monuments, but the first player to complete the monument will get a larger reward than all subsequent players. Players must choose between participating in the race for monument completion and devoting their resources to a different pursuit. Similarly, in Incan Gold (also known by its original name, Diamant, which remains its European title), players simultaneously choose whether to explore more deeply into a temple in hopes of turning up more gems on the next turn of a card from the expedition deck or to leave. At first, there is no risk attached to staying in, but after the first of a type of hazard card is revealed, the danger is that a matching hazard will be revealed and all gems discovered will be lost. Players who leave early get to retain all their gems gained so far, while players who remain will be splitting

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UNC-02 Push-Your-Luck new treasure with fewer players, making staying in the cave more rewarding as well as riskier. Formula De ties a player’s movement to gears represented by dice. Higher gears allow players to roll dice with more sides, up to a D30 for top gear—but curves offer a speed limit past which cars take damage. Take too much damage and you’re out of the race! Dice are a common means of implementing a press-your-luck mechanism, but they are far from the only one, as per the aforementioned Incan Gold. In Oh My Goods!, cards representing resources are played face-up into a market row until two cards showing a half-sun icon are revealed. Players must assign their workers after seeing one market row revealed, and can assign workers to tasks that require more goods to be completed than are currently showing in the market row. A second market row is then revealed, which may provide sufficient resources for players to complete their work … or not! Notably, the game allows players to assign workers to work in a way that will yield the maximum reward, which requires all resources are available, or to work for a lesser reward, in which case, a resource can be missing. This allows players to choose the stakes and probabilities of their wager while retaining the “bust” outcome that characterizes these games. Press-your-luck can be the central mechanism in a game, but it appears just as frequently as a part of a larger game. In Ra, players draw tiles from a bag to create an auction lot. Prior to each draw, the active player may call an auction, but auctions are more often triggered when a Ra tile is drawn out of the bag. There are multiple dimensions of luck-pressing baked into play: tiles are worth different amounts to players based on a set-collection mechanism (see Chapter 12 “Set Collection”), some tiles will impact players negatively, while other tiles are highly desirable to all players. Drawing another tile instead of calling the auction can radically change the overall value of the lots, and change them differently for each player. Toward the end of the round, when only one player remains, that player continues drawing tiles until he or she wishes to stop and purchase the lot. However, if a Ra tile is drawn at this point, the round ends immediately and the player loses his or her opportunity to buy. It is not uncommon to hear chants of “Ra! Ra! Ra!” during this phase of a game, demonstrating how meaningful the stakes feel in this masterpiece. Ra’s Push-Your-Luck mechanism permeates the whole game, yet it is clearly in service to the auction-and-set-collection core. In many games, the Push-Your-Luck element is a layer of flair rather than a core of the experience. In Mystic Vale, a kind of deck-building game (see “CAR-05” in Chapter 13) players flop cards to establish their mana pool for the turn, until three

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spoils symbols are showing on the cards. Players may choose to risk flopping an additional card to expand their mana pool, but if another spoils symbol shows, the player busts and loses his or her turn. This mechanism is entirely optional and additive, and players can play and win without ever engaging in it, but it can be wisely leveraged to accelerate a deck’s construction too. Push-Your-Luck as a mechanism is straightforward to understand, even if the risks can be difficult to calculate, and it easily creates drama, tension, and excitement. It should be considered an essential part of every designer’s toolkit.

Sample Games

Backgammon (Unknown, 3000 BCE) Can’t Stop (Sackson, 1980) Favor of the Pharaoh (Lehmann, 2015) Formula De (Lavauer and Randall, 1991) Incan Gold (Faidutti and Moon, 2005) Mystic Vale (Clair, 2016) Oh My Goods! (Pfister, 2015) Ra (Knizia, 1999) Roll Trough the Ages: The Iron Age (Lehmann, 2014) Tiny Epic Galaxies (Almes, 2015) Yahtzee (Lowe, 1956)

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UNC-03 Memory UNC-03 Memory

Description

Hidden, trackable information whose tracking gives players an advantage.

Discussion

Memory can be a game mechanism or a capability a player draws upon when engaging with one or more mechanisms. It’s an important design ingredient, a lever whose setting will have a substantial impact on a game’s weight, intended audience, and general reception. Our discussion will focus on games where memory is at the center of the game design, rather than where memory is an ancillary skill that the game tests. Memory games can be seen on a spectrum. At one end, are games like the classic game Memory and the modern game The Magic Labyrinth, in which the only skill the core game mechanism tests is whether players can remember things. In Memory, it’s the specific location of various items in the face-down grid of tiles. In The Magic Labyrinth, players need to remember the correct path through the maze, because the walls of the maze are invisible, and the game uses magnets on the underside of the board to define that path. Memoarrr! borrows a bit from both of these games, with cards that feature two elements that must be remembered, and then arranged spatially.

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Further down this spectrum are games where memory is crucial to the core gameplay in patent and obvious ways. Stratego and Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation features player pieces on standees or blocks. These pieces have unit information on only one side, such that players can’t see the identities of opposing pieces before they encounter them. In an encounter, players reveal the pieces, then flip them back, leaving the players to use their memories to track the location and identity of the revealed pieces. These games have fairly small and stripped-down rulesets that put the spotlight squarely on memory, but block-style war games like Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan use this same mechanism to add fog of war—the uncertainty of the disposition of enemy forces that is typical in war. This type of memory mechanism, sometimes called “Hidden Trackable Information” (HTI), for short, challenges players to remember information that was once revealed to them. We’ve discussed positional examples so far, but those examples are perhaps the least polarizing. In Small World, players must announce how many coins (i.e., victory points or VPs) they have collected at the end of their turn but not their total. It would be trivial to track this information with a paper and pencil, but in the context of a fast-moving game of territory control, it’s easy for players to lose track of who is ahead. This is intentional on the part of the game designer! Small World is the successor to Vinci, a Roman-themed game that is mechanically almost identical. One key change between the two games was making the victory points hidden, trackable information. This helped to prevent dynamics which plagued Vinci: bash-the-leader behavior and the extent to which players optimized their play on the last turn. This change, along with cute art and a lighthearted feeling, turned Small World into an evergreen success in the casual games space. Another example of HTI is found in El Grande. In addition to placing cubes onto the board, players may choose to place them into the Castillo, a tall tower. Players cannot look in the Castillo; they need to remember how many cubes are there. At the end of the round, each player secretly selects a province in which to place his or her Castillo cubes. Remembering how many cubes of each player are in the tower can be challenging—even remembering how many of your own are in there can be difficult for players. But this lends a fun, swingy punctuation to what otherwise is a very calculable game. HTI can be especially controversial when it exists in more complex games, but it is nonetheless common in 18xx games and other heavy economic or auction games (see Chapter 7 “Economics” and Chapter 8 “Auctions”,

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UNC-03 Memory respectively), where a player or corporate cash holdings are hidden. To some extent, this thematically reflects the ways in which corporations are secretive about their finances. Mechanically, pricing an auction or predicting an opponent’s actions is much simpler when the total money in the system is known and is even easier when the allocation of that money is known. Memory and HTI sharply reduce accessibility and inclusion. To help players who have trouble remembering, many games provide tracking components, like Clue’s guessing pad. Other games provide some aid to memory, like Hunt for the Ring, where the Nazgul players have a handful of tokens with different markings that they can use as they wish. In Hanabi, the rules explicitly encourage players to find a limit on communications that maximized the fun for the group. This leaves open an enormous range of possibilities, from playing Hanabi as a strict memory game where each individual must keep track of his or her own hand, to one with almost no memory component since players are free to remind one another what each of them has been clued to in his or her own hands previously. Even under such rules, however, players must remember when they were clued about the state of their hands, and which new cards they have drawn since then. Many games rely heavily on memory, even though they’re not explicitly memory games, and players with better memory (or card-counting systems) will have a substantial advantage. Trick-taking games and classic card games in general fall into this category, since players who can remember which cards have already been played can make better decisions about what to play next, and the relative values of cards still in their hands. Another common dynamic is games in which remembering the types of sets your opponent is collecting allows you to interfere with them effectively, as in Animals on Board. In these games, cards or tiles collected by players are hidden away after collection. These are important design considerations, but they relate to memory as a player skill rather than as a game mechanism. Admittedly, the line between these two is fuzzy, but we will wrap our discussion of memory mechanisms here.

Sample Games

Animals on Board (Sentker and zur Linde, 2016) Clue (Pratt, 1949) El Grande (Kramer and Ulrich, 1995) Hanabi (Bauza, 2010)

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Hunt for the Ring (Maggi, Mari, and Nepitello, 2017) Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation (Knizia, 2002) The Magic Labyrinth (Baumann, 2009) Memoarrr! (Bortolini, 2017) Memory (Unknown, 1959) Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan (Clakins, 2011) Small World (Keyaerts, 2009) Stratego (Mogendorff, 1946) Vinci (Keyaerts, 1999)

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UNC-04 Hidden Roles UNC-04 Hidden Roles

Description

One or more players are assigned differing roles that are not publicly revealed at the start of the game.

Discussion

While uncertainty lurks in many games, in Hidden Roles games, uncertainty is at the very heart of the gameplay. We can broadly talk about three types of Hidden Roles games: social deduction games, traitor games, and competing roles games. We touched on this topic earlier in the chapter about game structure (see Chapter 1). Social deduction games are team games in which the object of gameplay is to deduce the team allegiances of the players, as in the classic open-source game Mafia (which, ten years after its invention, was recast as Werewolf ). It’s worth noting that in these games, usually, only one team faces uncertainty. The werewolves know who all the villagers are, and as such, the werewolves are playing a role-playing game whose win condition is to successfully deceive the villagers for long enough to devour them. The villagers are playing a deduction game where the evidence is mostly in the social interactions

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at the table rather than the almost non-existent mechanical interactions. In this section, we’ll generically refer to the “villagers” to represent the team, typically positioned as the thematic protagonists, that has less knowledge of the game state, and “werewolves” to describe their opponents, who know the identities of most or all players. Shadow Hunters, Two Rooms and a Boom, and BANG! are exceptions to this general rule. In these games, the players do not know the identities of any of the other players (except for the Sheriff in BANG!, who is known to all). This gives these games a different feel, as there is less paranoia, as all players are on an equal footing, and an early part of the game is players trying to determine who is on their team without tipping their hand. Traitor games, as distinct from social deduction games, have some other win condition for the “villager” side besides revealing the traitors. In Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game, players try to reach Korhol (or some other destination), and the game operates as a cooperative game (see “STR-02” in Chapter 1). However, a traitor may lurk among the players, secretly sabotaging them. In traitor games, the traitor, upon discovery or self-revelation, often shifts into a different role with a new win condition, new actions, and different player powers. Traitor games need to use hidden resolution systems so that players can cause trouble while maintaining anonymity. In Battlestar, players play cards face-down during the crisis phase, trying to sum up to a value of cards of a certain color. Because the cards are played face-down, the traitor can sabotage the crisis resolution effort without revealing himself or herself; although, through deduction, the other players may start to uncover their identity. Dark Moon has players roll dice behind a screen. Each player must select one die to use to resolve the action. Traitors may use their worst rolls so as not to benefit the team, but showing a bad roll does not guarantee a traitor, as a loyal player may just have a bad roll and have no good dice to choose from. In our final category, competing roles games, players are not on fixed teams and have hidden identities, but revealing those identities is not directly tied to winning or losing. Ravenous River and Coup are examples of competing roles games. In Ravenous River, each player is secretly assigned one of seven animal identities. Animals eat one other type of animal and are in turn eaten by one other type. Players use cards to manipulate the positions of any animals, not just their animal, seeking to end the round in the same region as their prey and not their predator. Deducing the identities of the other players can help in executing a strategy but isn’t worth any points toward victory.

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UNC-09 Probability Management Some games offer probability manipulation at rarified skill levels. In Twilight Struggle, some cards leave the game after being played for their events. High-level players are careful not to trigger cards showing their own events, and to trigger, in as safe a manner as possible, their opponent’s events. Over time, the weight of the deck shifts and forces the opponent into many difficult hand-management situations where they must trigger highly damaging events. In Alhambra, players can draw currency into their hands, either by taking a single card, or any number of cards adding up to no more than five. Players gain a bonus action when purchasing tiles with exact change, and a great deal of the skill in this game lies in managing a hand that can match many values. Failure to realize this aspect of gameplay results in a substantial loss of player agency. Illustration 6.1 In Kingsbridge, players can earn +2 tokens, which allow them to modify future dice rolls. Here, a +2 token is used to place the 6/3 dice into the “11” space, where normally they would have to go in the “9” space.

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Sample Games

Alhambra (Henn, 2003) Backgammon (Unknown, 3000 BCE) Dominion (Vaccarino, 2008) Kingsburg (Chiarvesio and Iennaco, 2007) Orleans (Stockhausen, 2014) Puzzle Strike (Sirlin, 2010) Sagrada (Andrews, 2017) Twilight Struggle (Gupta and Matthews, 2005)

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UNC-10 Variable Setup UNC-10 Variable Setup

Description

The starting game state varies from game to game, through changes to shared game components like the map, and/or changes to starting player setups, resources, objectives, etc.

Discussion

Variable Setup is sometimes equated with replayability and can certainly contribute to it, though they are not the same thing. The line between setup and gameplay isn’t always that clear either. But setup can have an outsize effect on uncertainty and overall game outcomes. Catan’s rules recommend new players play with a specific board layout and provide rules for board construction that ensure that no one spot is over-powered relative to others. Players often ignore this rule, and this imbalanced setup can easily advantage one player over the other. Similarly, the randomly dealt alien powers in Cosmic Encounter define the game almost entirely and shape its dynamics even more dramatically than Catan’s setup. Dominion’s selection of ten kingdom cards is similarly impactful—those cards can be considered the last page of the rules (Illustration 6.2). In many cases, variable setups don’t impact uncertainty once the setup is complete, because nothing that happens in the game is probabilistically dependent on setup. After faction board tops and bottoms are selected in Scythe, for example, there is no further uncertainty. This is as distinguished from Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game, where more interactions are

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available with the loyalty deck and the makeup of that deck can change prior to the next loyalty phase. Some variable setups incorporate hidden or unknown information. In Specter Ops, the runner who is trying to evade the hunters gets to secretly select a few equipment cards out of the available pool. In theory, hunters can know the complete set of equipment cards and how they work, though whether that’s true in practice—whether players do in fact look in the rulebook to read about all the equipment—is questionable. Designers should provide player aids summarizing this type of information if it’s important that players know all the possibilities. Designers need to be careful that randomized setups don’t create balance issues. This is particularly true in longer games. Often, having limitations on the randomization (like redoing a setup if a certain number of the same type of tile are placed in a row) or giving players a pregame chance to respond to the random setup is required. An example of the latter is found in Catan, where there is a snake draft for placement of player’s initial settlements. This allows players to moderate the vagaries of the initial chance board setup. Illustration 6.2 A sample setup at the start of a Dominion game. The 10 card types played with can be chosen randomly or specifically selected, at the players’ option.

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UNC-10 Variable Setup

Sample Games

Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game (Konieczka, 2008) Catan (Teuber, 1995) Cosmic Encounter (Eberle, Kittredge, Norton, and Olatka, 1977) Dominion (Vaccarino, 2008) Scythe (Stegmaier, 2016) Specter Ops (Matsuuchi, 2015)

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UNC-11 Hidden Control

Description

Players have hidden influence on locations or characters, which they reveal to perform actions.

Discussion

In a game of this kind, play is divided up between assigning influence and either declaring or spending that influence to trigger the effects of the character or location in question. In Mythology, players secretly assign control points to heroes (or monsters, events, etc.) in one phase. In a later phase in the round, any player may attempt to activate these heroes by announcing that they are taking control. If nobody challenges that control, the action succeeds. If another player challenges, the players engage in an auction-like process of declaring an amount of control points that they had previously assigned. Players may choose to reveal none, some, or all of the control points

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UNC-11 Hidden Control they have assigned in an effort to take control of the hero, and the player who reveals the most influence is awarded control. In Kremlin, players influence politicians in the Soviet party, each of whom can trigger certain actions based on their altitude in the party hierarchy. Players write down the influence they assign to politicians on a secret log sheet and then reveal some or all of the claimed influence to control these politicians. Revealed politicians are targets for exile, or, in some versions of the game, execution by the KGB, so players must balance the risks and rewards of revealing control. This mechanism can also be used as part of a traditional public influence system. In Colossal Arena, players bet on battling creatures. The player who has placed the highest value of bets on a creature may use its special ability. However, at the start of the game, each player may place a secret bet on a single creature. Timing when to reveal your secret bet to seize control of a creature is a key tactic in the game. This kind of revealed influence is an uncommon mechanism, perhaps because it requires a log sheet or some other form of tracking, which can be cumbersome. It is also fragile to player deception that is hard to discover. But, used judiciously or with proper physical techniques, it can be compelling. This is perhaps an area that will be explored more in digital hybrid games.

Sample Games

Colossal Arena (Knizia, 1997) Conspiracy (Solomon, 1973) Kremlin (Hostettler, 1986) Mythology (Peek, 1980) Nothing Personal (Avery and Vasel, 2013)

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UNC-12 Deduction

Description

Reasoning by process of elimination to discover a crucial piece of information.

Discussion

Deduction is a familiar mechanism from mass-market classics like Clue and Guess Who?, as well as informal games like 20 Questions, Jotto, and Bulls and Cows. In these games, deduction is nearly the whole of the gameplay. Players are racing to solve the puzzle either before their opponents or before their time and resources run out. Deduction games typically fall into one of a few structures. Most deduction games have a central mystery that all players are trying to solve. A few games feature a puzzlemaster, a player who knows the solution, and one or more players who are trying to solve the puzzle. The role of the puzzlemaster may be oppositional, supportive, or neutral. In another approach, each player may be solving their own personal puzzle, and sometimes players are both puzzlemasters trying to prevent others from solving a puzzle they’re charged with defending, while simultaneously racing to solve another puzzle.

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UNC-12 Deduction A hallmark of deduction games, and a key consideration in their design, is in the choice of affordances that are provided to the players to track their deduction process. Paper pads are a common approach, as in Sleuth and the aforementioned Clue. Mastermind’s board and pegs system is perhaps the most famous method of tracking guesses. It may therefore come as no surprise that the game was initially published by Invicta Plastics, a plastic toy company that took a chance on Mordecai Meirowitz’s unusual design. While deducing the identity of a murderer or the value of a specific card is common, some games employ a spatial approach. In Tobago, players close in on the location of a treasure located somewhere on an island. Rules cards specify, for example, that the treasure must be on a particular terrain, like the mountains, or in the largest region of type of terrain, or within a few spaces of a feature like an idol. With each rules card played, the possible locations of the treasure shrink. When only a single valid location exists, the treasure may be recovered. Tobago uses deductive reasoning, but because players decide which rules cards to play, they are not deducing where the treasure might be. Rather, they are determining, based on their card choice, where the treasure will be found. Tobago’s approach is quite fun and refreshing, but a later game, Cryptid, uses a very similar engine to drive a more traditional deduction game. In Cryptid, each player holds clues about the location of the eponymous creature. These clues are structured like Tobago’s rules cards. With each turn, a player asks another about a specific board location, and that player responds by placing a disc on the board if they cannot rule that location out, or a cube if they can. The key distinction between the two games is that in Tobago, the location of the treasure is not fixed prior to play. Rather, the rules cards eventually force the treasure to resolve its location to a single valid space. In Cryptid, the monster is in a specific place, and each play of the game is chosen from a very large set of puzzles, with the corresponding deck of clues distributed to players to match. From a design perspective, Cryptid requires creating many puzzles, while Tobago is, in a sense, a means of generating those puzzles. Word-association and image-association games like Mysterium, French Toast, and Codenames share a lot in common with deduction. Players use evidence to narrow their choices, but the evidence is far less definitive than pure logical deduction should provide. Social deduction games, which we cover under their own heading, also introduce uncertainty into the deduction process. Just as adding randomness into a game will tend to lower its

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weight and increase the chances that a less-skilled player will win, attenuating the effectiveness of pure reasoning will make a game lighter and less competitively balanced. Many games call for deductive reasoning, though they may not be classified as deduction games. Hidden movement games, e.g., Hunt for the Ring, rely heavily on deduction, as do games with pawns that have hidden values, like Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation. Cooperative and team games with communication limits, like Decrypto, Trapwords, and Hanabi also call for players to use deductive reasoning skills. And just about every numbers-oncards game, from trick-takers to rummy-style games to poker-style games calls for card-counting and deduction to be played at a high level. While we don’t see these as specifically using a deduction mechanism, they share many features.

Sample Games

Clue (Pratt, 1949) Codenames (Chvátil, 2015)l Cryptic (Duncan and Veevers, 2018) Decrypto (Dagenais-Lespérance, 2018) French Toast (Hayward, 2021) Guess Who? (Coster and Coster, 1979) Hanabi (Bauza, 2010) Hunt for the Ring (Maggi, Mari and Nepitello, 2017) Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation (Knizia, Lang and Peterson, 2005) Mastermind (Meirowitz, 1971) Mysterium (Nevskiy and Sidorenko, 2015) Sleuth (Sackson, 1971) Tobago (Allen, 2009) Trapwords (Chvátil, 2018)

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UNC-13 Induction UNC-13 Induction 9♠ 4♠ 10♠ 5♠ 7♠ 2♠ 3♠ ♠♠ …

Description

Players attempt to determine the rules governing a situation. Typically, a game master creates a hidden rule. Players then create a pattern or play a game element and are told by the game master whether that matches the rule.

Discussion

Induction is a similar mechanism to Deduction but with distinct differences. The textbook definition of the concepts of “deductive” versus “inductive” reasoning is that deductive starts with facts (or theories) to draw a conclusion. Inductive reasoning starts with observations and then tries to come up with an explanation that ties together those observations. There is a lot of overlap between these approaches, which leads to confusion in their everyday usage. “Induction” as a game mechanism is best understood through an example. Eleusis is played with a standard set of playing cards. The dealer secretly comes up with a rule and lays out a starter card on the table. The other players in turn then play a card and are told whether it fits the rule and can be added to the line of cards on the table (beginning with the starter card) or not. If the card does not fit the rule, it is played next to the main line so players can have a history of both what did and did not work.

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Examples of simple rules in Eleusis include black and red cards have to alternate, or the value of the card cannot be more than three away from the last card. A more complex rule might be that cards must alternate red and black, but that face cards can only be played after cards that are a perfect square (1, 4, 9). If a player thinks they know the rule, they can declare that they are “the prophet.” Tey take over the roles of declaring whether any card played is right or wrong. So long as they are correct, they continue in this role. If the dealer says they are incorrect, they are no longer the prophet and are penalized. Scoring rules for Eleusis are fairly complex, as they want to reward the dealer for coming up with a complex rule but not so complex that no one figures it out. This is reminiscent of Targeted Clues (RES-17), where a player wants some, but not all, of the other players to guess something. Zendo is another classic example of an induction game. It is based on Eleusis but uses pyramidal blocks of various shapes and colors. The “Master” devises a secret rule. Players then construct a “Koan” from the stackable pyramid pieces on the table and the master marks with a white stone if it meets the rule, or a black stone if it doesn’t (Illustration 6.3). For purposes of games, the distinguishing characteristics of induction games are: • Open-ended rule • Players make guesses. Tey are only told if they fit or don’t fit the rule. Illustration 6.3 Two sample guesses, or “Koans,” in Zendo. The first meets the rule, and the second does not, as indicated by the stone color. The rule might be that there is a yellow piece, but it does not touch the table. Photo by W. Eric Martin.

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UNC-13 Induction This seems similar to deduction games like Clue. There, players make guesses and are told whether they are right or wrong. But the difference comes from the open-ended nature of the possible answer to the puzzle. In Clue, players know that the solution contains exactly one Suspect, Room, and Weapon. In Eleusis, there is no bounded list of possibilities. Another distinction between induction and deduction games is that in deduction games you are almost always given some information when making a failed guess—being shown a card disproving the accusation in Clue, for example. In Induction, you are merely told “right” or “wrong” and need to come up with your own “experiment” to try to figure out why you were right or wrong, so you can limit the possible rule space. The crux of induction games is the creation of the rule. First-time players are often stymied for ideas on rules, and players also tend to dramatically underestimate the complexity of their rules. There is a small sweet spot of a satisfying rule that players are gradually able to zero in on versus an obscure rule that only leads to a long, frustrating play experience. To help with this, some games come with “starter rules” or some other way to generate rules. However, this undercuts the strength of Induction, as once players know what the possible rules are, it reverts to a deduction game. The public domain game Mao is a metagame activity, where experienced players, who know the rules, play with novices, who do not. When a card is played, the novices are told whether it is a legal play or not. At the end of the game, the winner secretly adds a new rule for the next game. The secret rules usually go beyond the expected mechanisms of a card game. Tey may be tied to what players are wearing, what they might say, which hands they use, or anything else. The knowledge imbalance between the novices and the experienced players encourages the development of a ruleset based on injokes and private group dynamics. A commercial version of Mao, called Quao (pronounced “cow”), jumpstarts this organic rules-growth, by including a small deck of starter rules. One player selects some of these, at random, to start each game. Reviews of the game have noted that if these rule cards have all been seen and begin to be reused, the game loses much of its charm. A vast potential playspace is an important component of Induction games. In addition to how rules are created, the designer also needs to consider how guesses are made. Tey can be bounded, as in Eleusis, where a player must play a card from their hand as a guess, or unbounded, as in Zendo,

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where players can arrange their pyramids as they see fit. This makes Zendo more challenging than Eleusis. Unbounded guesses do not automatically translate to complexity, however. The classic guessing game 20 Questions is also a form of Induction. One player thinks of (typically) a noun, and the other players need to ask yes or no questions to determine what that player is thinking of. The flexibility of language helps the players narrow things down the category fairly quickly (e.g., Is it an animal? Is it larger than a toaster?). Another example of a game with bounded guesses is Visitor in Blackwood Grove. One player is an alien who crashes into a forest and creates a forcefield around the ship. The alien player creates a rule about what objects may pass through the forcefield (e.g., objects containing metal will pass). The “kid” player is working to get objects to the alien player before the government agents figure out the rule. The use of object cards cleverly opens up a large body of “world” knowledge to possible rules that do not exist in Eleusis or Zendo. Visitor also shows that Induction games can be thematic, unlike almost all Induction games published to date.

Sample Games

20 Questions (Unknown) Eleusis (Abbott, 1956) Mao (Unknown) Quao (Rivaldi and Rivaldi, 2007) Visitor in Blackwood Grove (Flanagan and Seidman, 2018) Zendo (Heath and Looney, 2001)

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UNC-14 Questions and Answers UNC-14 Questions and Answers a,b,c? b a c a

Description

Players ask and answer questions in a manner constrained by rules.

Discussion

Questions and answers appear in many different game genres. Broadly, we can group these games into a few functional categories. Games can use questions to obtain information and resources useful to winning the game, questions can directly be worth points, and questions can be prompts to encourage player-generated content. Questions for information are broadly covered in Deduction (UNC-12) and Induction (UNC-13). This mechanism can also appear in games, which otherwise do not feature deduction, in the form of special power or ability that allows players to look at another player’s hand or to inquire about a particular piece of hidden information or even future action. These games almost always require closed-ended questions with very clear directions about how questions may be structured and how they must be answered. Ideally, no ambiguity should exist in whether a question can be asked, and what the answer must be. In practice, the more complex or abstract a deduction game becomes, the more players are likely to be confused or to make mistakes about how to answer a question properly. Because it is often impossible for

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ECO-03 Market Price tracks can be 2-dimensional grids, as in the 18xx series. In those games, selling shares makes prices move down within a pricing column, while issuing dividends moves it to another column with a different price scale. This gives more fine-grained control to the design, and there can be special effects when the price hits the top or bottom of a row or column. Rather than have a marker record the current price, the actual commodity tokens can do so. This is done by placing one commodity per space on the pricing track. The price of the commodity is based on the farthest space up the track covered by the commodity, or sometimes the farthest visible space. As commodities are bought, higher price spaces are revealed, and as they are sold, the higher price spaces are covered so the price drops. Visually, the former method usually calls for numbers to be printed above or below the track spaces, which takes up more room, while the latter allows the numbers to be printed on the track spaces themselves. This elegant track system is used in Crude, Power Grid, and others. When players take a resource off the track, they simultaneously are adjusting the pricing for that resource, without having to remember to do anything else. Wealth of Nations adds a twist in that the buy and sell prices are not the same in each space. There is a delta that creates friction in the market system (Illustration 7.1). Markets can sometimes be one-way ratchets. In Acquire, players may only buy shares from the market, not sell them. And as the hotel chains they represent expand, the price of the shares goes up and can never go down. In other cases, like Rococo, prices for thread and fabric go down throughout the course of the turn, decreasing as each player makes purchases. This ostensibly models the decline of prices in a bazaar as closing time approaches and is also helpful for balancing first-player turn-order advantage. Market systems create a lot of player interaction, as players may attempt to manipulate the price to their advantage or deprive their opponent of the Illustration 7.1 The market in Power Grid. Coal (the brown cubes) cost 6, oil (black) 5, and trash (yellow) 7. If two coals are purchased, the next would cost 7.

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ability to gain needed resources. Tey also help to self-balance resource pro-duction. If one resource is being over-produced or under-used by the players, the price will be driven downward, and players will adjust accordingly. In a system where the physical resource tokens are placed on the market track, they may even become completely unavailable if players are hoarding them.

Sample Games

1830 (Tresham, 1986) Acquire (Sackson, 1964) Chicago Express (Wu, 2007) Concordia (Gerdts, 2013) Crude: The Oil Game (St. Laurent, 1974) Greed Incorporated (Doumen and Wiersinga, 2009) Power Grid (Friese, 2004) Rococo (Cramer, Malz, and Malz, 2013) Shark (Vanaise, 1987) Stockpile (Sobol and Orden, 2015) Supremacy (Simpson, 1984) Wealth of Nations (Carroll, 2008)

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ECO-04 Delayed Purchase ECO-04 Delayed Purchase

Description

Items that are purchased do not enter play right away but arrive on a future turn.

Discussion

In most games, when you purchase an item, it is immediately available to use. However, in the real world, it can take time to produce something, or get something delivered. Several games use this Delayed Purchase mechanic to force players to plan ahead. A simple implementation is to place purchased items directly on a turn track, and they become available when the turn marker moves into that space. This can also be done with a specialized production or training track, where units are advanced one box each turn. This was used in Time War, where Teams are trained by advancing them through a schematic

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of a training facility. Each turn, they move one box through the facility, and when they reached the exit, they are fully trained. However, players can remove teams early, but then they are only partially trained and less effective. In Star Wars: Rebellion, ship construction is managed this way too. But various special cards can move ships down the track, accelerating production. Strategic war games use this production track mechanism but have wanted, for realism purposes, to have different durations to produce different units. For example, an infantry unit might take a month, while an aircraft carrier might take a year. Because of the number of units being built, moving tokens from box to box is unwieldy, so designers created the Production Spiral. When units are being built, the tokens are placed by following the spiral arm out from the current month until the matching unit type is found. The tokens are then placed in the section of the arm. When the Month marker is moved, all tokens in that wedge become available to the player. World in Flames is a good example (Illustration 7.2). Another way to implement this is to place purchased items into a discard area, as is common in deck-building games like Dominion. Here the delay before the purchases are available is randomized, since the discards are shuffled before creating the draw deck. This can create an issue with games Illustration 7.2 The build queue in Star Wars: Rebellion. Each unit takes a certain number of turns to construct and is placed in the appropriately numbered box when built. Each turn units slide down one box. When they move out of the “1” box they are placed on the map.

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ECO-04 Delayed Purchase with a fixed number of turns, as items that are acquired late in the game may never see play. This can be avoided by making late game purchases just worth Victory Points, or by having a special shuffle toward the end of the game. Core Worlds uses that latter technique, as the discards may be shuffled in before the final turn, regardless of whether the draw deck is depleted or not. While not guaranteeing that cards purchased at the end will be drawn, it does increase the chances.

Sample Games

Core Worlds (Parks, 2011) Dominion (Vaccarino, 2008) Star Wars: Rebellion (Konieczka, 2016) Time War (Peek, 1979) World In Flames (Pinder and Rowland, 1985)

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ECO-05 Income

Description

Players gain resources at defined times.

Discussion

To foster a sense of growth and forward progress, most games with economic elements have some form of Income, where players receive additional resources. This is a large topic, and several specific mechanisms discussed in this chapter fall into this category. See “Automatic Resource Growth” (ECO-06), “Loans” (ECO-07), “Exchanging” (ECO-01), “Market” (ECO03), and “Random Production” (ECO-12). However, there are some broad generalizations that can be discussed. First, the designer needs to consider the timing of when Income is received. It can be scheduled, player-controlled, or random. Brass and Eclipse are examples of games with scheduled Income phases. Tey come at a definite point in the sequence of play, and players can plan around that. Player-controlled systems rely on players to take actions that result in Income. Typically, it is self-controlled: a player makes a decision to take a

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ECO-05 Income Production action that generates resources (as in Global Mogul) or sells something via a Market (ECO-03). However, in some systems, part of a player’s Income may rely on the actions of other players. For example, in Le Havre and Caylus, a player gains Income if other players use their buildings (ECO-14). This increases player interaction and rewards players that consider their opponents’ positions. However, this is typically implemented as only a portion of a player’s Income and not a significant one. There are games where all, or close to all, of a player’s Income is dependent on other players. In Container, players produce and ship containers. But other than taking loans, you may only gain money by enticing another player into purchasing one of your containers. As can be expected, this makes these games a lot less forgiving and subject to social pressures. Container in particular has this reputation. Income can also be random. Roll and Move games like Monopoly typically incorporate this. Players rely on others either landing on their property spaces or passing Go to collect money. But, there are other more sophisticated systems for randomly allocating resources. See Random Production (ECO-12) for details. Games can also be Open Economies or Closed Economies. In an Open Economy, there is a bank that pumps more resources into the game system. In contrast, in a Closed Economy, all the resources that exist are already in the player’s hands, and they just move between players during the course of the game. The vast majority of games are Open Economies. This helps foster a sense of progress and is easier for designers to balance. An example of a Closed Economy game is Dream Factory, which is discussed in detail in the (appropriately named) Closed Economy mechanism in Chapter 8, “Auctions.”

Sample Games

Brass (Wallace, 2007) Catan (Teuber, 1995) Caylus (Attia, 2005) Container (Delonge and Ewert, 2007) Dream Factory (Knizia, 2000) Eclipse (Tahkokallio, 2011) Global Mogul (Crenshaw, 2013) Le Havre (Rosenberg, 2008) Monopoly (Darrow and Magie, 1933) Nippon (Sentieiro and Soledade, 2015)

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ECO-06 Automatic Resource Growth

Description

Resources held by a player will automatically grow over time.

Discussion

In the purest form of this mechanism, one or more resources increases by a set amount (usually one) each turn. This allows the designer to gradually ramp up player power in a simple and intuitive manner. A popular example of this is in the digital card game Hearthstone. The resource Mana is used to play cards. The Mana available at each turn begins the game at one and is increased by one at each turn until it reaches a maximum of ten. This gives the game an arc, as the options are much more restricted at low Mana values, and complexity and combos are gradually introduced. It also encourages players to balance their decks. If they only select cards with high Mana values, they will not be able to play for several turns. But if they only select low Mana cards, they may run out of cards quickly as they play multiple cards per turn later in the game (Illustration 7.3). A variant on this system has unused resources grow. Tematically, this can be expressed as bank interest or as breeding animals. Agricola uses the latter option. If a player has two or more of the same type of animal, they gain an

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ECO-06 Automatic Resource Growth additional one. This encourages efficiency and can force players into deciding the value of using resources now, versus having more for later. Civilization uses a similar system for population growth. At the start of each turn, each area that has a single token gains one more, and those that have two or more tokens gain two more. Setting up to properly manage this population growth is an important part of Civilization strategy.

Sample Games

Agricola (Rosenberg, 2007) Civilization (Treshem, 1980) Hearthstone (Donais and Sakomoto, 2014) Illustration 7.3 Agricola player board. If there are two or more of a given type of animal, one more is added. So in this example, one more sheep (white) and cow (brown) will be added. The lone pig (black) does not create an additional pig.

1830 (Tresham, 1986) Attika (Merkle, 2003) Brass (Wallace, 2007) Catan (Teuber, 1995) Chess (Unknown, ∼1200) Flip City (Chen, 2014) Maiden’s Quest (Shannon, 2018) Monopoly (Darrow and Magie, 1933) Mystic Vale (Clair, 2016) Trough the Ages: A Story of Civilization (Chvátil, 2006)

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ECO-12 Random Production

Description

Resources are generated from a random process and distributed to qualifying players.

Discussion

The Random Production mechanism was introduced in Crude but was popularized in Catan. In both of these games, players begin their turn by rolling two dice. In Catan, the die result determines which tiles activate, and any players with settlements or cities touching that tile receive resources. In Crude, the dice activate both the related row and column for the active players, and either the related column or row for their neighbor (Illustration 7.4). This mechanism keeps all players involved in other players’ turns, by offering the possibility of gaining resources. Players must remain flexible in their planning since they can’t guarantee resource production or the specific mix of resources they’ll get. There’s also a slot machine effect, as players may hit a small “jackpot” if they hit a needed number. This system was extended by Machi Koro by defining special abilities that only trigger on a player’s turn or that only trigger on other players’ turns. This was further refined in Space Base, where each ability card has two sides. The blue side has an ability that triggers on your turn. If the card is

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ECO-12 Random Production replaced, it rotates to its red side and now triggers when an opponent rolls that number. Since, in games with more than two players, there are more opponent turns than your turns, getting cards to their red side is an important strategy. A weakness of these systems is that they can be susceptible to player perception of streaky dice rolls. In actuality, given the number of dice rolls in a typical game of Catan, it is inevitable that some numbers will be rolled more than average, which means that some will be rolled less. This introduces a level of randomness that may or may not match the design intent and player expectation. Designers also need to realize that players are poor judges of what is a normal “streak” in a game like this and will perceive their frequency as worse than average even when they are exactly as expected. The Catan Event Cards expansion introduces a deck of 36 cards featuring each of the different possible outcomes of a roll of 2d6. A reshuffle card sits five cards from the bottom, indicating when the deck is to be reshuffled. Whether this is an improvement or not is largely in the eyes of the beholder and the designer. Illustration 7.4 Each turn in Crude the active player rolls two dice, which activates a row and column in their grid of facilities, allowing production or transformation of resources. In addition, the blue die also triggers the matching column in the player to the left, while the red die triggers the row of the player to the right.

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Sample Games

Catan (Teuber, 1995) Crude: The Oil Game (St. Laurent, 1974) Machi Koro (Suganuma, 2012) Space Base (Clair, 2018)

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ECO-13 Investment ECO-13 Investment

Description

Players own a share of an entity.

Discussion

Typically, this Investment mechanism represents ownership in the form of stock. Players may buy shares of stock and accrue benefits based on the amount of stock owned. The benefits take two basic forms. In the simplest, players earn a dividend based on the number of shares owned. This may occur periodically, or at specific trigger points. Other systems give benefits to the player who owns the most shares, or to the top shareholders. This is very similar to an Area Majority system (ARC-02), so the considerations there apply. Often it is a combination of these two. In Acquire, for example, players buy shares in hotel chains, which grow during the game, and merge if they touch. When a chain merges, each share pays a set amount, with the top two shareholders earning special bonuses.

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In Airlines, scoring happens at variable intervals based on Card Draw (CAR-04). Each airline awards points based on the number of flight paths it has claimed on the board. The player with the most gains one VP per flight path, and the player with the second-most gains half of that. The parallels with Area Majority are clear, as having one more share than your opponent is just as good as owning 100% of the shares. The number of shares that are available is usually limited. In Airlines, it varies by company, so players can lock in a guaranteed majority by having, for example, 4 shares in a 7-share company. This is distinct from the typical Area Majority game, where players can put as many resources as they like into a single entity. This distinctive mechanism is sometimes referred to as Area Control. Another instructive example in Airlines is the way values change for different airlines. Each has a different number of markers that can be placed on the map to claim more routes. Airlines with more shares have more markers. This makes them potentially more valuable, but players must do more to gain and have the most shares. See Connections (VIC-14) and Network Building (SET-04) for further discussion (Illustration 7.5). Illustration 7.5 The stock market track in 1830. A marker on this track indicates the current value of a stock share for each corporation. Buying stock moves the marker up and selling moves it down. Issuing dividends moves it to the right while withholding them shifts it to the left.

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ECO-13 Investment An analogous but different form of Investment is Contribution. Players who contribute to a particular effort are entitled to a share of the spoils. For example, in Tobago, players contribute clues to narrow down the location of a treasure. When it is located, players who contributed clues to the correct location earn a reward. In Dragon’s Gold, players cooperate to slay a dragon, and players who participate (no matter to what degree) are entitled to participate in the negotiations to divide the treasure.

Sample Games

Acquire (Sackson, 1964) Airlines (Moon, 1990) Chicago Express (Wu, 2007) Dragon’s Gold (Faidutti, 2001) Get the Goods (Ado and Moon, 1996) Shark (Vanaise, 1987) Tobago (Allen, 2009) Wheedle (Knizia, 2002)

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ECO-14 Ownership

Description

Players own entities and perform actions for those entities or collect benefits if others use them.

Discussion

In Le Havre and Caylus, players may build buildings, which become new action spaces that all workers can use (see “Worker Placement” in Chapter 9 for more details). Typically, the owner can use the space free of charge, but when other players use the space, they must pay a fee to the owner. This type of Ownership mechanism introduces a lot of different value calculations for the player. If I invest in this building, is it attractive enough that other players will use it and I will recoup my investment? If I take advantage of a building owned by another player, will it benefit my opponent more than me? As such, this mechanism can create a lot of player interaction. In many rail games, including Empire Builder, Railway Rivals, and Rail Baron, players may use tracks built by other players for a fixed cost. This leads to decisions about how often a player may need to take a certain route in the future and rent-vs.-buy calculations (Illustration 7.6). A more advanced form of Ownership is featured in 1830, 18xx games more generally, Imperial, and more. In these games, players purchase shares in companies (or countries in the case of Imperial), and the player with the most shares is the executive owner and has the ability to take actions on behalf of that entity. In 1830, players can build tracks and stations, buy

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ECO-14 Ownership trains, and decide whether or not to issue dividends. In Imperial, players may build armies or navies, declare war on other countries, or build up their economy. Typically, the money and assets of the company belong to the company. Players have their own money and assets, and these are strictly separate. There are specific means by which players can profit from running the company, not all of which are to the benefit of the company or the other shareholders. Like in real-world business, there are many strategies for enrichment, and these games offer a high level of complexity and steeper learning curves. If a player obtains more shares than the current owner, they take over Ownership. This can lead to major shifts in board state. While owners usually don’t like to lose their position, it can sometimes be an important tactic, particularly in the 18xx series of games. In those, the corporations, which represent railroad companies, must have trains. When trains become obsolete, they are discarded, and new ones must be purchased. If the railroad does Illustration 7.6 In Lords of Waterdeep, players may construct buildings which they then own. This is indicated by the color chip placed in the lower right. They gain a benefit if other players visit them, as shown in the bottom “OWNER” section of the building.

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not have enough money, the owner must pay for new trains out of pocket. An important tactic is for the owner to drain money out of the company treasury and then dump their shares to stick the almost-bankrupt company with another player. Greed Incorporated is also based around this idea, as the key strategy in this game is getting Ownership of a company, getting it pay you bonuses, and bailing out before it goes under. Ownership of this type makes a game multilevel. Players need to consider the individual player positions within companies, the companies’ positions on the board, and the relative strengths and cash positions of all.

Sample Games

1830 (Tresham, 1986) Acquire (Sackson, 1964) Belfort (Cormier and Lim, 2011) Caylus (Attia, 2005) Empire Builder (Bromley and Fawcett, 1982) Greed Incorporated (Doumen and Wiersinga, 2009) Imperial (Gerdts, 2006) Le Havre (Rosenberg, 2008) Lords of Waterdeep (Lee and Tompson, 2012) Rail Baron (Erickson and Erickson, 1977) Railway Rivals (Watts, 1984)

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ECO-15 Contracts ECO-15 Contracts

Description

Players fulfill Contracts to earn rewards.

Discussion

Typically, to complete a Contract, players turn in a specific combination of goods and earn a reward, which is usually money or VPs. Contracts can either be public or be private. Public Contracts are faceup and shared by all players who race to fulfill it first. Often the Contract is discarded, but sometimes, other players can fulfill the Contract later for a lesser reward. Century: Spice Road is an example game with Public Contracts. Private Contracts, by contrast, may only be fulfilled by the player that has them. Tey may be known to all or kept hidden until fulfilled. In Empire Builder, players have three Contract cards to deliver a specific good to a specific city. These are face-up so all players can see them, but only the owner may complete the delivery (Illustration 7.7). There are a variety of ways that players may obtain Contracts. Tey may be obtained via random draw (as in Empire Builder or Century: Spice Road), by selecting from a tableau, by drawing several and selecting which to keep and which to discard, by draft, or even by auction (as in Mow Money). Contracts give players immediate direction and goals, which can be particularly important for new players. Public Contracts increase player inter-action but also may lead to “feel-bad” moments if a player is really close to

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completing a Contract but is scooped by an opponent at the last second— particularly if the second place rewards aren’t available. In these cases, it is helpful if whatever is used to fulfill the Contract is generally useful so that the effort to acquire that specific set of resources, or bring them to a specific location, is not completely wasted.

Sample Games

Century: Spice Road (Matsuuchi, 2017) Empire Builder (Bromley and Fawcett, 1982) Goa (Dorn, 2004) Mow Money (Saunders, 2016) Ora et Labora (Rosenberg, 2011) Schoko & Co. (Hirschfield and Monnet, 1987) Undermining (Tolman, 2011) Illustration 7.7 Two sample contract cards from Century: Spice Road. Paying the cubes shown on the bottom yields the victory points shown just above them.

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ECO-16 Bribery ECO-16 Bribery

Description

Players offer bribes to other players to get them to perform specific actions.

Discussion

Bribery is a subset of the Trading mechanism (ECO-02); however, it is typically more structured and given a different thematic basis. In a Bribery mechanism, a player needs to make a decision, and the other players then make monetary offers to entice the active player to make a particular choice. Santiago uses this mechanism to great effect. Players are constructing irrigation canals around fields. Each turn, one player is the overseer and needs to decide where they will be constructed. The other players may influence the decision by laying a stick of their color in the direction they prefer, along with some coins. If the overseer decides to build in a way that contains another player’s bribe, they take it. However, they are free to build in a completely different direction than any of the bribers would like. Bribes that are not taken are returned to the players. This system rewards players that are able to judge where the overseer may want to build anyway and also gives the overseer opportunity for bluff, convincing the other players that the overseer wants to build in a different direction than they truly do, to entice other players to place bribes where they were planning to go anyway. The overseer also needs to value the benefit of a particular build to their opponent, as opposed to the bribe that they would receive. While Bribery usually involves one active player and many potential bribers, Tonga Bonga implements a multiplayer simultaneous bribe system. Players have sailor tokens, but they cannot staff their own ships. Teir sailors must be sent to other players’ ships. At the start of each round, players place bribes on different positions around those ships. Ten, in sequence, each player places a sailor on an available space, potentially gaining the bribe there. Sailors have

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different ratings, and a higher-rated sailor can kick out a lower-rated sailor from a position—a kind of Auction or Area Majority mechanism (ARC-02). After all the sailors have been placed, players gain coins on their spaces. Players need to balance gaining coins, versus sending their best sailors to help their opponents move their ship, which ultimately is the way to win the game. Money is only a means toward an end and does not yield direct victory points. Sheriff of Nottingham uses Bribery as a one-on-one mechanism. Players are trying to bring goods into the city and need to declare what they are bringing in to the Sheriff, who is played by a different player each round. Players place the cards they wish to get into the city in a sealed pouch and must declare the contents to the Sheriff, truthfully or not. The Sheriff has to decide whether to inspect the bag or not. If the player was lying, the Sheriff gains, if not, the player gains. Before the Sheriff decides to inspect or not, the player may offer a bribe for them to not inspect, which can lead to interesting negotiations and Yomi (UNC-01).

Sample Games

Intrigue (Dorra, 1994) Santiago (Heley and Pelek, 2003) Sheriff of Nottingham (Halaban and Zatz, 2014) Tonga Bonga (Dorra, 1998) Traders of Genoa (Dorn, 2001)

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ECO-17 Increase Value of Unchosen Resources ECO-17 Increase Value of Unchosen Resources

Description

If players do not select certain Actions or Resources, then they increase in value.

Discussion

Puerto Rico is one of the earliest examples of this mechanism. Each player selects one role during a round, but there are more available roles than players. The roles that are not chosen gain a coin at the end of each round. In the future, when players select that role they also gain the coins on it. This mechanism is a specific type of Dutch Auction (AUC-08). Small World and Century: Spice Road also implements this system in a different guise. When players select a new faction in Small World, they select it from a queue. Tey may take any available faction in the queue but must place a coin on each one that they skip over (Illustration 7.8).

Resources are in an ordered queue and can only be pulled from one end or, rarely, both ends but not the middle.

Discussion

A pure expression of this mechanism can be found in Walk the Dogs. During the setup, players lay out a long line of dog figures of different breeds. Players play cards that allow them to pull a certain number of dogs from the head or tail of the line, with the objective of forming sets (SET-01 Set Valuation) (Illustration 7.9). Marracash uses multiple resource queues. Players are merchants inside the city and can purchase stalls of different colors. Customer pawns with these same colors are randomly placed in a line outside the city gates (one line per gate), and players may bring a few into the city each turn but must bring the pawns at the head of the line.

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ECO-20 Resource Queue This mechanism restricts player’s abilities to act while giving them great visibility into future possibilities. All of the customer pawns are placed at the start of the game, so players have complete knowledge of the sequence at the start of the game and can plan accordingly. This is a great example of Input Randomness, where players must react to initial randomization rather than have randomness result from dice or some other randomizer to determine the outcome of an action. This mechanism is distinguished from Action Queue (ACT-06), Shared Action Queue (ACT-07), and Programmed Movement (MOV-10) in a variety of ways. First, in Resource Queue you typically only deal with the head or tail, while in the action queues you execute the entire queue each turn. Also, action queues are most often laid out, resolved, and pulled back in full each turn, rather than being laid out at the start of the game. Patchwork has a circular Resource Queue with a pawn defining the “head” of the queue. Players may take one of the next three pieces ahead of the pawn. Again, the entire circle is randomly laid out at the start of the game, so players have full visibility over everything from the start. Illustration 7.9 The line of dogs in Walk the Dogs is a Resource Queue. If the card shown is played, the player will take the two dogs at the head of the line.

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In some games, the resource queue is constructed or manipulated by the players. In the darkly satirical Guillotine, at the start of each round nobles are laid out in a line. On their turn, each player will chop the head off the noble at the start of the line and earn their points. Players have cards that allow them to manipulate the line to try to arrange for the least popular (and most valuable) nobles to be at the head of the line on their turn. Similarly, in Retreat to Darkmoor, players try to maneuver their minions so that they are not last in the queue, where they may be slain by the marauding hero. Minions at the head of the line will escape to the havens in Darkmoor, where they will score for their owners. In another example, Kolejka is set in Communist-era Poland, and you send family members to different stores to wait in line to purchase goods. Players both construct the queues by sending pawns to different queues, as well as have action cards that allow them to manipulate those queues. The game Bohnanza is built around this concept of queues. Each player has a hand of bean cards and must play the leftmost card each round into their gardens. Since you are trying to plant sets of the same bean, you may not want to play the leftmost card. Trading (ECO-02) with other players allows you to pull cards from the normal queue and keep your sets intact. A card-based queue system can also be found in Aeon’s End. In this deckbuilding game (CAR-05), at the end of the turn players place all their discarded cards on top of their discard pile in any order. When the draw deck is exhausted, instead of reshuffling the discard pile, it is simply flipped over to form the new draw deck. Players have complete knowledge of the state of their deck (although admittedly with a memory element). In a looser interpretation of Resource Queue, players are not just restricted to certain elements at the head or tail but may dig deeper by paying more of a resource. This mechanism becomes a Dutch Auction (AUC-08) under these conditions and is discussed more fully in that section.

Sample Games

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AUC-06 Constrained Bidding Constrained Bidding is a favorite for designer Reiner Knizia, appearing in Ra, Amun-Re, and High Society. Yet it hasn’t caught on as a generally popular auction mechanism, and designers should be aware of some substantial drawbacks to it. For one, Constrained Bidding, aside from the basic constraint of some minimum bid increment, is an especially artificial device. The need to raise a bid by a specific amount or to bid only the amounts on the bidding tokens you hold does not typically have any thematic justification. It is hard to imagine a real-world auction that would use this kind of mechanism. Constrained Bidding also introduces a challenge in redistributing the used bidding tokens. In most auction games, the money system is either closed or based on some economy that enables you to buy and sell the goods up for auction. But in a fixed token system, all the advantages those fixed increments grant to speed of auction come at the cost of their non-liquidity. Put simply, you can’t make change! Designers need to carefully consider both the balance of initial apportionment of bid tokens and how they come back to their owners after use. One area in which there is still considerable design space is multiuse bidding counters. Will you use a powerful card as currency to bid in an auction? Illustration 8.1 In Ra, players have a subset of these bidding tokens, either three or four depending on player count. Any bid they make must be a single bidding token. Photo by Board Game Geek user kevintlee.

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Or will you save its power for use in another aspect of the game? One might see Twilight Struggle (and many other area majority games) as a series of simultaneous auctions, with the multiuse cards representing a kind of fixed bid. Admittedly, in Twilight Struggle, the cards, when used as action points, are more liquid than a true Constrained Bid Auction, but it is in the same family. Indeed, there is an entire category of games that are based on bidding cards with multiple uses, often with players having duplicate decks. Libertalia and Eggs & Empire come to mind immediately. The cards can be seen as a kind of Constrained Bidding token, and players typically have to use each card once before being allowed to pick up the discards. What distinguishes these games from true auctions is twofold. First, the games do not always have an actual lot up for bid. The revealed cards may interact with a pot of gold, for example, but they do not represent contingent offers to purchase some lot as in most auctions. Second, even when a lot or lots do exist, like in Eggs & Empire, winning the auction does not necessarily lead to winning the lot. More generically, the player with the highest bid does not necessarily win the auction. Typically, in these games, in addition to the currency value on the card, there are some additional effects and interactions that can impact the auction’s outcomes dramatically. Nevertheless, these games merit a mention here as they are a means of using the Constrained Bid structure in an engaging and more thematically resonant way.

Sample Games

Amun-Re (Knizia, 2003) Cyclades (Cathala and Maublanc, 2009) Eggs & Empire (Pinchback and Riddle, 2014) High Society (Knizia, 1995) Libertalia (Mori, 2012) Ra (Knizia, 1999) Stockpile (Sobol and Orden, 2015) Twilight Struggle (Gupta and Matthews, 2005)

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AUC-07 Once-Around Auction AUC-07 Once-Around Auction

Description

The players each have one opportunity to bid, either passing or raising the prior bidder. The order of bids is determined by one of the Turn Order structures. After the last player has the opportunity to bid, the high bidder wins.

Discussion

The Once-Around Auction structure takes a straightforward approach to shortening auctions by simply collapsing the whole auction into one round. This works very well for speeding the auction, but it does have disparate impacts on players depending on their position in the turn order. The first player is faced with the substantial challenge of making a bid without any other information. Teir bid will set the market and is vulnerable to being outbid by any player, who can bid as little as one dollar more. By contrast, the last player in turn order has perfect information. Tey know exactly how much to bid to win the lot. Often, the player in the next-to-last place is faced with a lot that is relatively inexpensive, but which they do not want. However, they feel like they must police the auction and raise the bid to prevent the last player from getting a windfall and, in doing so, take the risk of having to purchase a lot they did not want at a relatively high price. Whether the strong left-right binding (the term used to describe games that are strongly impacted by turn order and, specifically, the players seated to the right and left of a given player) of this mechanism is positive or negative is largely a matter of perspective, but it is something to design around.

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For example, turn order can itself be priced in such a manner that the advantage provided by going last in the auction is accounted for. Alternatively, going first in other aspects of the game may be quite powerful, to help balance the disadvantage of going first in the auction. Another approach is to use constrained bids that require bidders to raise the current winning bid by a more substantial increment, or to provide the first bidder with the right to match the final bid and take the lot. Once-Around Auctions aren’t that common in modern designs, having been superseded by Sealed-Bid Auction (AUC-04) that are agnostic to turn order or by drafting mechanisms that eliminate the role of currency entirely. Generally, they should be used when tight coupling to turn order is desirable and turn order is central to the design.

Sample Games

Medici (Knizia, 1995) Modern Art (Knizia, 1992) New Amsterdam (Allers, 2012) Tin Goose (Clakins, 2016)

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AUC-08 Dutch Auction AUC-08 Dutch Auction

Description

A simultaneous single-bid system in which the lot starts at a very high price and then is gradually decreased by the auctioneer or other controlling mechanism until someone agrees to claim the item at its current price, ending the auction. The first bidder to accept the current price is the winner, such that there are no ties. A Dutch Auction is sometimes also called a one-bid auction because of this feature that the first bid made is also the only bid in the auction.

Discussion

The Dutch Auction has a storied history, having been invented in the seventeenth century in Holland to manage the sale and trade of tulip bulbs that arrived in Holland via the Ottoman Empire. A Dutch Auction maximizes the price at which a good is sold and incentivizes buyers to act quickly since once a bid is made, there is no opportunity to counter the bid; the auction is over! Dutch Auctions only work well when there is a single item up for bid or a single lot. All bidders must receive information of the offer price dropping simultaneously and must be able to respond immediately. Any bidder with an informational time lag is highly disadvantaged in this kind of auction,

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whether that time lag is on hearing the newly announced price or in submitting a bid (Illustration 8.2). One way to execute a Dutch Auction is with an actual clock that counts down prices, as in Merchants of Amsterdam, but the componentry alone makes this an unusual approach. Dutch Auctions spread over multiple turns are very common in board games and are often implemented as a row or river of cards. Each position in the row is tied to a price and players may purchase a card from any position. When a card is purchased, more expensive cards slide down and become cheaper. In many games, the last card is free, and in others, the cheapest card will disappear from the market every turn and a new card will enter at the pricey side. Examples of this market row include Suburbia, Pax Pamir Second Edition, and Trough the Ages. A common variant can be seen in Small World, in which players can purchase the first card in the row for free or pay one coin per card they want to bypass until they reach the card they wish to purchase. The trick here is that a player acquires any coins on a card they purchase, which means it’s not necessary to have a card-clearing mechanism in the market. Eventually, the first option will be worth taking for the coins piled on it. This implementation isn’t strictly a traditional Dutch Auction, since more than one good is up for auction at the same time. It’s also typically mediated Illustration 8.2 The Dutch Auction clock from Merchants of Amsterdam. The dial rotates automatically via a spring mechanism. The first player to slap the center button stops the clock and pays the currently indicated price.

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AUC-08 Dutch Auction by turn order: you can only make a purchase on your turn. Because of different mechanisms for adjusting the market each turn, every player does not have an equal opportunity to pay any price they wish for a given good. In some cases, like Trough the Ages, calculating at what cost a card will become available to you and manipulating that price by purchasing cards that are cheaper and forcing cards to slide down multiple positions is a key strategy. Despite some of these issues, the market row has become a staple of game design and a favorite method for reasonably fair resource allocation. The logic of this mechanism can sometimes find its way into worker placement games. For example, in Agricola, some buildings will accumulate resources if nobody places a worker there. Eventually, the rewards available are so rich that someone claims them. Trough the lens of the Dutch Auction, we’d say that the price per share kept going down until a buyer was willing to purchase the whole lot. This isn’t quite a Dutch Auction, it’s really an auction with a fixed price (one worker, though it could be a monetary price in a different context) but in which the rewards increase. However, note that unlike traditional auctions, this auction shares a primary feature with Dutch Auctions, which is that the value moves in favor of the buyer. Dutch Auctions use price to effectuate this, rather than the size of return, but they are conceptually quite similar. Dutch Auctions as implemented through market rows are quite a robust and durable solution for game designers. Tey typically don’t take up too much board space, they’re ergonomic, decisive, quick, and make for interesting decisions. In some games, like Morels, or Majesty: For the Realm, they can be a bit tedious when it comes to constantly sliding down cards. Vikings uses an ingenious wheel mechanism to address this situation elegantly by placing the prices on the wheel and rotating it to adjust the prices of the tiles laid around its perimeter. Designers will frequently turn to this river-of-lots mechanism when using some non-monetary currency for resource acquisition. The aforementioned Trough the Ages uses an Action Point currency (ACT-01) for card acquisition. Tough Small World themes the cost as monetary, money is worth an equal number of victory points, so the actual cost to acquire a lot is victory points. This mechanism is also quite amenable to variations involving allowing players to reserve a card in the market for purchase later at a lower price or claiming a card so that its eventual acquisition cost is paid directly to the player.

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Sample Games

Agricola (Rosenberg, 2007) Majesty: For the Realm (Andre, 2017) Merchants of Amsterdam (Knizia, 2000) Morels (Povis, 2012) Pax Pamir Second Edition (Wehrle, 2019) Small World (Keyaerts, 2009) Suburbia (Alspach, 2012) Trough the Ages: A Story of Civilization (Chvátil, 2006) Vikings (Kiesling, 2007)

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AUC-09 Second-Bid Auction AUC-09 Second-Bid Auction

Description

This mechanism modifies other auctions, such as Turn Order Until Pass or Sealed Bid. The amount paid by the Highest Bidder is equal to the secondhighest bid.

Discussion

In game theory, Second-Bid auctions, also called Second-Price auctions or Vickrey Auctions, are well-studied in relation to the question of how will the choice of auction type impact the price of a good? If I have a car that I want to sell, for example, which auction type will fetch me the best price? One way to ensure the highest possible price for the seller is to use an auction mechanism that encourages bidders to make mistakes in their bidding strategies. A Dutch Auction (AUC-08) is a great example. The added pressure of the clock and the possibility of someone else making a bid that can’t be countered leads to somewhat higher settlement prices than a traditional English Auction. In many cases, there is a desire to create a fast and fair auction, in which the best strategy for all bidders is to simply bid the highest price they are willing to pay. In a traditional auction, the correct strategy is to bid $1 m ore t han t h e p re v i o u s bi d u n t i l yo u rreser v e p o in t i s m e t . Y o u d o n ’ t in cre a seyo u r bi d b y m ore t han$ 1 over the previous bid because maybe nobody will outbid you and you’ll win the auction at a lower price than the amount you were willing to pay. This makes for slow going at times.

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A second-highest auction is the solution to the question of how to make auctions fast and fair for buyers and sellers. In essence, your bid in a SecondPrice auction is not an offer to pay that amount but to pay anything up to that amount. Your bid of $1, 000 i sre a ll y abi d o f$ 999, such that anyone who wants to buy the item must pay $1,000 or more. The dominant strategy in a Second-Price auction is to bid your true value for the lot. If all other players value the lot at a lower price, you’ll pay their valuation, not your higher price. If other players value the lot higher than you, you won’t win, but they’ll never pay less than your true value. Vickrey Auctions are extremely rare in board games. The only example we were able to turn up was Reiner Knizia’s Das letzte Paradies (The Last Paradise), a largely forgotten title. In part, this is because Vickrey Auctions aren’t that different from other auction types when it comes to board games. In any non-blind auction method, a Vickrey settlement method will yield a final price that is roughly the same as the non-Vickrey, or perhaps one-bid increment smaller. That’s a lot of rules overhead for such a small change in price. In blind bidding systems, the Vickrey does impact actual prices more substantially, but in many cases, the game design capitalizes on that inefficiency in the auction. Put another way, the returns to bidding skill are higher in Non-Vickrey Auctions, whereas Vickrey Auctions provide a clear dominant strategy to the bidders. In a sense, the efficiency of Vickrey Auctions may make them less interesting for gameplay. Perhaps another important reason Vickrey Auctions aren’t used is that their game-theoretical impact isn’t patently obvious to players. If you explain the way the auction works, most players don’t intuitively understand that their best bet is to bid their true value. A game that uses Vickrey to try and make auctions more fair and less chaotic may find that players are simply confused by it. Where Vickrey Auctions really shine is in a situation that doesn’t come up in board games very often, which is in allocating a large lot of identical goods. Want to sell 100 tons of cinnamon? A Vickrey Auction is a great way to find the settlement price at which all 100 tons will sell. Once that price is found, even bidders who offered more for some portion of the lot are charged the market-clearing price, not their higher bid. In essence, the buyer is trading away the highest possible returns for speed and the certainty of selling out their whole inventory. An echo of this idea can be found in Harbour, where a player must sell their entire lot of goods when they choose the sell action, but this sale is to the bank. One might imagine that this transaction is the end result of a Vickrey Auction that happened off-screen, so to speak. Vickrey Auctions, though important for the study and for understanding

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AUC-09 Second-Bid Auction auction strategies, have relatively few practical applications in board games, at least so far. As board games have moved into digital arenas, Vickrey Auctions may find new applications, especially in asynchronous game modes. When games are player asynchronously, multiple-round bidding structures can slow the game down enormously. In the case of Trough the Ages: A New Story of Civilization, players can bid military strength to claim colonies. Colony auctions occur during the Events phase of each player’s turn, should a colony be drawn from the Events deck. The Events phase is the first part of a player’s turn, and until the auction is fully resolved, the player is frozen and cannot proceed to the main phase of their turn. Instead, a Turn Order Until Pass Auction (AUC-03) to determine the high bidder. The colony is then awarded, the winner spends the necessary military strength, and the active player can then complete their turn. When adapting Trough the Ages for digital play, the designer offered a modification to this system to prevent games from stalling for hours or even days at each auction. Players simply enter one bid, which represents the maximum that they are willing to bid. Once all bids are in, the highest bidder wins and pays one more than the amount bid by the second-highest bidder. In practice, the difference between this auction and the turn-order auction is mainly that, in case of ties, the winner is the player closest to the active player in turn order, and the winner pays the amount of the tied bid, rather than one more. In a turn-order bidding system, ties are not possible. As we’ve noted above, these types of auctions are uncommon in analog games. One reason may be that it is hard to conceal the highest price the top bidder was willing to bid. In a Vickrey Auction, the winner pays the amount bid by the second-highest bidder. The amount that the winner bid is not typically revealed. This information can be quite consequential, especially in a game like Trough the Ages, where players may have hidden resources that they can optionally apply. Revealing a bid that is high enough to require using hidden resources effectively reveals that a player has those resources. In a digital format, the game’s internal logic can determine and declare the winner without revealing the total bid amount. It may not be possible to achieve that same outcome in an unmoderated analog format.

Sample Games

Das letzte Paradies (Knizia, 1993) Harbour (Almes, 2015) Trough the Ages: A New Story of Civilization (Digital) (Chvátil, 2006)

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AUC-10 Selection Order Bid

Description

Selection Order Bid is a form of multiple-lot auction in which players are not directly bidding on the lots themselves but the order in which they’ll draft the lots. As the bid increases, players may pass and accept a later place in the order. In some cases, players must pay their entire current bid (an all-pay mechanism), and in others, they may recover some of their bid.

Discussion

There are many systems for auctioning off multiple lots, but Selection Order Bid may be the most elegant. In For Sale, players bid to draft first from a collection of property cards. The cards range in value substantially, and a given flop of cards can either cluster closely, with the lowest being separated from the highest by only a few dollars, or be spaced quite widely apart. Players bid in turn order for the right to draft first. A player may choose to pass and collect the lowest-value card remaining. When passing, they pay half their previous bid. The last player to remain in the auction receives the most valuable card but must also pay his or her full bid.

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AUC-10 Selection Order Bid Another way to think of the pay-half-when-pass variant is that it’s actually a simultaneous bid on two lots: a full-price bid on the most valuable card and a half-price bid on the least valuable card. Considered in this fashion, Selection Order Bid is a type of constrained bidding system or even a sort of ante. If you want to bid $10 o n t h e hi g h - v a l u ec a r d a tt h eo p e n o f t h e a u c t i o n, yo u ’ reesse n t ia ll y a g ree in g t o p a y$ 5 for the lowest-value card, which you could have had for free, had you chosen to pass. This is somewhat analogous to a penny auction, where players must pay a fee for each bid they make, even if it is not the winning bid. The halved value of the bid that is forfeit whether or not the player wins the auction can be seen as the bid fee, rather than a bid itself. In certain games, this type of auction also forces players to estimate the value of lots to other players. For example, if players are collecting different symbols or colors, the lots will have different values for different players. If a certain lot is only good for one player, that player can take a chance and bid low assuming that the lot will be remaining when the player’s selection opportunity comes.

Sample Games

Age of Steam (Wallace, 2002) Eggs & Empire (Pinchback and Riddle, 2014) For Sale (Dorra, 1997)

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AUC-11 Multiple-Lot Auction

Description

An auction in which players simultaneously bid on Multiple Lots in parallel, instead of bidding for one lot at a time, serially.

Discussion

Multiple-Lot Auctions are very common in tabletop board games because they compress the time it takes to allocate lots among the players. The physical affordances of board games, like tableaus and player-colored tokens, all lend themselves to organizing and displaying information needed to run these types of auctions clearly. Multiple-Lot Auctions ask players to manage two different axes of decision-making at the same time: which lots to bid on and how to divide the money between those lots. In a serial auction, a player’s valuation of a later lot might change dramatically based on winning or losing a previous lot. In an extreme case, like Fresh Fish, once a player has won a fish market stall, they do not bid at all for a second fish market stall. Simultaneous auctions don’t have this kind of rebalancing of player valuations (Illustration 8.3).

AUC-14 Dexterity Auction

Description

A Dexterity Auction requires the performance of some act of dexterity to submit a valid bid. Typically, this would involve the bid marker itself being placed into some valid bidding area, but other methods for implementing this may be used.

Discussion

Going, Going, GONE! by Dr. Scott Nicholson is the design that most readily comes to mind because of its explicit auction theming. In the game, multiple items are up for bid simultaneously, and players bid in real time by dropping their bid tokens into cups corresponding to each lot. Only tokens that land in the cups count, and the time available for bidding can be fast enough that placing a bid is not assured. While Going, Going, GONE! is squarely a Dexterity Auction, one could perhaps view games like Crokinole and Shuffleboard as being Dexterity Auctions. Consider Crokinole, where players flick their bid markers, attempting to acquire points by occupying board areas. Each side only scores when more of its markers are in a scoring zone than the other side’s markers. The main difference between this and an auction is that in Crokinole, if you land two more markers than your opponent in a scoring zone, you score points for each marker. That would be like bidding on a diamond and winning one diamond for each dollar by which you outbid your opponent.

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AUC-14 Dexterity Auction One can readily imagine a mechanism which awards to the player with the most darts, or stones or markers in some area a singular benefit. This would be a Dexterity Auction where player skill in landing the bid would be more important than player intent to bid some amount. Dexterity Auctions have been implemented in video games that are board game-like in nature, most notably M.U.L.E. and Sumer. In these games, players move on-screen avatars against the clock, representing offers to buy or sell. This allows players to “fake” a bid by moving far ahead and then pulling just behind their opponents as time runs out, to force them into winning an item at a higher price than they might have intended. It’s worth noting that dexterity is one of those mechanisms, like memory, that can be deeply polarizing and potentially inaccessible to those with physical disabilities. It can be especially dissonant when it is one component in a multi-mechanism game. A game that otherwise emphasizes planning and calculation may frustrate players when their plans are ruined by an errant toss.

Sample Games

Crokinole (unknown, before 1876) Going, Going, GONE! (Nicholson, 2013) M.U.L.E. (Berry, 1983) Sumer (Favorov, Gunnarrson, Raab, and Suthers, 2017)

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AUC-15 Fixed-Placement Auction

Description

Fixed Placement is a meta-mechanism that modifies a multiple-lot auction by creating rules about which lots players may bid on and representing bids visually on a board or cards. It is often combined with constrained-value bids. A Fixed-Placement auction ends when every player passes and/or no player has the right to bid further. The highest bidder for each lot wins the lot.

Discussion

Multiple-Lot Auctions are fairly common in board games. These auctions introduce a new wrinkle into bidding by forcing players to evaluate several lots at once. Depending on bid timing rules, there may also be strategic elements to sequencing your bids or forcing an auction to close early. Multiple-Lot Auctions present some challenges to tracking. How should the top bid be represented for each lot? What rules should govern bid order?

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AUC-15 Fixed-Placement Auction How can the game prevent multiple-lot bidding from devolving into a series of one-lot auctions, in which players ignore all but one lot up for bid at a time? Fixed Placement can help solve all of these problems. Visually, FixedPlacement Auctions provide a track on which players can mark the value of their bid using a player pawn. The right to bid can be governed by turn order. In some games, like Amun-Re, turn order is interrupted whenever a player is outbid. That player becomes the active player, who takes the bid marker representing the bid that was just surpassed and makes another valid bid with it, on another lot. The entire auction ends when each player is the top bidder for some lot. In Cyclades, there are more lots than there are players, but each player has only a single bidding token, so each player will win exactly one auction and some lots will go unpurchased each turn. Critically, in both of these games, a player may not immediately rebid on the lot for which they were just outbid. This rule encourages players to bid close to their actual value for a lot, since if they bid lower, they may not have an opportunity to return to rebid on that lot. In theory, this should speed these auctions, though, in practice, new players may evaluate this dynamic incorrectly, leading to frustration and overlong analysis. Both of these games also feature triangular increases in valid bid increments, which prevents the tit-for-That, raise-by-one bidding that can grind an auction to a near-halt (Illustration 8.4). In Vegas Showdown, bids are submitted strictly in turn order. Bidding too low has multiple consequences: not only will a player be outbid but they will have to wait until the next turn to bid. In the meantime, other players will get to place bids, potentially raising the costs of lots the passed player was interested in purchasing. Vegas Showdown does allow immediately rebidding on the same lot, though the value of the next valid bid increases in a delayed triangular pattern (each interval is repeated three times before increasing). Perhaps the greatest strength of Fixed Placement is that it offers an opportunity to integrate bidding with other game actions. Since there is a visible record of current bids, a design can invite players to take unrelated actions, instead of restricting bidding to its own phase. While Vegas Showdown takes advantage of this feature, there remains a lot of design space here.

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Sample Games

Amun-Re (Knizia, 2003) Cyclades (Cathala and Maublanc, 2009) Vegas Showdown (Stern, 2005) Illustration 8.4 The auction tracks from Vegas Showdown. Each player places a token on the track to indicate their bid on that lot. If a token is overbid, it is returned to the owner to be placed again.

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AUC-16 Dutch Priority Auction AUC-16 Dutch Priority Auction

Description

A Dutch Priority Auction, a term of our own invention, is a multiple-lot auction in which prices for the lots are determined based on the number of bids placed on the lots up for bid. The winning bidder is the first player, in bid priority, who chooses to pay the current price for a lot, which is equal to the number of bidding tokens there. Priority may be determined by a variety of factors, including global turn order or turn order for each lot based on the order of bid placement. Players may typically pass on the purchase when they are the priority bidder by removing their bidding token. This has the effect of reducing the price for the lot by one.

Discussion

A Dutch Priority Auction has features of a Dutch, or descending-bid auction, coupled with an ordered, turn-based bidding system to help direct traffic and coordinate the sale of multiple lots simultaneously. In this system, prices will initially move toward the seller (i.e., they’ll rise) as bids are added and then move back toward the buyers as prices descend when bidders decline to buy at a given price. Unlike a traditional Dutch auction, in which any player may accept the going price and end the auction by calling out, a Dutch Priority Auction determines an active player, the priority player, who may choose to accept the going price or pass. In Die Speicherstadt (available in the US as Jórvík, with a Viking theme and some minor balance tweaks), this priority is determined in an initial round of bid-marker placement. Earlier placement provides earlier priority in the auction resolution phase (Illustration 8.5).

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The priority player may choose to pass. In most cases, passing means removing a bid marker and thus lowering the asking price by one. Usually, passing in this kind of auction simply means not acting at this time. If the passing player has another bid marker at a lower priority, should the auction continue until that marker comes up, the player will be allowed to purchase the lot at that time. Spyrium adds another element to this core, which is that a player, when passing, receives money equal to the bid markers remaining on the lot. The choice is between a current purchase at a higher price and receiving an equal amount of money but passing on the purchase. In some cases, an early pass can fund a later purchase of the same lot! The effect of this style of auction is to require players to declare the lots they’re interested in, somewhat separately from the price. Players may not have enough bid markers to claim the right to bid on every lot they like and must restrict themselves to only those lots that are most meaningful to them. However, bid markers must do double-duty. Tey can not only be used to stake out lots that a player desires but must also be used to raise prices on other players. There is no other way to raise the price for a lot except to place a Illustration 8.5 The board in Die Speicherstadt. In the position shown, Blue would have the first option to purchase the Counting Office, for four coins. If they choose not to, White would have the next option, at two coins (since is no reason for them to pay for their first meeple). If White declines, Purple may purchase it for one coin.

Worker Placement ў ў Worker Placement, a type of Action Drafting (ACT-02), is often credited to designer Richard Breese and his game, Keydom, in 1998. Nonetheless, it was Caylus, by William Attia, that popularized the mechanism and inspired its name. Mechanically, Worker Placement is isomorphic to action drafting. Players select actions in turn order by placing one of their pawns, or workers, into the action space, or building. This is the core mechanical concept and thematic conceit, and the mechanism has proven so durable because of that tight theme-mechanism correspondence. It’s easy to understand why placing the worker in the sawmill will generate wood. Worker Placement can be described as action drafting, or even as a highly specialized type of auction, but while resource allocation mechanisms may share mathematical similarities and incentivize similar player behavior, the experience of these mechanisms can vary a great deal based on how they’re presented. Teir intelligibility to the player will also vary a great deal based on the setting, theme, and logical coherence of the mechanism. For Sale’s auction is readily understood by players, as it is squarely in context. An auction for property is a familiar concept, even if most players haven’t ever bought a house at an auction. The thematic scaffolding, provided by Dungeon Petz, on the other hand, falls short in terms of making its mechanism intelligible. Why is it that the largest group of workers secretly assigned to an action get to take the action first? There’s no strong connection to a real-world dynamic that helps players remember and understand the rule. The Worker Placement metaphor of placing a worker in a production building to generate a good helps players understand the structure and incentives of the underlying game system, which is one reason why it is such a popular core mechanism. DOI: 10.1201/9781003179184-9

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In this chapter, we’ll talk about other implications and expectations of the mechanism, including blocking, gaining workers, adding buildings, and more, as we delve deeper into this touchstone of modern design. The term “Worker Placement” has lost some of its cohesion, and today, it is often used as a synonym for a Euro-style game, irrespective of the presence of workers or action drafting. Tus, it would not be out-of-place for Terraforming Mars or Roll for the Galaxy to be described as “Worker Placement.” We will restrict our analysis to games which use action drafting, recognize some form of blocking, and conceive thematically of some kind of worker. This narrower definition also excludes quite a few games which employ the worker metaphor but not its underlying mechanism. For example, we exclude cooperative games like Charterstone and Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island, because these games lack a true drafting or blocking element. Games with workers placed onto private tableaus like Orleans and Trough the Ages: A Story of Civilization or games in which workers represent a currency or bid marker rather than a draft marker, as in Jórvík, Spyrium, and Keyflower, are also outside the scope of our definition. However, our definition is intended only to limit the scope of our analysis and not to stake a claim on how the term should be used by anybody else. Whatever words we use, we believe these elements of drafting, blocking, and thematic coherence are important distinguishers that deserve a term by which to refer to them.

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WPL-01 Standard Worker Placement WPL-01 Standard Worker Placement

Description

Players select actions, in turn order, by placing a worker from their supply on a building associated with a specific action and then execute that action immediately. The round ends when all workers have been placed, at which point they return to their owners’ pools and a new round begins.

Discussion

This familiar structure, typified by games like Lords of Waterdeep and Agricola, is an improvement over the ur-game, Caylus, in which buildings resolved after all Worker Placements were complete. The immediate resolution makes for faster play and obviates the need for players to remember which resources they will receive when making their next placement. Later games, like The Manhattan Project and Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar, have workers returning only when their owners recall them. In the former, players get the building’s reward on placement, while in the latter, the reward is tied to the moment of recall, since the reward escalates the longer the worker is left out on the board. With each passing turn in Tzolk’in, workers rotate over on the ingenious gear system to a higher tier of rewards that will be distributed when the worker is recalled. Most Worker Placement games employ the mechanism for all actions in the game. Turn order is typically set by placing a worker on a building that grants turn order priority. Increasing the number of actions that may be taken in a turn is themed as getting new workers, which is an action tied to a building. Maintenance costs are represented as feeding or paying for your workers.

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Increasingly, there are games that incorporate some Worker Placement elements in the context of a broader game. Examples include Copycat, Rococo, and Belfort.

Sample Games

Agricola (Rosenberg, 2007) Belfort (Cormier and Lim, 2011) Caylus (Attia, 2005) Charterstone (Stegmaier, 2017) Copycat (Friese, 2012) For Sale (Dorra, 1997) Jórvík (Feld, 2016) Lords of Waterdeep (Lee and Tompson, 2012) The Manhattan Project (Tibbetts, 2012) Mint Works (Blaske, 2017) Orleans (Stockhausen, 2014) Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island (Trzewiczek, 2012) Rococo (Cramer, Malz, and Malz, 2013) Roll for the Galaxy (Huang and Lehmann, 2014) Spyrium (Attia, 2013) Terraforming Mars (Fryxelius, 2016) Trough the Ages: A Story of Civilization (Chvátil, 1986) Tribune: Primus Inter Pares (Schmiel, 2007) Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar (Luciani and Tascini, 2012)

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WPL-02 Workers of Differing Types WPL-02 Workers of Differing Types

Description

Workers can differ in abilities, or can be upgraded and downgraded, or are valid for placement in different areas and buildings.

Discussion

Improved workers are a common variation on standard worker placement. Improved workers can count as more than one basic worker as in Belfort, or they may allow you to break standard placement rules, as in Leonardo Da Vinci. Tzolk’in puts a different spin on this idea by having the rewards for a space improve the longer that a worker is allowed to stay out on that space. Tematically, this can be understood as a worker spending more time working. Another take on this idea is the notion that workers can improve. In both Praetor and Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia, workers, represented as dice, are more capable and provide better returns when they show higher numbers. Players can take actions to increase the values of these worker dice. In Village, workers can age and gain experience, which improves their effectiveness (Illustration 9.1). Some games have workers who participate in different placement contests or have buildings that can only be accessed by certain types of workers. Pillars of the Earth has workers who can collect resources and master builders, who are placed during the second round of placement and who can access other actions besides resource collection. The Manhattan Project similarly features specialists, like scientists and engineers, and certain buildings require those

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specialists to operate. Glenn Drover’s Empires: Galactic Rebellion (previously known as Age of Empires III: The Age of Discovery) and Viticulture feature as many as eight different kinds of workers who might participate in majority contests and even battles in addition to taking actions.

Sample Games

Age of Empires III: The Age of Discovery (Drover, 2007) Belfort (Cormier and Lim, 2011) Euphoria: Build A Better Dystopia (Stegmaier and Stone, 2013) Glenn Drover’s Empires: Galactic Rebellion (Drover, 2016) Leonardo Da Vinci (Acchittocca, Brasini, Gigli, Luperto, and Tinto, 2006) The Manhattan Project (Tibbetts, 2012) Pillars of the Earth (Rieneck and Stadler, 2006) Praetor (Novac, 2014) Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar (Luciani and Tascini, 2012) Village (Brand and Brand, 2011) Viticulture (Stegmaier and Stone, 2013) Illustration 9.1 Three different workers from Manhattan Project—Engineer, Scientist, and Laborer. Some placement spaces only allow specific types of workers to be placed there.

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WPL-03 Acquiring and Losing Workers WPL-03 Acquiring and Losing Workers

Description

Workers beyond the original complement may be acquired in some manner, either temporarily or permanently. Workers may also be lost as the game progresses.

Discussion

Rather than improving existing workers, many games allow the acquisition of new workers. These new workers represent substantial growth in a player’s overall action budget, and as such, acquiring more workers is often a dominant strategy. In Stone Age, the reproduction hut is typically chosen first or second in every round. Because of the power of adding workers, designers have taken to metering worker growth. In Lords of Waterdeep, all players receive a new worker on a fixed turn in the middle of the game. Caverna requires that players build housing for new workers to acquire them—an investment of resources up front that the new worker’s productivity will pay for in the future. Any kind of purchase price on a worker has to be considered in light of the number of actions that the worker will be able to take and the returns those actions will provide. Usually, buying workers early has a higher payout than buying them late for this reason. In Last Will, the number of workers a player may deploy varies each turn based on the place in turn order that they choose. More workers mean going

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later in the turn order, thus reducing the expected value of those additional workers, since the best spots will be taken by the time those extra workers are up for placement. Euphoria sets a hard cap on the total value of pips that can be showing in a player’s pool of available worker dice, which sharply limits a player’s incentive to collect more workers. Temporary additional workers are featured in Snowdonia, Russian Railroads, and Power Grid: Factory Manager. These workers will return to the general pool after use and must be hired or acquired again for reuse. A similar way to throttle player appetites for more workers is through a feeding or worker upkeep cost for permanent workers. Agricola is famous for the unforgiving tightness of its feeding mechanism and the substantial penalties incurred for failing to feed your family, while Stone Age’s toothless approach makes a starvation strategy quite viable. Worker attrition is the flipside of this dynamic of gaining workers. Euphoria’s workers may get too smart and, as a group, have too high a pip value, at which point one escapes (or perhaps, is sent for re-education …). The aging workers of Village eventually pass on, and the workers in Praetor retire. Other games actively encourage sacrificing workers for a benefit. Asgard is a visceral example, but discarding a die in Alien Frontiers, themed as landing a spaceship (the die) on a planet to establish a colony, is mechanically identical.

Sample Games

Agricola (Rosenberg, 2007) Asgard (Zizzi, 2012) Caverna: The Cave Farmers (Rosenberg, 2013) Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia (Stegmaier and Stone, 2013) Last Will (Suchy, 2011) Lords of Waterdeep (Lee and Tompson, 2012) Power Grid: Factory Manager (Friese, 2009) Praetor (Novac, 2014) Russian Railroads (Ohley and Orgler, 2013) Snowdonia (Boydell, 2012) Stone Age (Brunnhofer, 2008) Village (Brand and Brand, 2011)

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WPL-04 Workers-As-Dice WPL-04 Workers-As-Dice

Description

Workers are represented by dice whose pip values impact play.

Discussion

Workers-As-Dice is a broad genre, and it is frequently accompanied by the mechanism of playing a combination of workers in a building. In Alien Frontiers, players allocate all of their dice on their turns to buildings that take a different combination of dice and values and have different requirements for placement. This approach leads to some analysis paralysis because of the large number of combinations that are possible with as many as six dice. Other titles, like Kingsburg, limit the dice pools to three dice. Each roll presents a substantially smaller set of placement permutations for players to consider, not only because of the smaller number of dice but because there are fewer valid buildings for any given combination. Workers-As-Dice can also function to determine the effectiveness of workers. In The Artemis Project, worker dice collect a number of resources equal to their pip value—as long as resources remain available in the supply. However, the higher pip value dice are awarded resources last, which may leave the placing player out of luck if the resources run out before they can collect the reward. Champions of Midgard features warrior dice whose faces represent attack strength. The dice are assigned to overcome monsters and are rolled together, summed, and compared to the monster’s strength. For some players, this is an unacceptable level, and type, of randomness in a worker placement game.

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Whatever your position on the matter, it is representative of the ongoing hybridization of game styles and game mechanisms (Illustration 9.2). The manner in which the dice change values over the course of the game can vary. In some games, the dice are rolled each turn, giving a random distribution that players need to work with. Alien Frontiers works in this way. In other games, the players obtain the dice on a certain side or have to expend resources to change them to other, perhaps more powerful, sides.

Sample Games

Alien Frontiers (Niemann, 2010) The Artemis Project (Chow and Rocchi, 2019) Champions of Midgard (Steiness, 2015) Kingsburg (Chiarvesio and Iennaco, 2007) Illustration 9.2 The Alien Frontiers board, with various spaces occupied by dice. The Shipyard requires matching pairs of dice. All dice in the Colony Constructor must be the same value, while the Raider’s Outpost requires a “run” of increasing values. Finally, dice placed in the Lunar Mine must be increasing but do not need to be consecutive.

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WPL-05 Adding and Blocking Buildings WPL-05 Adding and Blocking Buildings

Description

Buildings, and their corresponding actions, may be added to the pool of actions players may select from. Buildings may also be occupied to prevent or hinder players from accessing those actions.

Discussion

Buildings define available actions in a worker placement game, and how designers manage the availability of actions is critical to the overall flow of the game. Some games retain a static set of actions throughout the game, like Stone Age. Other games introduce new actions in a set pattern. Agricola features new actions that reveal themselves each round, but the actions are drawn from a very small subset, guaranteeing, for example, that the “Family Expansion” action will reveal itself in one of three consecutive rounds. Many games allow players to add buildings and to claim ownership for them. As early as Caylus, players could add a building and receive victory points when another player occupied it. Lords of Waterdeep has variable owner rewards for building usage by others. Some games break the core notion of action drafting by introducing private actions. Russian Railroads themed these as engineers, rather than buildings, but private buildings, themed as buildings, exist in The Manhattan Project. On the opposite end of the spectrum are public actions that are always available to all players, like the resource-gather actions in Stone Age, which are in a public area, or the

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Despite the challenges, the movement remains a durable feature of many board games. Movement is fun, and it lends itself well to many different kinds of games in a huge variety of implementations and specific mechanisms, while being conceptually familiar and intuitive, no matter what the context.

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MOV-01 Tessellation MOV-01 Tessellation

Description

The playing field is divided into spaces to regulate movement.

Discussion

There are several ways to subdivide boards, all of which are covered in this section. The most basic is a one-dimensional division. This is often called a track, and it is commonly used in Race games, Roll-and-Move games, and others. There are several variations on the standard track. First, there may be alternate paths that branch off of the main path. These can be a shortcut that reduces the distance needed to travel or a path that gives bonuses or other information, as in Careers, where each potential career choice has its own path. Second, certain spaces, or collections of spaces, may be divided into sub-spaces in the width of the track. This is typically used in racing games to create lanes, allowing multiple players to occupy the same space, and to create “inside” and “outside” lanes. The number of lane spaces can be reduced,

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sometimes even down to one, to create bottlenecks that create challenges for players. This is used to great effect in Ave Caesar and Downforce, where vehicles move a set number of spaces based on cards. Forcing players to waste a good card because they cannot get through a bottleneck is a key strategy. Boards can also be laid out in two dimensions, either with a regular pattern or with irregular shapes. The most common regular patterns are squares (as in Chess) and hexagons, used in many war games, such as PanzerBlitz. Triangles may also be used but are uncommon as they limit options for adjacency and tend to look busy. If squares are used, the designer needs to decide if pieces may move diagonally. From a distance standpoint, a diagonal move is approximately 50% further than an orthogonal move, which needs to be compensated for in games striving for realism. Hexagonal Tessellations do not have this issue, and all natural moves are the same distance. This is why they are commonly used for war games and others require realistic movement. Note that a square grid with each row shifted 50%, making a brick pattern, is isomorphic to a hex grid (and easier to prototype, particularly when creating tiles—even rectangular cards can be used for this purpose). Some games need to model three-dimensional space, typically those that take place in space, in the air, or under the sea. A common approach is a dashboard or log sheet for each vehicle that tracks the altitude. This system is used in Richtofen’s War and Air Force. Some, like Attack Vector: Tactical, have tokens placed next to or beneath pieces to indicate height above or below the playing surface. Others, like Chopper Strike and Sub Search, physically create multiple levels of the play area by vertically stacking boards, separated by supports. These are physically striking and easy for players to interpret but need to limit the number of levels due to cost, the physical size of the board, and ease of reaching in between levels to reach pieces. Irregular patterns are called Area Maps. Diplomacy is an example. There are several design considerations for Area Maps. First, if they regulate movement, the areas should be approximately the same size, or at least “movement equivalent.” For example, a mountainous region may be divided into smaller, more numerous spaces so it takes more moves to traverse. If possible, regions should not touch at a corner, and they should only touch along an edge. Area maps are isomorphic to point-to-point movement, where boxes or circles are connected by lines. Sometimes point-to-point maps can be preferable, as they clearly show connections, and connection information (like

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MOV-01 Tessellation rivers or borders) may be more evident. Point-to-point maps are also common in space games, where the connection between stars is shown. Some maps are a combination of two-dimensional point-to-point and onedimensional tracks. For example, Trains and Stations has tracks in between cities that players must build along. If a region contains important information, like terrain type or resources, the graphics should be visible and distinct even if pieces are present.

Sample Games

Tracks Ave Caeser (Riedesser, 1989) Careers (Brown, 1955) Downforce (Daviau, Jacobson, and Kramer, 2017) Monopoly (Darrow and Magie, 1933) Snakes & Ladders (Unknown, ∼200 bce) Sorry! (Haskell, Jr. and Storey, 1929) Squares Chess (Unknown, ∼1200) Checkers (Unknown) Go (Unknown, 2200 bce) Hexagons Blitzkrieg (Pinsky and Shaw, 1965) PanzerBlitz (Dunnigan, 1970) Squad Leader (Hill, 1977) Lords of Creation (Wallace, 1993) Tree-Dimensional Attack Vector: Tactical (Burnside, Finley, and Valle, 2004) Chopper Strike (Uncredited, 1976) Richtofen’s War (Reed, 1972) Sub Search (Uncredited, 1973)

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Area Diplomacy (Calhamer, 1959) El Grande (Kramer and Ulrich, 1995) Risk (Lamorisse and Levin, 1959) Point-to-Point A House Divided (Chadwick and Emrich, 1981) Pirate and Traveller (Sanderson, 1908) Twilight Struggle (Gupta and Matthews, 2005) Combination Master of the Galaxy (Bokarev and Seleznev, 2018) Trains and Stations (Lang, 2013) World in Flames (Pinder and Rowland, 1985)

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MOV-02 Roll and Move MOV-02 Roll and Move

Description

A randomizer is used to determine how far to move a piece. The space landed on determines the action(s) a player can take.

Discussion

Roll-and-Move games are emblematic of many of the earliest games people are exposed to. This Roll-and-Move mechanism has also been used in some of the oldest known games, including Senet and Backgammon. Because Roll and Move has been used in so many simplistic children’s games, it has the reputation as an anti-pattern. Players do not feel in control of their actions and are at the mercy of the randomizer, which could be dice (Monopoly), a spinner (Chutes and Ladders), or cards (Candyland). To mitigate this, the designer should extend the mechanism to allow for more player choice. One way is to give the players more ways to apply the results of the randomizer, as in Backgammon, where the player can use the dice in a variety of ways. Other options are to have mechanisms that allow the players to modify, use a subset of the number, or choose a direction, as in Talisman, wager on movement as in Long Shot and Camel Up, or wrap it in a Push-Your-Luck mechanism like Nur Peanuts!. Other options are discussed in sections Different Dice (MOV-07) and Probability Management (UNC-09).

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Sample Games

Backgammon (Unknown, 3000 bce) Camel Up (Bogen, 2014) Long Shot (Handy, 2009) Monopoly (Darrow and Magie, 1933) Nur Peanuts! (Meister, 2001) Parcheesi (Unknown, 400) Senet (Unknown) Snakes & Ladders (Unknown, ∼200 bce) Talisman (Harris, 1983)

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MOV-03 Pattern Movement MOV-03 Pattern Movement

Description

Pieces move in a specific pattern relative to the board grid.

Discussion

This Pattern Movement mechanism gives pieces specific ways that they can move relative to a grid. There are three basic styles: 1 Fixed Target Spaces: This is similar to the way that knights move in Chess. There are a few specified target squares, and the piece may be moved to any of them. Tey may or may not be able to jump over spaces that are blocked by friendly or enemy pieces. These moves do not need to be reversible. While a Chess knight may return to the square it came from, a pawn may not move backward. In Shogi the Gold, for example, may move diagonally forward but not diagonally backward (although it may move straight backward). 2 Any Distance in a Direction: The Queen in Chess would be an example of this movement style. Pieces may move any number of spaces in a given direction until blocked by another piece. Sometimes, the

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directions are fixed relative to the board, so pieces cannot return to where they came from. The Lance in Shogi, for example, may move any distance forward but may never move backward until it is promoted. 3 Jumping: Jumping over pieces may be a requirement for moving or may be used to capture. Sometimes jumps can be chained, as in Draughts (Checkers) and Chinese Checkers, which can lead to dynamic and dramatic play. Games with Pattern Movement often have a Promotion mechanism, where pieces that reach the end of the board (or close to the end, as in Shogi) are converted into a more powerful version of the piece. Navia Dratp has pieces that promote by spending a currency to upgrade them. It is earned by moving and capturing, and different pieces cost different amounts to upgrade, which gives a great tool for balancing. A different take on Promotion is shown by The Duke, where pieces are tiles with different movement patterns on either side. When a piece is moved, it is flipped over to its other side (Illustration 10.1). Illustration 10.1 Pieces in The Duke have their movement pattern printed on them. After moving, they are flipped over to show a different pattern. Photo by Dan Thurot.

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MOV-03 Pattern Movement Movement Patterns can be difficult to learn if there is a different pattern for each piece and it is not part of the piece, as in Chess or Shogi. However, some modern games, such as the aforementioned Navia Dratp and The Duke, print the movement pattern directly onto the piece, which makes it much smoother for newer players to learn and allows for even more different styles of pieces. Nevertheless, games like The Duke do present players with the challenge of remembering the movement pattern on the reverse side of each piece. Player references can help alleviate these issues.

Sample Games

Checkers (Unknown) Chess (Unknown, ∼1200) Chinese Checkers (Monks, 1892) The Duke (Holcomb and Mclaughlin, 2013) Navia Dratp (Yamazaki, 2004) Shogi (Unknown)

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MOV-04 Movement Points

Description

A piece is given a number of points to spend on movement.

Discussion

This Movement Points mechanism allows the designer to differentiate units as well as movement conditions. It is commonly used in war games, as in Rise and Decline of the Tird Reich, for example, where infantry units have three movement points, and armor units have six. However, it is also used in train games like Empire Builder and racing games like Formula De to control movement. Normally, each space takes one Movement Point, but certain obstacles and terrain, like mountains or swamps, may take more. In more tactical games, rivers and roads may slow or accelerate movement by controlling how many Movement Points are used. Movement Points may be further generalized as Action Points (ACT-01), where movement is just one of the actions that points may be spent on, as in Tikal. Another extension is to allow normal Movement Points to be increased by incurring some limitation or penalty. For example, many war games allow for units to “double-time” or “redeploy” at the expense of not being able to conduct an attack or come within a certain distance of an opposing unit. Others allow units to take on a status of “exhausted” by moving farther than normal but having their other skills degraded until a “rest” turn is taken.

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MOV-04 Movement Points

Sample Games

BattleTech (Brown, Leeper, and Weisman, 1985) Empire Builder (Bromley and Fawcett, 1982) Formula De (Lavauer and Randall, 1991) Melee/Wizard (Jackson, 1977) Rise and Decline of the Tird Reich (Greenwood and Prados, 1974) Tikal (Kiesling and Kramer, 1999)

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MOV-05 Resource to Move

Description

Players expend a Resource to Move.

Discussion

Games where players are moving a limited number of pieces (typically one) may give them a resource that needs to be expended to move. This can take the form of a card with a numeric value, as in Ave Caesar or Ben Hur, or it can be a currency such as fuel or something more abstract. In Hare & Tortoise, players need to spend carrots to move and can acquire them through various actions (Illustration 10.2). The resource may also have to be expended to change velocity. This is most commonly seen in space games, such as Attack Vector: Tactical, where fuel modifies velocities. However, it can also apply to traditional racing games, like Mississippi Queen, where players are racing steamships on the Mississippi River. In Mississippi Queen, players may normally increase or decrease their speed by one. If they wish to accelerate or decelerate at a higher rate, they must expend coal, which is a limited resource. Scotland Yard gives players a limited number of tickets of different types— Subway or Bus, for example—one of which must be used each turn depending on the type of transportation taken. If the detectives exhaust their tickets before catching Mr. X, they lose the game. Giving players a resource that they need to manage is one way to mitigate the common issues with random Roll-and-Move games (MOV-02), as it increases player choice.

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MOV-05 Resource to Move

Sample Games

Attack Vector: Tactical (Burnside, Finley, and Valle, 2004) Ave Caesar (Riedesser, 1989) Ben Hur (du Poel, 1987) Elfenland (Moon, 1998) Hare & Tortoise (Parlett, 1973) Mississippi Queen (Hodel, 1997) Mush (Moon, 1994) Scotland Yard (Burggraf, Garrels, Hoermann, Ifland, Scheerer, and Schlegel, 1983) Illustration 10.2 The movement chart in Hare and Tortoise, which uses a triangular cost system. Moving 4 spaces costs 10 carrots, while moving 8 spaces costs 36 carrots.

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MOV-06 Measurement

Description

Pieces may be moved up to a certain distance, measured by a ruler.

Discussion

In this Measurement system, there is no grid or other tessellation breaking up the map. Pieces are free to move any amount up to their movement limit, expressed in inches, centimeters, or using a game-supply ruler. This system is typically seen in miniatures games, which are played directly on a tabletop. Because of the analog nature of Measurement, these systems have several unique issues they need to deal with. First, attack, like movement, is also expressed in the Measurement units. The designer needs to decide whether to allow for Measurement at any time to determine the range or only after attacks or moves have been declared. Not allowing premeasurement gives an edge to players that are better at estimating ranges but tends to make for a lighter experience as sophisticated plans and strategies may fall apart because a charge falls a fraction of a centimeter short. Most modern games allow for premeasurement, although this does slow things down (Illustration 10.3). This is compounded by the second issue, that there is always some imprecision in moving and Measurement. These systems require players to communicate about the intent of moves and to act in a reasonable fashion. Finally, unlike Movement Points systems (MOV-04), the measuring can be challenging with different terrain types. Does movement in difficult terrain count as moving “farther” than in other terrains? How are those

A turn is broken up into a series of small Impulses. Depending on their speed, units will be able to move in specific Impulses.

Discussion

Originally pioneered in Star Fleet Battles, this system simulates the simultaneous movement of player pieces. Rather than one player moving their full distance, and then the next, moves are interleaved. There is a chart that shows which Impulses a ship will move in for different speeds. When a ship becomes active, it moves a single hex. As an example, in Star Fleet Battles, ships may have speeds from 0 to 16, so there are 16 Impulses. A ship that is moving at speed 4 will move every fourth Impulse. A ship that is moving at speed 6 will move in Impulses 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, and 16.

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MOV-09 Impulse This system increases realism by having ships gradually approach each other, rather than jump to a new location and fire from there. However, it does so at an increase in complexity and bookkeeping that requires one of the players to keep track of the progress of the turn and alert players to when particular ships need to move.

Sample Games

Attack Vector: Tactical (Burnside, Finley, and Valle, 2004) Car Wars (Irby and Jackson, 1981) Star Fleet Battles (Cole, 1979)

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MOV-10 Programmed Movement

Description

Players simultaneously program their movement and then reveal and execute it.

Discussion

This is a subset of Action Queues (ACT-06), so the considerations there apply. However, there are some specifics relating to movement to cover here. First is the Right-Left issue. Programmed Movement games often have turning as one of the orders. Robo Rally is an example. This can often be difficult for players to visualize and can result in turning the wrong way. It can be beneficial to have the turn cards labeled as Clockwise and Counterclockwise, rather than Right or Left, as these may be simpler for players to visualize, but the issue remains. To avoid this, some Programmed Movement games either have a generic Turn action, allowing the players to choose facing at that time, or allow free rotations. The Dragon & Flagon is an example (Illustration 10.4). Another is how challenging the spatial puzzle will be and how that fits into the game theme. Robo Rally creates a complex space for players to navigate by constraining them in two ways. First, players draw a hand of nine cards and must select five to be programmed. It is frequent that players do not have the exact cards they need to get where they would like to go, so that forces them to evaluate a variety of alternatives. In addition, there are features on the board like conveyor belts, pits, and pushers that, although deterministic, make it even more challenging to picture the

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MOV-10 Programmed Movement result of a sequence of cards. There is also bumping—if players move into the same space as another robot, they push it out of the square, which can have a huge effect on where that robot ends up. Ten, if robots take damage, they may have cards “locked” into place, making coming up with a plan even more challenging. All of these elements foster a feeling of chaos, which is the goal of Robo Rally, which players tend to either love or hate. Space Cadets uses a similar system, with cards being drawn and placed in sequence to plot movement. But it gives a little more control to players, as there are fewer obstacles on the board, and ships pass through each other or may occupy the same space. Players also have more control, as they can slow down, reducing the number of cards played or allocating more of the Energy resource to Helm, allowing for more cards to be drawn. Another lever for the designer is the number of cards to be placed in the queue. This materially impacts the complexity of planning. While Robo Rally has players plot five cards, duck! duck! Go only has them plot one, befitting its intended younger audience. Volt: Robot Battle Arena has players place a die on a chart indicating the direction they want to move, with the die face indicating the distance. There is no facing—robots can move or shoot in any direction chosen. This puts the emphasis in Volt: Robot Battle Arena on guessing what the opponents will do, rather than on how to control your own robot. Programmed Movement can also be used as part of a Hidden Movement game (MOV-24). Illustration 10.4 A sample queue in Robo Rally. The cards are executed in sequence from left to right, relying on the player to be able to visualize the action.

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Sample Games

The Dragon & Flagon (Engelstein, Engelstein, and Engelstein, 2016) duck! duck! Go! (Nunn, 2008) Robo Rally (Garfield, 1994) Space Cadets (Engelstein, Engelstein, and Engelstein, 2012) Twin Tin Bots (Keyaerts, 2013) Volt: Robot Battle Arena (Matsuuchi, 2014)

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MOV-11 Relative Position MOV-11 Relative Position

Description

The precise location of units is not tracked. Only their Relative Position is important.

Discussion

The standard use case for this mechanism is in racing games that track relative order but not specific position. For example, in Formula Motor Racing, the cars for the players are simply in sequence from first place to last. Players take actions to try to move further up toward the front of the line and be in the first place when the game ends. The distance between first and second place is always the same. There is no further representation of distance or gaps between cars. Similarly, in Get Bit!, players are swimmers trying to escape from a shark and only their relative position is tracked. The shark attacks the player last in line (Illustration 10.5). This system has the benefit of simplicity and focuses on specific aspects of racing. It also eliminates the need for a board, track, or lanes, and the rules and space overhead that go with that. It also keeps the games competitive, as it is literally impossible for a car to get too far into the lead to catch or drop too far behind the leader. Everything is constrained.

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Roadkill is a hybrid version of this system, which has a series of location cards that players race through. Not all players need to be on the same location card but those that are placed in a ranked line. The air combat game Ace of Aces uses an innovative book system, where each page shows the view out of the player’s cockpit. The positions are determined by a relative movement system, as players select moves secretly and simultaneously, and the planes are shifted relative to each other, with each player remaining the center of their own play space. Another type of Relative system is used in Up Front. This card-based tactical combat game has squads that move toward or away from other squads. Teir location is represented by an abstract concept called Relative Range, which goes from 1 (far away) to 5 (right on top of each other). Abstracting movement in this way allows Up Front to focus on other tactical elements of the battle. Illustration 10.5 In Roadkill, players move along a track formed of cards. On each card, players are placed in relative order. In the image on the left, Car #8 is in last place on the top card. If it passes Car #1, it moves up in order, as shown in the right.

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MOV-11 Relative Position Racing or movement does not need to be the central metaphor for use of this mechanism. In Guillotine, players manipulate a line of people, with the character at the head of the line needing to put their head on the chopping block.

Sample Games

Ace of Aces: Handy Rotary Series (Leonardi, 1980) Formula Motor Racing (Knizia, 1995) Galaxy Trucker (Chvátil, 2007) Get Bit! (Chalker, 2007) Guillotine (Peterson, 1998) Roadkill (Greenwood and Verssen, 1993) Up Front (Allen, 1983)

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MOV-12 Mancala

Description

Movement is based on the number of units at the starting location.

Discussion

This system arises from a family of games from Africa, most notably Mancala. In Mancala, the board is a series of pits organized essentially in a ring. Various numbers of playing pieces are in each pit. On their turn, a player selects a pit and removes all the pieces in that pit and places one in each successive pit in a single direction. If there are three pieces in a pit, for example, one each will be placed in each of the next three pits going around the ring. A common variation on this mechanism is that only one piece moves, but the distance it gets to move is exactly equal to the number of pieces in the space it starts in. In Finca, this system is used to move around a Rondel for action selection (ACT-10), and all pieces, regardless of owner, count toward the distance moved. Finca also has the twist that the strength of the action is based on the number of tokens in the destination space. In Downfall of Pompeii, players begin the game by placing their pawns into buildings in the city. After the first eruption, players can add pawns to a building equal to the number of pawns already in the building, and finally, after the second

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MOV-12 Mancala eruption, players move pawns a number of spaces equal to the number of pawns on the originating space. In Teseus: The Dark Orbit, players move their pieces around a space station, again based on the number of pieces located in the starting area. However, they have the choice of going clockwise or counterclockwise. These systems have a lot of opportunity for clever play and are highly interactive as pieces from all players are commingled and directly impact the options available to each.

Sample Games

Downfall of Pompeii (Wrede, 2004) Finca (Sentker and zur Linde, 2009) Mancala (Unknown, 700) Teseus: The Dark Orbit (Oracz, 2013)

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MOV-13 Chaining

Description

Pieces are stationary but are built out in chains.

Discussion

While the pieces in these games are stationary, building them in chains gives a dynamic feel of movement. In fact, most of these games are typically about taking journeys and traveling. In Expedition and Lazer Ryderz, players place a chain of arrow tokens or templates to show the path they are taking. Tey are considered to be at the tip of the chain. In both cases, if the chains cross, something special happens, which is the rationale for leaving the chain. In Trough the Desert and Quartermaster General, players do not have to play from the tip of the chain. Tey may extend from anywhere. This is more in keeping with the themes of establishing caravans or supply lines (Illustration 10.6). Using chains, rather than just a single unit, creates opportunities to blockade other players, forcing them to cross your path, or topologically isolate them. The static nature of the placements makes these games simple to teach but can open up tactical options for deeper play.

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MOV-13 Chaining

Sample Games

Blue Lagoon (Knizia, 2018) Expedition (Kramer, 1996) Lazer Ryderz (Amato and Kline, 2017) Quartermaster General (Brody, 2014) Trough the Desert (Knizia, 1998) Illustration 10.6 In Expedition, players expand one of three shared expeditions (red, blue, and yellow) by adding an additional arrow token to the tip. Players are attempting to steer the expeditions to cross spaces they secretly control.

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MOV-14 Bias

Description

Pieces automatically move in a certain direction, or it is easier to move in a certain direction.

Discussion

The Bias mechanism is typically used to simulate wind, currents, conveyor belts, and other physical systems. There are typically two types: Automatic and Influencers. Automatic Bias mechanisms move pieces in a set direction, typically at the end of each turn. An example is the conveyor belts in Robo Rally, which automatically move all robots on them, as well as possibly rotating them. Others are the rivers in Niagara and The Adventurers: The Temple of Chac, which slide all pieces on the river toward the falls, or the magnets or fans in Darter. This is also commonly seen as gravity in space games, such as Demon’s Run, which move players that go too close to black holes (Illustration 10.7). These effects are often indicated to the player by arrows on the board showing the effect on pieces. If movable elements are causing the effect, the iconography on the piece is often used. Influencer mechanisms make it easier to move in certain directions. This is very common in sailing games, but it can also be seen in other themes, like mountain climbing. In Yacht Race, the distance a ship can move is directly related to the wind direction. This mechanism can give texture to an otherwise featureless map, as in a sailing or space game. When players have some control over the element in

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MOV-14 Bias question (moving magnets in Darter, or changing wind direction in Yacht Race), it can present the players with really interesting tactical possibilities. For example, in Niagara players can influence how fast the river flows each turn. These mechanisms need to be used with some care, particularly with automatic biases when positioning is critical. If the system gets complicated, it can be difficult for players to picture where they will be at the end of their turn, particularly if this is combined with Programmed Movement (MOV10), as in Robo Rally. There are more complex variations on the mechanism. One is Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension, where the Bias point depends on player location. Players move relative to the closest ship to them, whether ahead or behind. A related mechanism is used in Tutankhamen. Players move along a track and may only move in one direction. Tey may move as far as they want but Illustration 10.7 A sample board from Robo Rally showing the two types of conveyor belts. A robot moving onto a red conveyor is moved one space in the direction of the arrows; a blue conveyor moves it two spaces. Some conveyor spaces also rotate robots, as shown by the turned arrows.

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only get to use the ability of a piece they land on. This one-way nature of the board gives the players challenging decisions of whether to race ahead for a desirable space further along the track or to move slowly and get more actions but have to use only those spaces skipped by other players.

Sample Games

The Adventurers: The Temple of Chac (Blossier and Henry, 2009) Darter (Byrne and Conkey, 2004) Demon’s Run (Matheny, 1981) Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension (Young, 2013) Niagara (Liesching, 2004) Primordial Soup (Matthäus and Nestel, 1997) Robo Rally (Garfield, 1994) Tutankhamen (Knizia, 1993) Yacht Race (Uncredited, 1960)

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MOV-15 Moving Multiple Units MOV-15 Moving Multiple Units

Description

Actions may Move one or Multiple Units.

Discussion

This is a subset of Command Cards (ACT-05). The considerations there apply. This mechanism is used in its Command Card form by Tunder Alley, where players control a number of cars, and the cards are used to move a subset of them. There are also games where players play cards that move Multiple pieces that may or may not belong to them. The Wolfgang Kramer card system, which includes Daytona 500 and Downforce, gives players a hand of cards, each of which moves cars that may belong to them or to opponents. The key to the game is playing cards at a time when the cars you want to move a long way forward are relatively clear and can use the full movement, whereas cars you are not interested in are blocked in and waste some or all of the movement (Illustration 10.8). This type of system is frequently associated with Betting (UNC-01), allowing player interests to overlap or conflict at different points. Another example is Panamax. In this game, ships move through the Panama Canal, and certain sections are too narrow for ships to pass each other. So, if you wish to move your ship in that section, it pushes ships ahead of them, giving them free movement.

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Sample Games

Daytona 500 (Kramer, 1990) Detroit-Cleveland Grand Prix (Kramer, 1996) Downforce (Daviau, Jacobson, and Kramer, 2017) Long Shot (Handy, 2009) Panamax (d’Orey, Sentieiro, and Soledade, 2014) The Really Nasty Horse Racing Game (Knock, 1987) Tunder Alley (Horger and Horger, 2014) Illustration 10.8 Sample cards from Detroit-Cleveland Grand Prix. Cars of all the colors shown must be moved for the distance shown, but the player playing the card can choose the order of movement. This can greatly impact the distance the cars are actually moved.

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MOV-16 Map Addition MOV-16 Map Addition

Description

The map is added to as it is explored.

Discussion

This Map Addition mechanism is commonly used in exploration games, as players expose new areas of the map. There are two broad types of games in this category: Constrained, where the shape of the board is known and players must explore within those bounds, and Unconstrained, where players are free to explore as they wish (sometimes with some rules). There are also games where the map shape is defined by the scenario or mission but is hidden by the game mechanics, as in The 7th Continent, or known to only one player, as in Descent: Journeys in the Dark. This mechanism is often implemented with tiles and so is a subset of Tile Laying. Much of that discussion applies here. But there are some specific points for map building. If players can build in any direction, it may keep them somewhat separated as each explores their own area. If more interaction is desired, some incentive to move to the center needs to be included. The cooperative realtime game Escape: The Curse of the Temple implements this rather bluntly, by requiring players to gather on a single tile periodically. In the stress and

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hurry of a real-time game, it can be challenging to avoid getting spread out. If using tiles, edges can be used to gate movement. For example, in Eclipse, tiles may be marked with a gate or be blank. If two gates match up on adjacent tiles, players may move between them. Later, a technology may be developed that permits movement even if only one gate is between two tiles. This allows for structure and movement restrictions even in the openness of space. The Map Addition mechanism can also be used to introduce uncertainty into an essentially linear track. In Mississippi Queen and The Mushroom Eaters, new portions of the track are revealed as they are moved onto. In Mississippi Queen, this acts as a type of Catch-The-Leader mechanism (VIC-18), as the leader may be out of position to take advantage of the newly revealed tile. Exploration can also be procedurally generated. In Source of the Nile, when exploring an empty hex, players roll on a series of tables to determine the base terrain type, rivers, and other features. The system cleverly incorporates adjacent spaces to make it more likely, for example, for a block of adjacent jungle spaces to emerge rather than a series of isolated jungle spaces.

Sample Games

The 7th Continent (Roudy and Sautter, 2017) Descent: Journeys in the Dark (Wilson, 2005) Dragon Island (Fitzgerald, 2017) Eclipse (Tahkokallio, 2011) Escape: The Curse of the Temple (Ostby, 2012) Mississippi Queen (Hodel, 1997) The Mushroom Eaters (Hayden, 2013) Source of the Nile (Maker and Wesley, 1978) Xia: Legends of a Drift System (Miller, 2014)

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MOV-17 Map Reduction MOV-17 Map Reduction

Description

Over the course of the game, the map shrinks.

Discussion

Removing parts of the map can be psychologically interesting for the players, as they feel more constricted both in space and in options. We are exposed to this Map Reduction mechanism first as children through the game Musical Chairs. Isolation and Hey, That’s My Fish! are classic representatives of this mechanism. In both, players take a move and then remove a tile. In Isolation, it may be any tile on the board. In contrast, in Hey, That’s My Fish!, it must be the tile that the player began their turn on. In Sinking of the Titanic, the board is shrunk in a fixed fashion, rather than under player control, as the ship rotates beneath the water board and the board gradually becomes reduced more and more.

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In some games, the board closing is something that happens toward the end of the game. In The Omega Virus, sectors of the board may suddenly be closed to the players completely as the game nears its timed conclusion. Also worth mentioning are the Survive: Escape from Atlantis series of games, where the board as a whole does not shrink, but safe tiles (land tiles in this case) are slowly removed, forcing players into shark-infested waters. Many other games don’t shrink the physical board; they simply reduce the options available to the players. Ticket to Ride and many other rails games naturally reduce the options available to players as more and more routes get claimed. To a substantial extent, the question of whether the board gets smaller or the options on it become fewer is mostly a matter of thematic consonance and what is practical given the physical components involved.

Sample Games

Hey, That’s My Fish! (Cornett and Jakeliunas, 2003) Isolation (Kienitz, 1972) The Omega Virus (Gray, 1992) Sinking of the Titanic (Uncredited, 1975) Survive: Escape from Atlantis (Courtland-Smith, 1982) Ticket to Ride (Moon, 2004)

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MOV-18 Map Deformation MOV-18 Map Deformation

Description

The map is modified during the course of the game through rotation or shifts.

Discussion

In this Map Deformation mechanism, the map is traditionally composed of a series of (typically square) tiles, composed of smaller spaces. Player tokens are located on these tiles. When the tiles are rotated or relocated, the player tokens are moved along with them. Because this can often radically change the game situation, this mechanism introduces a large dose of chaos into the proceedings. It can also make it difficult for certain players who may have spatial relation issues to visualize the result of the deformation. This is particularly true as tiles with more spaces on them are used. This mechanism can be implemented through means other than tiles. In Stay Alive players move sliders around the edge of the board to control where holes are located, possibly dropping marbles out of the game. In both Dune and Yedo, an entire section of the board is blocked each turn by the sandstorm and watchman, respectively. Because of the impact of Map Deformation, it is typically the centerpiece of the game and not a secondary mechanism.

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Sample Games

Dune (Eberle, Kittredge, and Olatka, 1979) Dungeon Twister (Boelinger, 2004) Stay Alive (Barlow, 1965) Wiz-War (Jolly, 1983) Yedo (Ginste and Plancke, 2012)

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MOV-19 Move Through Deck MOV-19 Move Trough Deck

Description

Players Move Trough a Deck of cards.

Discussion

This mechanism gives players the feeling of movement by forcing them to work through a deck to get to the bottom or some goal card. In Chainsaw Warrior, for example, the deck thematically represents the house players are exploring, with cards representing rooms or encounters, and players take “move” actions to delve deeper. This mechanism is also used in Incan Gold, where players flip cards to move deeper into the temple. Adopting this metaphor allows designers to give players a sense of forward momentum while keeping the game compact, eliminating the need for a board or large map. It also makes it easier to randomize. The Gating and Unlocking mechanism (ACT-15) is good to use here to tier difficulty.

Sample Games

Chainsaw Warrior (Hand, 1987) Incan Gold (Faidutti and Moon, 2005) Maiden’s Quest (Shannon, 2018) One Deck Dungeon (Cieslik, 2016)

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MOV-20 Movement Template

Description

A defined Movement Template is used to determine where a piece moves to.

Discussion

First pioneered in Wings of War, this system has been widely used since, most notably in the Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game. Each turn, players simultaneously select which Movement Template will be used by each of their units. For example, it may be a Short Straight, a Gradual Left, or a Sharp Right. Moves are revealed, and the templates are used to determine where each piece will end. Because of the use of the templates, this mechanism is best thematically integrated with pieces that need to keep moving, such as airplanes (Illustration 10.9a). These games are similar to Programmed Movement (MOV-10), except that only one move is programmed, as opposed to the 3–5 that are common in traditional Programmed Movement games. These systems also typically

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MOV-20 Movement Template do not have a board or spaces to regulate movement but are played directly on a tabletop. While this introduces some of the analog issues discussed in Measurement, the use of the templates keeps things better constrained. However, rules for collisions also need to be developed. The use of templates also allows for unit differentiation by defining which templates may be available to them. Lazer Ryderz introduces a variation on the system by incorporating an Action Retrieval system (ACT-03) for when players are allowed to reuse certain templates (Illustration 10.9b). A related system, included here for brevity, is Diskwars, where the units are discs. Tey are moved by flipping a certain number of times. The diameter of the disc and the number of times it may be flipped define the speed. In essence, the discs themselves are serving as the Movement Templates.

Sample Games

Diskwars (Gelle, Hardy, Jolly, and Petersen, 1999) Lazer Ryderz (Amato and Kline, 2017) Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game (Little, 2012) Wings of War (Angiolini and Paglia, 2004) Illustration 10.9a A movement template in X-Wing. There is an indent on the side of the plastic base that allows the template to be placed accurately. The rear of the unit is then moved to the end of the template.

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Illustration 10.9b In Lazer Ryderz, players move by placing templates but older templates stay on the table for a few turns. This both limits where a player can move, as certain templates may be unavailable, and also creates obstacles on the table as templates cannot be crossed. Two separate templates are shown for a better sense of scale.

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MOV-21 Pieces as Map MOV-21 Pieces as Map

Description

The Pieces themselves compose the Map.

Discussion

These games blur the line between Units and Map, as the map is composed of the individual units themselves. Because of this, these games are typically played directly on the table surface without a board. The two exemplar games for this mechanism, Hive and Vortex, use hexagonal tiles for units. Hexagons are a natural choice for this mechanism, as it gives more options for pieces to move. Typically, pieces must be adjacent to other pieces, so there is one single connected block of units. Pieces are added to the other edge or moved around the outside. Pieces that are surrounded by others are usually locked in place, with only those on the outside of the block able to reposition. Units may have intrinsic abilities (as in Hive) or gain special abilities based on adjacent tiles (Vortex). Because all the pieces, both friendly and enemy, are in a connected block, these games are typically highly interactive, tactical, and quick.

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Sample Games

Hive (Yianni, 2001) Maelstrom (Hardy, Jolly, and Petersen, 2001) Vortex (Hardy, Jolly, and Petersen, 2001)

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MOV-22 Multiple Maps MOV-22 Multiple Maps

Description

The game takes place on Multiple Maps which are connected at defined points.

Discussion

This mechanism is implemented in Iron Dragon, a rail game set in a fantasy world. Trains may run through the main board or transition to a special Underground map. The two are connected at specific points, which can make for interesting route building. Khronos has multiple boards, but these are connected in time rather than space. Tey represent three different ages of the same region, and actions that are taken on older boards, like building structures, can ripple through into the future boards. Fische Fluppen Frikadellen is a trading game that may be played by up to 15 players on three maps placed at separate places in the room. Each board is played individually—turns are not synced between boards—and players may move from board to board under certain circumstances, taking their goods with them in an attempt to make better deals. When arriving at a new board, they are inserted into the turn order. Players move around each map visiting individual stores for buying and selling, and prices fluctuate independently (Illustration 10.10). Having Multiple Maps forces players to approach the geometry of the situation in a different way. It may present shortcuts or advantages that need to be evaluated in the context of the cost to take advantage of them. It also allows the designers to create more complex structures.

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Sample Games

Buck Rogers: Battle for the 25th Century (Grubb, 1988) Fische Fluppen Frikadellen (Friese, 2002) Iron Dragon (Bromley and Wham, 1994) Khronos (Urbon and Vialla, 2006) World in Flames (Pinder and Rowland, 1985) Illustration 10.10 The board in Buck Rogers: Battle for the 25th Century. Fleets and planets are moved on the solar system map in the upper center. When a fleet is in the same space as a planet or asteroid, ground forces may be landed onto the larger map for that object.

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MOV-23 Shortcuts MOV-23 Shortcuts

Description

A shorter or quicker route exists that may not always be available.

Discussion

Shortcuts are a way for designers to warp the geometry of the board, to give players other options. For example, in Clue, players may move directly between the diagonal corners of the board. This system reduces travel time, which is not a core feature of Clue. Sometimes, shortcuts are only usable by certain characters or with certain equipment. This is commonly used in dungeon-crawl-type games, through the Secret Passage trope. Characters may need to use a skill to detect and be able to use them or need a special key. Some games will have alternate paths that are shorter but more treacherous. This is a way to present tactical options to players in what is traditionally a basic Roll-and-Move format (MOV-02).

Sample Games

Clue (Pratt, 1949) Dungeoneer (Denmark, 2003)

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MOV-24 Hidden Movement

Description

Movement occurs that is not visible to all players.

Discussion

Hidden Movement is closely tied to many of the mechanisms discussed in Chapter 6, “Uncertainty,” but there are specific considerations that are reviewed here. Scotland Yard is a classic example of a game with Hidden Movement. One player, Mr. X, is trying to evade the other players for a set number of turns. Hidden Movement games require the hidden players to track their location somehow, and in Scotland Yard, it is done by recording it on a pad. This method is commonly used in these games, as it also allows for the players to review the hidden players’ locations after the game is complete, both for the fun of seeing “close calls” as well as ensuring that the rules were followed. This last item deserves to be emphasized. By its nature, Hidden Movement requires actions to be taken without the knowledge of the other players. So, typically the rules relating to this activity should be as simple as possible. In Scotland Yard, Mr. X uses Point-to-Point movement (discussed in Tessellation MOV-01) to move around the map, using different forms of transportation. The connections between the points are colorcoded to match the transportation options, making it relatively simple to

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MOV-24 Hidden Movement understand, and hopefully avoid mistakes. An error in a Hidden Movement game often cannot be found until after the game is over and can invalidate the entire experience (Illustration 10.11a). There are games that have more complex movements and rules in general in order to support a specific play experience. The Normandy Campaign is the first entry in the Double-Blind trilogy. In these war games, each player has a map of the play area and keeps it hidden from the other behind a screen. The front line is represented by a chain of tokens. Any movement of pieces behind the front line (friendly territory) is not revealed to the other player. If a player wishes to move into enemy territory, they announce the coordinates of the spaces they moving into, one at a time. If there are enemy forces in a space, the movement is stopped and combat between the invaders and defenders is resolved. Any spaces the invading armies traverse are taken over by the invading player, and the front line is adjusted to reflect the transfer of ownership. Illustration 10.11a Hidden movement in Scotland Yard is tracked with this component. A piece of a player is placed inside, and the Mr. X player writes their moves in the windows and covers it with the type of transportation that was used.

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This procedure requires that both players be very familiar with the rules and relies on the honor system for following them (Illustration 10.11b). The game Flat Top simulates carrier battles in World War II, and both players use Hidden Movement on private boards to track the location of their naval task forces to try to find the enemy players launch search planes on the main board. However, since simply placing search planes launched from carriers directly onto the board would reveal the carrier locations, players are allowed to use Hidden Movement for search planes until they want to reveal them on the main board. Tey can’t search until they are revealed, but they can move to a different location far enough from their carrier to try to mislead the opponent about their origin point. Since deception and deduction are typically part of the Hidden Movement experience, most of these games have defined points or reasons when players must reveal their location. Scotland Yard requires the player to surface on certain turns. Specter Ops requires the hidden player to commit crimes at certain Illustration 10.11b The Axis map in The Normandy Campaign. The Allied front line is indicated by the green star counters, but the actual Allied units may be anywhere within that area. Photo by Board Game Geek user oi_you_nutter.

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MOV-24 Hidden Movement locations, which reveal their location, as does moving in Line of Sight of a hunter (ARC-08). Ghost Chase does not permit the ghost player to enter the same room twice, gradually reducing their possible options for movement. Another option for giving hints is used in Captain Sonar. In this game, each team announces what direction it is moving in (e.g., North or West). The other team records this information and, since subs cannot move through islands or off the map, can gradually figure out where the opponent is located. The Fury of Dracula gives time-delayed hints to the hunters using an Action Queue system (ACT-06). Dracula plays a card showing the location he is moving to, but that card is added to a queue. Only the last card in the queue may be looked at by the hunters, so they see where Dracula was a few turns ago but not where he currently is. This has the benefit of not requiring any note-taking by the player conducting the Hidden Movement and helps detect rule violations. Hidden movement games can take advantage of recording moves to force players to actually program movement in advance (Programmed Movement: MOV-10). In Mind MGMT, a one-vs-many game (STR-03), the single player begins the game by planning five turns of movement on a personal dry-erase board. Each turn they plan one more turn into the future. This combines future commitment for the hidden player with a “trail” system like The Fury of Dracula. In the two-player Duel in the Dark about the bombing raids on Germany during World War II, the British player plans all of their movement before the raid begins, after targets and weather are determined. This is done by placing a series of “compass cards” in a stack indicating the direction the raid moves. During the raid, the Germans may move freely and try to predict what the British path and target are. In Duel in the Dark, the player using hidden movement has little chance to react to the “visible” movement player, so the need for information hints is minimized. It shifts more into a pure deductive exercise (UNC-12). Pyramid of Pengqueen offers a unique approach to detecting hidden locations. Players place magnetized pieces on either side of a vertical center wall. When two pieces are on the same space, they repel and fall off of the wall. Another way to implement Hidden Movement is what we call the Anchor/ Distance mechanism. In this, the unit that is moving is revealed in a specific location. Ten each turn, or as a result of an action, it moves one further away from that space, increasing the Distance. However, the exact location is not recorded or determined in any way. At some point, the movement is completed or the unit is revealed. At that time, it is placed on the map a number of spaces away from the Anchor space determined by the Distance.

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Discussion

In some games, only certain units can exercise control over a territory. Axis & Allies requires infantry or armor units to take control of a territory away from an opponent. Fighter and bomber planes may not even land on newly captured territory, which can create some interesting decisions for players who are forced to decide between taking a valuable plane as a casualty of combat in order to capture a territory or having the more expendable infantry unit take the hit but be left with a plane that is unable to conquer the space. In Kemet, the powerful monsters and creatures summoned by the power tiles are not considered units and cannot even remain on the board if their accompanying troops are eliminated (Illustration 11.1). In the context of area majority games, the simplest distinction between unit types is their power. Some units have the strength of one, and others are more powerful. Dominant Species has both a majority contest, based on the total population of a species, and a dominance contest, which is calculated by evaluating the types of food a species can eat and the quantity of that food that is available in the hex being scored. A single unit may lose the population battle but win the dominance battle. A more straightforward application of the idea of varying troop strengths is in Belfort, in which Elves and Dwarves start at a strength of one but can be promoted to count for two points of strength.

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The idea of different unit types is another foundational concept in game design. It is both so old that it’s hard to know where it first began and still a regular feature of modern design. Units can vary in their movement abilities, combat strength, cost, their ability to perform certain tasks or even to be placed in certain spaces, and more. Whether we’re dealing with space operas, like Twilight Imperium and Star Wars: Rebellion or the highly simplified war game-like system Command & Colors, we observe a broad variety of unity types and methods for distinguishing them from one another. In the context of absolute control, some differences in troop types are tied to the uncertainty engine that resolves combat. Whether troops roll a die to hit, or can only be hit by a certain die value, or all the other variations on this core idea (Chapter 4, “Resolution”), the differences between troops are about how they influence random outcomes. This is one of the means by which designers moderate the impacts of output randomness. The types of troops committed and the expected value they generate in terms of hits they can inflict on the opposing side represent a wager, with the value of the territory occupied representing the pot to be won. In an area majority context, there is a narrower range of variation. There are troops that are worth more than one point of strength, troops whose Illustration 11.1 Portion of a counter sheet from Dai Senso! The symbol in the center indicates the type of unit (an X is a type of infantry, while ovals are tanks), which impacts how they move and fight. The three numbers on the bottom of each unit are Attack, Defense, and Movement ratings.

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ARC-03 Troop Types value is hidden, troops who can override rules that restrict additional troops from being added, or troops that provide tie-breaker benefits. Rarely, a unit might actually eliminate existing units from an opposing player, as the T-Rex and Pterodactyl units do in Triassic Terror. In that same game, the Raptor unit also forces opponents to move units to another territory. Cave Troll is built entirely around the mechanism of special powers for units that influence the struggle for majorities in various rooms of a dungeon. Each player fields units that have abilities such as locking down a room in the dungeon to prevent other players from adding units there or swapping units between rooms. In Glenn Drover’s Empires: Galactic Rebellion (which is only the latest iteration of a game once published under the Age of Empires license), a variety of units perform functions either related to or entirely additive to their roles in the majority contest. A Diplomat will let you bring another unit along to a planet to increase your strength there, while a Smuggler will let you get trade goods.

Sample Games

Axis & Allies (Harris, Jr., 1981) Belfort (Cormier and Lim, 2011) Cave Troll (Jolley, 2002) Command & Colors (Borg, 2006) Dai Senso! (Emrich, Prowell, Vasta, 2011) Dominant Species (Jensen, 2010) Glenn Drover’s Empires: Galactic Rebellion (Drover, 2016) Kemet (Bariot and Montiage, 2012) Nexus Ops (Cantino and Kimball, 2005) Star Wars: Rebellion (Konieczka, 2016) Titan (McAllister and Trampier, 1980) Triassic Terror (Hawes, 2013) Twilight Imperium (Petersen, 1997)

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ARC-04 Territories and Regions

Description

Maps can exhibit hierarchical relationships among their constituent spaces such that a territory might exist in a region and various attributes and parameters may be tied to the control of these areas.

Discussion

The concept of Regions constituted out of a number of Territories is common in conflict games. One typical mechanism provides an additional reward to players who control a set of Regions that compose a territory. This mechanism, a kind of territorial Set Collection (Chapter 12) can be implemented based on absolute control, like Risk, or based on majority control, as in EightMinute Empire: Legends or Twilight Struggle. Setting regional control offers some natural hooks for designers to hang additional concepts off of. Making movement between Regions more difficult or expensive enhances the defensibility of a region, once it has been taken. Factions can be assigned “homeland” benefits when in their own Regions too, as in Risk Legacy. In essence, regionalizing Territories provides another dimension by which to differentiate Territories, much as the terrain does (Illustration 11.2). Regional effects provide opportunities to bring a setting to life by providing narrative and mechanical events that differentiate the Territories from one another. For Intellectual-Property (IP)-based games like War of the Ring, regional parameters ensure that iconic moments in the original story can be recreated with greater fidelity. Strider can only be revealed as Aragorn and

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ARC-04 Territories and Regions crowned king if he reaches Minas Tirith or Dol Amroth. Similarly, the Corsairs of Umbar can only attack their historically hated enemies, Gondor, and cannot simply sail to any coastal region. 1960: The Making of the President’s card-driven system helps the Nixon player carry the West and the Kennedy player, the Northeast. The contest is decided mostly in the South and Midwest. Tough deviations are possible, the core identity and patterns of the 1960 election are reinforced by providing different regional strengths to the Kennedy and Nixon players, baked into the makeup of their unique decks.

Sample Games

1960: The Making of the President (Leonhard and Matthews, 2007) Eight-Minute Empire: Legends (Laukat, 2013) Risk (Lamorisse and Levin, 1959) Risk Legacy (Daviau and Dupuis, 2011) Twilight Struggle (Gupta and Matthews, 2005) War of the Ring (Di Meglio, Maggi, and Nepitello, 2004) Illustration 11.2 The Twilight Struggle board is clearly broken up into regions, as indicated by the backgrounds of the territories. Each territory has a stability rating, and some are designated as Battleground spaces, shown by the dark purple banner.

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ARC-05 Area Parameters

Description

In Area control games, Parameters are assigned to regions that impact why players might wish to control them and how they need to allocate resources to do so.

Discussion

The most common Area Parameters are the rewards gained for controlling areas. Tose could be VPs, which are awarded to the majority owner in El Grande or to a single owner in King of Tokyo. Other common rewards include resources, like in Nexus Ops, and access to special powers, like in Alien Frontiers. As previously discussed, access to adjacent territories can also be considered a special ability. Exploration games like The 7th Continent and dungeon crawlers like Descent: Journeys in the Dark will pile on a variety of parameters onto the tiles that make up their game boards—though admittedly, this is stretching the notion of area control extremely thin, particularly in a co-op context. Memoir ’44 has various bonuses and penalties for attacking and defending in and out of certain types of terrain, as well as rules modifying movement for units moving through terrain. It is a good example of the flexibility of assigning Area Parameters (Illustration 11.3). Carcassonne extends the notion of Area Parameters by assigning parameters to different features on each tile. These parameters include point values and rules for when and how they can be scored. Tough we don’t typically

Units may only see certain areas.

Discussion

Many tactical games need to determine if a unit can see another, typically for purposes of attacking. This is referred to as Line of Sight (LOS). A variety of mechanisms have been developed to deal with this situation, with different degrees of accuracy and complexity. LOS is a type of Force Projection (ARC- 06) in that it controls which areas of the board a unit may impact. The simplest LOS mechanism is to have a range of a certain number of spaces and to trace the shortest path of spaces (hexes or squares, typically) to the target. If there is any terrain that blocks LOS, the firing unit cannot see the target. PanzerBlitz uses this method. There are almost always multiple ways to trace paths from attacker to target, so typically, the attackers may choose which path they prefer. While this has the benefit of simplicity, it also makes for some unusual situations, particularly on square grids. Its use is typically restricted to hex grids. Games such as Advanced Squad Leader increase realism by having players lay a thread between the attacker and defender hexes. Dots are placed at the center of each hex to assist in this. If the thread touches any obstacles

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that block LOS, like buildings or forests, the LOS is blocked. The increased accuracy of this method comes at the cost of fiddliness in terms of moving pieces out of the way and adds the possibility of arguments, as the LOS may just graze certain obstacles and it isn’t totally clear if it is blocked or not (Illustration 11.4a). These systems need to deal with elevation changes as well, to account for hills, gullies, and multilevel buildings. All of these add both complexity and realism. Most games use a “layer cake” approach, with pieces being able to see all spaces on the same elevation as them and can only see lower levels if they are on the edge of their elevation (a “crest” hex). Some games even add rules for blind spots behind obstacles for observers at a height. In Nuns on the Run, players are trying to avoid the nuns patrolling the grounds. Movement is Point-to-Point (MOV-01), and LOS is determined by placing a straight edge between the two points and seeing if it hits any walls. As a help to players, the spaces are numbered, and the rules include a table showing if two spaces (looked up by number) can see each other or not. Nuns Illustration 11.4a A Line of Sight example from Advanced Squad Leader. LOS is traced from hex center to hex center and uses the actual artistic rendition of terrain features to determine what is blocked.

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ARC-08 Line of Sight on the Run also has facing. Nuns can only see 180 degrees in front of them. Other games like Advanced Squad Leader do not have facing. Miniatures games often use a “model’s eye” view to LOS. Players lean down to the table and check to see if they can see the opposing models. Laser pointers can be helpful here in making a determination. Yet, as with the thread method, this can often lead to player arguments. There may also need to be a judgment about whether some elements of the model don’t count for LOS. Warhammer Age of Sigmar, for example, specifies that decorative elements added to a model like flowing capes and large crowns are not valid for LOS. This allows players to exercise their creativity when painting and decorating models. Warmachine/Hordes sidesteps this by having players use standard cylinders to represent models when checking for LOS. The tactical battle game Tannhäuser takes a simplified approach to LOS. Spaces on the board are color-coded and grouped into “paths.” Characters on the same path (same colored circles) can see each other. Some spaces between paths have two different colors—to represent that they can be seen from any space in either path (Illustration 11.4b). LOS is a bedeviling aspect of game design. High-level conflict games don’t require these rules at all, but squad-level combat games usually do, Illustration 11.4b Line of Sight in Unmatched is determined by space color. A piece can see pieces in spaces of the same color.

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and these games often have some area control aspects to them. LOS usually interferes with force projection, so blocking LOS is a tool in the designer’s toolkit for modifying the way in which certain units shape the battlefield and the options players have for navigating it.

Sample Games

Advanced Squad Leader (Greenwood, 1985) Nuns on the Run (Moyersoen, 2010) PanzerBlitz (Dunnigan, 1970) Tannhäuser (Grosselin and Poli, 2007) Unmatched (Daviau and Jacobson, 2019) Warhammer Age of Sigmar (Uncredited, 2015) Warmachine/Hordes (McVey, Snoddy, and Wilson, 2003)

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Set Collection ў ў Humans are pattern-seeking creatures, which perhaps explains why so many games incorporate some version of set collection. There’s a nearly endless variety of types of sets to collect. Some sets are thematic, like Noah’s pairs of animals, or the Tree Little Pigs. Some are abstract, like Poker hands or melds in Gin Rummy, and some sets are arbitrary, like the compass, tablet, and gear science cards in 7 Wonders. Even game concepts like contracts or tickets can be considered types of set. But no matter their variety and under-lying commonality, all sets are built on the idea of synergy: the value or power of the set is greater than the sum of its parts. The result of this characteristic of sets is that as players collect the components of a set, they will naturally diverge in their valuation of the remaining components. Picking up the fifth dumpling in Sushi Go! means much more than the first tempura—but for another player, that tempura completes their set and scores five points, while the first dumpling is worth only a single point. This value difference means that inter-player competition is no longer zerosum. Players can set and achieve goals that are not in diametric opposition to their opponents, and the indirect conflicts that result engender a less aggressive dynamic that can appeal to players who may shy away from direct conflict. Set collection can readily support multiple dimensions, and this is common to all but the simplest of games. Number-based sets can be collected in numerical order or in multiples of a single number. Add in colors or suits for yet another dimension. These orthogonal dimensions create choices and tension, as players consider which types of suits to collect based on their value, distribution of their components, and what their opponents might be trying to collect. The rich math behind the set collection makes it a great tool for designers, but just as important for its popularity is the thematic consonance and DOI: 10.1201/9781003179184-12

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intuitiveness of the set collection. In Ticket to Ride, there’s no imaginable reason why, at least from a simulation perspective, a set of four blue train cards can connect Chicago to Omaha, and also Helena to Winnipeg but not Winnipeg to Duluth, or Dallas to El Paso. Surely, the actual inputs of labor, capital, and raw materials are similar, and it’s hard to think why, in practice, the blue tracks are any different from the green ones. And yet, through the set collection, these issues present no challenge to players, their understanding of the game, and their willingness to accept its conceits. Some tracks are green, and some are blue. Game on. That’s the real magic of the set collection. It is an incredibly versatile mechanism for abstracting a whole host of possible game activities. Sometimes, these sets feel richly thematic and representative of the activities being simulated, and other times, the sets are merely a veneer. But our human love for patterns and combinations means we’ll accept quite a bit of abstraction in our set collection. Coupling this activity with clever scoring and collection dynamics, you have one of the fundamental building blocks of board game design. While set collection can be implemented with many different kinds of components, by far the most common components are cards and tiles. For the sake of simplicity, we will refer to set elements generically as cards, unless referring to a specific game that uses some other component.

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SET-01 Set Valuation SET-01 Set Valuation

Description

Set Valuation is the logic or underlying mathematical model by which designers assign values to sets of game elements. Set Valuation can be in terms of currency, resources, or victory points.

Discussion

To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, it’s one thing to collect the set, but something else entirely to value the set. Many other chapters in this book, like “Economics” (Chapter 7), “Auctions” (Chapter 8), and “Card Mechanisms” (Chapter 13), discuss how resources are allocated and acquired, but in this section, we’ll discuss what those resources are actually worth. Implicit in this framing is that sets are nearly always converted into some benefit and consumed, turned in, or otherwise removed from play, even if only at game-end. Sets are not typically semi-persistent: either you complete them, and spend or score them right away, or they persist and are scored at game-end. However, some sets may be held in hand, and scored when a player chooses to do so for maximal effect. In the introduction to this chapter, we described sets as being worth more than the sum of their parts. A more precise way to say that is that sets do not

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Discussion

Earlier, in Set Valuation (SET-01), we discussed using sets as resources or as direct point-scoring elements. Here, we focus on sets as game verbs and adverbs, as elements that provide actions (verbs) or buffs (adverbs) to actions. Combos are an emergent aspect of gameplay, in that they aren’t explicitly explained in the rules, even though effective play usually requires finding strong Combos. For designers who wish to cultivate this kind of play in their games, there are some best practices to follow. Games with Combo potential usually have a modular, black-box approach to actions, which tend to be direct and non-contingent. It also helps to have a few types of resources and a variety of domains within which game elements can exist. Finally, more open turn structures, with more options for how to play, help create a Combo dynamic. Card games like Seasons illustrate this well. Cards can exist in a deck, a hand, or in play. Actions that move cards from the deck to the hand create a chain that allows another play. Resources that can be converted into effects, or more resources, create the possibility of virtuous spirals. And the existence of dice opens up a whole dimension of possibilities for altering die faces and rerolling dice.

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Combos exist in many games, perhaps most famously in Magic: The Gathering. However, when played in constructed formats, where players build their own decks before play, the set-collection aspect of the game exists largely in the purchasing of cards. In draft formats, however, players who can identify and select synergistic cards are in essence defining and collecting sets. What makes this type of set collection different from the set collection of a game like Coloretto is that the sets in Magic: The Gathering are not predefined or fixed. While the designers have certainly intended many of the powerful effects of certain card combinations, by not explicitly declaring these combinations as sets, they preserve the joy of discovery for players. In Kemet, acquiring tiles that enhance your movement ability can synergize with a tile that forces your opponent to take casualties before a battle commences. Together, these two Abilities make for a potent combination that allows you to project force across the board. Kemet has many other synergies hiding among the power tiles that players can acquire. Many games have these kinds of Combos, and identifying and assembling a Combo and then running it is the core of the gameplay. Many so-called engine-building games are precisely this: getting together a few elements that create a virtuous cycle of increasing productivity. Some games have you building actual engines, like Steampunk Rally, while in others, the engine is more metaphoric, such as the combinations of Abilities and scoring that you can build in Race for the Galaxy. In Orléans, a specific set of workers is required to trigger taking an action. The 7th Continent has a crafting system that allows players to combine cards, and Evolution features a similar system to provide creatures with traits and even to create multiple species with complementary Abilities that model symbiotic biological relationships. Glory to Rome and its spiritual successor, Mottainai, can best be described as games that challenge players to assemble a set of cards that add up to a game-breaking Combo. We’ll end by reflecting that set collection is dynamic, a pattern common to many games that are instantiated by a number of mechanisms, including those that define acquisition, usage, and valuation. Like with Auctions (Chapter 8), at some point, we begin to observe set-collection elements within nearly every game. That observation, though interesting, may not be useful to the working designer. The set collection as a concept may be everywhere, but the set collection as a mechanism exists in fewer places.

Sample Games

The 7th Continent (Roudy and Sautter, 2017)

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SET-05 Combo Abilities Coloretto (Schacht, 2003) Glory to Rome (Chudyk, 2005) Kemet (Bariot and Montiage, 2012) Magic: The Gathering (Garfield, 1993) Mottainai (Chudyk, 2015) Orléans (Stockhausen, 2014) Race for the Galaxy (Lehmann, 2007) Seasons (Bonnessée, 2012) Steampunk Rally (Bishop, 2015)

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Card Mechanisms ў ў Card games go back to the first millennium CE, possibly as early as the 800s in China, and by 1400, variations on the now-familiar 4-suit, 52-card deck are attested to in Persia, the Middle East, and Europe. All of this is to say that card games and their attendant mechanisms have been around for a long, long time. Core concepts in card games include a face-down draw deck from which players can draw cards privately into a hand; the public table where all players can see and interact with cards; the tableau, a private, but visible play area; and the discard pile, which has varying rules for interaction. The various types of runs and sets, predicated on the ranks and suits of cards, have different implications for different games, as does the existence of “joker” or wild cards in a variety of flavors. Overall goals of card games might include shedding cards from a hand, capturing or avoiding specific cards, collecting a larger number of cards than the opponent, winning a specified number of hands, defeating attacks from other players, and aligning outcomes to bids. Card games have rules about hand limits, how cards may be acquired, used, and discarded, how turn order may be manipulated, and what the specific composition of cards in the deck must be. Broadly, we can speak of trick-taking games, shedding games, and handcomparison games, though there is substantial hybridization. Trick-taking games focus on card comparison in card-by-card and turn-by-turn play, often tied to some contract or bid that players seek to make. Shedding games are games in which players seek to get rid of their cards first, as in Rummystyle games. Ladder-Climbing games, a hybrid type, are a combination of trick-taking games and shedding games that are especially popular. Players shed their hands by laying down a valid set, as in Rummy, but compete for DOI: 10.1201/9781003179184-13

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the right to lead a new ladder by playing the highest-ranked cards of that set. Hand-comparison games often involve betting, like Poker and Blackjack, where players compare hands based on some standard ranking of hands. The action in these games is in acquiring the set, rather than grouping an existing hand into a few sets and playing them out. Modern card games sometimes follow these models fairly closely. There are many Rummy, trick-taking, climbing, and even Poker variants, from the Mystery Rummy series to Tichu to Pyramid Poker. However, there is a new school of modern card games that shares basic ideas about decks and hands with classic card games, but little about the nature and meaning of the cards themselves. It will take a better work of history to properly trace the evolution of card games and to disentangle the influence of collectible card games from the emergence of card-based versions of middleweight European-style board games. However, the modern design embraces cards as flexible game elements that function almost as rulebook additions. Cards carry a small payload of additional rules that define how they may be used, while possibly also sharing broader characteristics like suits, costs, prerequisites, bindings to other game elements, and more. We cover many mechanisms throughout this book that are often implemented with cards, and there’s probably no truly satisfying definition for the category of card games. Nonetheless, in this section, we’ll explore some of the major concepts and mechanisms that feature regularly in card games and games played mostly with cards, which we haven’t already addressed elsewhere in this volume.

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CAR-01 Trick-Taking CAR-01 Trick-Taking

Description

Players play cards from their hand to the table in a series of rounds or “tricks,” which are each evaluated separately to determine a winner and to apply other potential effects.

Discussion

Trick-Taking games are about 1,000 years old, and as such, there are many games, variations, and scoring rules. Covering all those possibilities is beyond our scope, and we will instead focus briefly on the core concepts. Trick-Taking games begin with dealing cards out. In classic games, like Bridge and Spades, all cards are dealt out evenly to the players. Some games have a betting phase in which players declare the number of tricks they intend to take. After this, players play in turn order, starting with the first player, called the lead. Many games require that players “follow the lead” or “follow suit,” which means playing a card of the same suit as the lead, if possible. The player playing the highest card of the lead suit wins the trick and becomes the lead for the next round. Often, one suit is the “trump” suit, and cards of that suit outrank cards of the lead suit, no matter their numerical value. Finally, players score for the number of tricks they’ve won. Designers have created variations of all of these core rules. In Diamonds, rather than dealing the entire deck, a subset of the deck is dealt out, which creates uncertainty and lowers the impact of memory and card counting. In

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CAR-04 Card Draw, Limits, and Deck Exhaustion discards. In Memoir ’44, scenario-specific rules set the draws, discards, and hand limits for each faction, which allows the designer to model military concepts like surprise, supply lines, and operational capacity. Individual cards, like “Recon,” allow players to draw additional cards, at the cost of taking a less powerful action on the map. In Evolution: The Beginning, players always receive the same number of cards each turn, but they may play as many or as few cards as they wish and carry over all their cards from turn to turn. Intentionally or not, this evokes the idea of punctuated equilibrium, in which long periods of limited speciation are punctuated by moments of great activity, evolutionarily speaking. Ticket to Ride similarly doesn’t encumber players with a hand limit but imposes a draw limit of two (one if you draw a face-up wild train from the display). Players may lay down melds of any size though, so long as a matching route in size and color is available on the board. Tus, player hand-size fluctuates throughout the game, and skilled players will consider the potential moves their opponents can make based on the number of cards in their hands. Bohnanza requires players to draw, and either plant or trade, a fixed number of cards from the deck each turn. These cards can then be supplemented by any number of cards in hand. Some games treat Card Draw as similar to any other resource. In Deus, players choose to either play a card or discard some number of cards. Players may discard any number of cards, but one discarded card, and its suit, determines which discard ability is triggered. The discard abilities include gaining money, resources, buildings, or additional card draws. In Race for the Galaxy, players must explicitly choose whether to convert goods, represented by cards, into victory points or additional card draws. At the other end of the spectrum, from this more permissive approach to card economies is Trough the Ages, which sorely restricts card movement from the market row into the hand. Players must spend precious actions to acquire cards from the market row and may never exceed their hand limit—unlike many other games that allow players to temporarily exceed hand limits and then discard down at the end of the phase or turn. In fact, Trough the Ages: A Story of Civilization has no player-triggered discard mechanism at all, and taking a card into hand comes with an enormous opportunity cost. The hand limit is itself determined by a civilization’s government type, and more advanced governments increase the player’s hand size and thus, fairly directly, the power and possibilities of that player’s civilization.

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Sample Games

Power Grid (Friese, 2004) Bohnanza (Rosenberg, 1997) Deus (Dujardin, 2014) Diamonds (Fitzgerald, 2014) Evolution: The Beginning (Crapuchetts, 2016) Forbidden Island (Leacock, 2010) Memoir ’44 (Borg, 2004) Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper (Fitzgerald, 1998) Race for the Galaxy (Lehmann, 2007) Trough the Ages: A Story of Civilization (Chvátil, 2006) Ticket to Ride (Moon, 2004)

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CAR-05 Deck Building CAR-05 Deck Building

Description

Players play cards out of individual decks, seeking to acquire new cards and to play through their decks iteratively, improving them over time through card acquisition.

Discussion

Deck Building isn’t a single mechanism, and throughout this book, we discuss mechanisms that are also present in Deck-Building games. Nevertheless, a core structure has emerged in deck-building games that we’ll consider here. Tough Deck Building is a relatively new mechanism and genre, having appeared first in 2008’s Dominion, follow-ups have often mimicked Dominion’s basic structures. The basic idea is that cards can provide actions, currency for use only in the current turn, or victory points. In base Dominion, nearly all the cards provide only one of each of these uses, but many deck builders that followed combined these and offered players a choice for how to use each card. Some games have also expanded beyond these boundaries, like the bases that persist in players’ tableaus until they are destroyed in Star Realms. In many deck builders, players will dispose of their whole hand of cards each turn. Commonly, players have a limit on the number of cards they can play as actions, but no limit on the cards that can be played as money, though not all cards will have a money value. While Dominion limits the number of buy actions that players can take, most follow-ups limit players to what they can afford. Some cards allow players to draw, and then play, even more cards. At the conclusion of their turn, players will draw back to the full hand, usually five cards. While Dominion provided for a static, open market for cards,

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later deck builders like Ascension: Deckbuilding Game and Star Realms offer players a market row that is replenished from a randomized deck. Acquisition methods are a good place to evoke a theme, while also addressing the inherent variability of laying out cards for purchase at random. Valley of the Kings has a pyramidal market that allows players to buy only the three cards at the base, after which higher-level cards will drop down into lower levels as the pyramid crumbles. This mechanism gives players foresight, and a bit of control, over which cards will be available to their opponents. In Eminent Domain, basic cards are acquired at no cost from a central display, but powerful tech cards are acquired by being able to play the requisite number of technology icons. Tough there are no dependencies and prerequisites as in an actual Tech Tree (ACT-16), the effect of making players show a greater number of technology icons for the more powerful cards offers a similar scaling effect. The synergies of certain combinations of cards create more viable and powerful branches through this tiered collection of technologies. For readers interested in fully exploring Deck-Building mechanisms, Dominion’s expansions are an instructive journey. Intrigue introduces negative player interactions like forced discards. Alchemy introduces a second currency type, and cards which can only be purchased with that currency. Seaside introduces the ability to carry over cards from turn to turn. Prosperity adds treasures, a new kind of resource that can be spent to trigger abilities without using up actions. Dark Ages focuses on interactions with the discard pile, while Adventures adds persistent cards that can be played in a future hand. Cornucopia rewards players for collecting varieties of cards, while Guilds introduces persistent money and reasons to spend it. Dominion represents one approach to Deck Building, which is part of a larger category called pool building, which includes pools built from items other than cards. This can be entirely isomorphic to Deck Building, as in Puzzle Strike, in which cards are replaced with custom Poker chips that are drawn from a bag. The Poker chip component is easier to shuffle as often as deck builders require and is more durable when subjected to frequent shuffling. Orléans, on the other hand, has players drawing workers out of a bag, who can then be assigned to a variety of actions on a player’s board. Andy Parks, the designer of the deck builder Core Worlds, describes the distinction between these games as being between drafting verbs, that is, actions, as in most deck builders, and drafting nouns, as in Orléans. In a deck builder like Dominion, most cards represent an action that players can take simply by playing the card, which is what Parks means by drafting verbs. In Orléans, players pull workers out of a bag and assign them to different

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CAR-05 Deck Building actions. However, actions require some specific combination of worker types in order to trigger—a kind of Set Collection (Chapter 12)—rather than each worker type having a specific type of action associated with it. Parks refers to this as drafting nouns. His own Assault of the Giants game features drafting adjectives—modifiers that provide bonuses and additional abilities, but that must attach to existing cards and characters—out of the pool, presenting yet another possible way to construct a pool builder. Pools work well as resolution mechanisms, where they’re called chit-pull systems. There are also games that don’t have true pool-building mechanisms but come very close. In Machi Koro, players purchase numbered cards whose abilities are triggered based on die rolls. Players can buy cards, representing the pool, and they can buy cards that trigger on the same numbers, to increase the payouts of specific numbers. However, players have a limited impact on the over-all probability of numbers being rolled. Tey can choose to roll one die or two dice, but that’s all. In a deck builder, players can assure themselves of a zero probability of not drawing certain cards, simply by not acquiring them. Machi Koro doesn’t provide quite that level of control to players. Going farther out on this mechanical limb, we can consider the placement of settlements in Catan as a pool-building-adjacent mechanism. Even the selection of runners in Can’t Stop shares something of this flavor. In Roll for the Galaxy, players acquire worker dice that have different faces and different values as goods. Players may shape their overall pool both based on which dice they acquire and which dice they place back into their pool each turn. As deck builders and collectible card games show, there is an enormous amount of design space outlined by cards and some tokens. In addition to the games discussed above, cooperative deck builders like Shadowrun: Crossfire, Gloomhaven, and Pathfinder Adventure Card Game continue to blur the line between card, board, and role-playing games. There are also variants like no-shuffle deck builders like Aeon’s End and build-the-enemy’s deck games like Tiny Epic Defender.

Sample Games

Aeon’s End (Riley, 2016) Ascension: Deckbuilding Game (Fiorillo and Gary, 2010) Assault of the Giants (Parks, 2017) Can’t Stop (Sackson, 1980) Catan (Teuber, 1995) Core Worlds (Parks, 2011)

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Dominion (Vaccarino, 2008) Dominion and Expansions (Vaccarino, 2008) Eminent Domain (Jaffee, 2011) Gloomhaven (Childres, 2017) Intrigue (Dorra, 1994) Machi Koro (Suganuma, 2012) Orléans (Stockhausen, 2014) Pathfinder Adventure Card Game (Selinker, Brown, O’Connor, Peterson, and Weidling, 2013) Puzzle Strike (Sirlin, 2010) Roll for the Galaxy (Huang and Lehmann, 2014) Shadowrun: Crossfire (Elliot, Heinsoo, Lin, Marques, McCarthy, Schneider, and Watkins, 2014) Star Realms (Dougherty and Kastle, 2014) Valley of the Kings (Cleaver, 2014)

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CAR-06 Drafting CAR-06 Drafting

Description

Drafting is a means of distributing cards or other game elements to players through an ordered selection process.

Discussion

Many games can be described as a process of acquiring, manipulating, and spending resources. One of the main distinctions between modern and classic card games is the move away from random deals and draws and towards more agential means of acquiring cards. Auctions are one popular method (Chapter 8), but they can be cumbersome, mathy, and intimidating to many players. Drafting represents a quicker alternative. One way to think of a draft is that instead of precisely valuing each lot and bidding accordingly in an auction, players can instead ask What do I want most right now? Do I have to take it now, or will it be here for me next turn too?

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Drafting cards is closely related to Action, Drafting (ACT-02), and Worker Placement (Chapter 9). The core concept is the same in all of these: players select, in turn order, something for their exclusive use. What makes card Drafting different is the variety of design options afforded by the physicality of the card. The draft variant most similar to worker placement is the Rochester draft, as exemplified in The Networks. All available cards are laid on the table, and players each take one card on their turns. Play continues until all the cards have been taken or all players pass their turn. Like a worker placement game, Rochester drafts make all options visible and available at the same time. This can be overwhelming for players and can lead to analysis paralysis, just like in a worker placement game. By physically removing cards from the display, Rochester drafts simplify visually as the draft continues. Consequently, each card is also exclusive to the player who selects it, though designers can include multiple copies of a card if they wish for an action to be available to multiple players. In addition, for games in which cards are taken in hand and played in a later phase, Rochester drafts test the players’ ability to recall what cards their opponents took. In a worker placement game, the players’ pawns encode that information visually, and everyone can see where each pawn was played. Another simple draft mechanism is pick-and-pass. In Lords of Waterdeep, a game effect calls for the active player to draw a hand of cards equal to the number of players at the table, select one to keep, and pass the rest. Each player does this in turn, until the last player is left with the last card. Some games call for drawing one more card than the number of players, so the last player also has a choice. This mechanism is tightly coupled to turn order. Lords of Waterdeep leverages this coupling to provide the greatest return to the player who triggered the effect, but designers should take care not to overly advantage players based on turn order when using this mechanism. To mitigate turn-order imbalances, designers can implement a snake draft, in which the order of Drafting in round 1 is inverted in round 2, so that the last player in the first round becomes the first player in the last round. Snake Drafting mitigates but does not resolve turn-order imbalance. Assuming a level drop-off in the values of cards, the value of the first choice in round 1 and the last choice in round 2 is greater than the value of the last choice in round 1 and the first choice in round 2. In cases where values don’t drop off in a level fashion, the problem remains: some positions are superior to others. Games where the difference in value is negligible, or in which different selections have different values for each player, may be the best place to implement

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CAR-06 Drafting snake drafts. Most games will use a snake draft as part of some larger system, or in setup, as in Catan’s placement of initial settlements. One game to cleverly address this issue is Kingdomino, in which players draft dominoes with two terrain squares on them and add them to their kingdom. Some squares feature crowns, which make all connected squares of the same terrain worth one point per crown in the combined region. The tiles are numbered, with the lowest-numbered tiles being the least valuable. To draft the tiles, they are laid out in numbered order in a vertical display. The player who chooses the most valuable tiles, the bottom tile in the display, will claim that tile, but will go last in the following turn. Conversely, the player selecting the least-valuable top tile will go first in the next round. While the tiles have some absolute value, they will differ in relative value to each player based on the exact terrains featured on them and what is in each player’s tableau already. In some cases, a player will gladly take a weaker tile, and its better place in turn order, because of how well the tile fits in his or her own board. Another approach to balancing the turn-order issue of Drafting is to have parallel pick-and-pass drafts happening simultaneously. This method, featured in 7 Wonders, Sushi Go!, and Among the Stars, is executed by dealing each player a hand with a number of cards equal to or greater than the number of players playing. Each player picks a card from his or her hand to keep, then passes the hand to the left, and receives a hand from the player to the right. Play continues until all cards are selected. This kind of draft accelerates gameplay because all players are choosing at the same time. However, unlike a Rochester draft, where all choices are visible at all times and where players have nearly equal access to every card, in a parallel draft, each player will only see some fraction of the cards—as few as half in a 7-player game of 7 Wonders—and will simply not ever have the option of taking those cards. Another consideration is if one player is particularly slow, he or she can create a bottleneck, which often leads to confusion about which player is up to which round of Drafting. As mentioned earlier, Drafting, in nearly all its formats, presents two questions. The first is what does the player value most. Many players will stop their analysis here and select the card they like best. But, more skilled players will ask whether they need to take that card right away or when turn order wheels back around to them, that card will still be there. This technique, called “wheeling,” adds tension and skill to Drafting. Wheeling is particularly important to booster drafts of Magic: The Gathering and other Collectible Card Games (CCG). What’s unique about

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these styles of the draft is that the pool of cards in the draft is unknown to any player, since they come out of sealed booster packs. Moreover, in many CCGs, card synergies are tightly coupled such that once you begin drafting toward some strategy or deck type, other cards drop to little or even negative value. The extremes in valuation for cards between players make wheeling much more likely to succeed, since the card that one player values the most may have little use to the other players. When that disparity is large enough, it might make sense to take a card that’s useless to you, simply to deny it to other players, a move called hate-drafting. Wheeling and hate-drafting are not mechanisms, but they are behaviors that emerge from the Drafting mechanism and the underlying card distributions and overall game system. Tey are part of what makes the Drafting mechanism so engaging, and designers should evaluate their prototypes with these behaviors in mind. A few other variants on the parallel Drafting structure include whether cards are played immediately after Drafting, as in Best Treehouse Ever, or in turn order during a play phase, for example, in Medieval Academy. Sometimes, not all cards drafted are played, as in Fairy Tale, where only three of the five cards drafted each round are played and the other two are discarded. Another variant is to allow players to mix their hand with the hand of cards being passed. In this kind of setup, players may take as many cards as they wish from the new hand, as long as they pass the correct number of cards to the next player. Having players play a card immediately after drafting can also help keep the draft on schedule and avoids bottlenecking and confusion by forcing all players to play at roughly the same cadence. Drafting games can sometimes be played at 2 players, as in Seasons, but they tend to be a little flat. Tides of Madness is a drafting game limited to 2 players only, and among its innovations is that players can be forced to collect cards with madness symbols on them and can even lose the game if they collect too many. 7 Wonders Duel is a 2-player drafting game with quite a few mechanical twists to ratchet up the tension. Players can only draft cards on the bottom-most revealed level of a structure, but by taking a card, they can reveal face-down cards higher in the structure that become available for drafting. Cards can be used for multiple purposes, including selling off for money, which incentivizes hate-drafting. In addition, there are three possible win conditions, including two in-game sudden-death wins. One win condition is tied to a tug-of-war contest that requires both players to take enough military cards to prevent being overrun by the other player. Another instant-win

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CAR-06 Drafting condition is subject to a set-collection contest in which players must draft wisely to at least prevent their opponents from assembling the winning set. These during-game concerns, and the possibility of forcing certain lines of play because of them, add richness to the Drafting choices.

Sample Games

7 Wonders (Bauza, 2010) 7 Wonders Duel (Bauza and Cathala, 2015) Among the Stars (Bagiartakis, 2012) Best Treehouse Ever (Almes, 2015) Catan (Teuber, 1995) Fairy Tale (Nakamura, 2004) Kingdomino (Cathala, 2016) Lords of Waterdeep (Lee and Tompson, 2012) Magic: The Gathering (Garfield, 1993) Medieval Academy (Poncin, 2014) The Networks (Hova, 2016) Seasons (Bonnessée, 2012) Sushi Go! (Walker-Harding, 2013) Tides of Madness (Čurla, 2016)

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CAR-07 Deck Construction

Description

Prior to a multiplayer game session, players select the cards that will make up the decks they use during the multiplayer session. The game provides rules governing how decks may be constructed that typically covers the number of cards in the deck, required cards, restricted cards, and limits on copies of the same card. This mechanism is isomorphic to force-building or list-building in miniatures games and can more generally refer to any game that requires players to assemble private pools of game elements that they will use during play.

Discussion

Deck construction is a retronym, a term that is only required because of the emergence of a later mechanism that creates ambiguity about what we may be referring to. In deck-building players build decks and play them as an integrated part of the core play experience (see CAR-05). Deck construction, on the other hand, refers to games where players typically prepare a deck in advance.

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CAR-07 Deck Construction The most familiar implementation of deck construction is common in trading card games (TCG), from competitive dueling games like Magic: The Gathering to cooperative ones like Arkham Horror: The Card Game. Players sit down with a pool of cards and build a deck to suit their play style and objectives, within the rules set forth by the game. Perhaps the most important rule of all in deck construction is defining the pool of cards available to players. In competitive TCGs, there might be many sanctioned play formats, each with its own rules about available cards. Official tournaments might be limited to cards from a specific cycle or set of expansions, and within that pool, there may be cards that are banned entirely or limited to fewer copies than the normal limit. In collectible games, another key limit is which cards players own and thus have access to. Even in non-collectible formats, such as the Living Card Game® format introduced by Fantasy Flight Games, players may not have as many copies of a card as they wish and may need to acquire multiple sets to construct a deck to their exact specifications. Other types of limits include limiting players to selecting cards of a particular faction and to selecting cards with a total cost that falls under some budgeted amount. These limits are frequently found in miniatures and skirmish games. Both present useful opportunities for designers. Faction identities emerge from the abilities assigned to their cards, and players might prefer factions that support their desired play style. Buying a deck or army within some point limit ensures that players have roughly balanced sides, even as they select units from large and varied pools. Rules about deck construction are critical to ensuring playability, balance, and limitation on exploits. In games where deck exhaustion is a loss condition, the maximum number of cards in the deck determines how appealing and successful a “milling” strategy, which forces opponents to discard from their decks, might be. A required minimum number of cards in the deck, coupled with limits on copies of cards, sets the variability range for a deck. Without those rules, a deck might contain one particular combo of a couple of cards over and over again, ensuring the combo is present in every hand. This might be quite efficient, but it undermines the conceit of the genre, in which players seed effective combinations into a deck that is large enough to output variable draws. While deck construction is usually a mechanism intended to give players a lot of agency, choice, and self-expression within a game system, it can also be a barrier to entry. Building a deck in advance of a game takes time, and

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building an effective deck takes experience. Many games offer preconstructed starter decks that let players jump into the game and only later engage in the deck-construction elements. In cooperative and solo games, decks will typically have to be rebuilt to optimize deck contents for each scenario, making the meta-game activity of deck construction a key aspect of engagement with the game. An alternative to pregame deck construction is a draft format. CAR-06 goes into detail about draft options. Rather than having rules about deck size, numbers of copies of a single card allowed, and other restrictions, drafting naturally constrains players by only allowing them to select from the pool of available cards, a pool which is shared by all players. At the other end of the spectrum of agency and engagement lies Smash Up. Smash Up invites players to select two different faction decks and shuffle them together to produce one integrated deck. These faction decks are all preconstructed and so players are not selecting individual cards at all. This is the most extreme version of the limitations of deck contents, and it completely removes the barriers of deck construction, though at a high cost to the player agency in the design of the deck. Deck construction is part of a larger design pattern in which players choose the kinds of power-ups, abilities, and characteristics they want to play with. One axis of differentiation is whether the choices happen in the meta-game, as in a TCG, or in a pregame selection format. While Smash Up does technically have rules for drafting the available factions, players often simply just decide to play with some pair of factions without formally engaging in that process. In Seasons, on the other hand, players use a pick-and-pass drafting format (CAR-06) that is very much the first stage of the game itself, precisely because players are responding to each other’s choices as they move through the selection process. Notable marginal examples straddle a broad range. In Baseball Highlights 2045, players begin with preconstructed decks and draft new cards in between rounds. This is a kind of midpoint between deck construction, deck building, and preconstructed decks. In the solo scenario-based game Israeli Air Force Leader, players choose a squadron of pilots for each mission. One might even see Galaxy Trucker as an example of deck construction, albeit as loosely construed as possible. These examples demonstrate the wealth of possibilities available to designers in designing a meta-game selection experience for players.

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CAR-07 Deck Construction

Sample Games

Arkham Horror: The Card Game (French and Newman, 2016) Baseball Highlights 2045 (Fitzgerald, 2015) Galaxy Trucker (Chvátil, 2007) Israeli Air Force Leader (Verssen and Verssen, 2017) Magic: The Gathering (Garfield, 1993) Seasons (Bonnessée, 2012) Smash Up (Peterson, 2012)

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CAR-08 Multi-Use Cards ? Definition Multiple actions are shown on a card, but only one can be used.

Discussion

In this mechanism, the cards are typically broken up into clearly defined areas, each of which presents the player with a different option. Note: We use “cards” throughout this entry, as that is the most common implementation. Tiles may also be used, although this mechanism can also be used on tiles or other components. However, it does require a certain amount of real estate to make the choices clear, so cards tend to be the component of choice. This mechanism presents the players with two or more choices, and they can select only one to perform. For example, in La Granja, each card has four different abilities that can be used, each of which is arranged on the edge of a card. The clever player mat allows for cards to be tucked under any of its four edges, so only the operative section of the card is showing. Once

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CAR-08 Multi-Use Cards the card is placed it cannot be moved—the player forgoes the other options (Illustration 13.1a). Sometimes, the cards can only be used one time, as in La Granja. In others, however, they are recycled so that players may select different options each time. In Gloomhaven, for example, each action card has two abilities, and the player can choose which to execute each time the card returns to their hand. A positive feature of this mechanism is that it presents the players with clear and focused options. It also naturally leads to difficult decisions, particularly when only one option may be chosen the entire game. This feeds into players’ feelings of decision anxiety, which may or may not be a design goal. A key consideration for the designer is which abilities to combine on the same card. One option is simply to randomly assign them to cards. However, this may result cards where one choice is generally superior to the others, which can reduce the decision space. A better approach is to match the power levels of the different options. This will maximize the difficulty in the player deciding which option to use. A final consideration is whether to thematically tie the elements together for each card. In Gloomhaven, the two halves of the cards are frequently thematically connected. A subset of this mechanism is Action/Event (ACT-04). In this system, players can choose from a set number of action points or an event. Since one element of the card is a number, balancing is simplified. See that mechanism for more details about specific implementation considerations. Illustration 13.1a The cards in La Granja are placed under the player mat at different edges, only showing the chosen section of the card.

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An alternative approach to Multi-Use cards is to allow the cards themselves to be used as physical objects, typically as a discard. For example, in Race for the Galaxy, cards must be discarded to pay to play other cards. In The Ares Project, cards can be played either face up, typically creating a structure that can create units, or face down on those structures where they represent the resources required for the units to be built. The Multi-Use cards in Combat Commander have six functions in the game; however, only two are options for the players. At the top of the card is an Order that players can issue on their turn. Next, there is an Action, which can be used either on their own or on their opponent’s turn. Below the Action is an Event. Randomly, the players may be required to flip the top card of their deck and perform the Event. Finally, at the bottom left is a Random Hex, which can be used for some events and other game functions, and at the bottom right a series of die rolls, which are used to resolve actions. Additionally, the die rolls may be in a special “trigger” box which can generate events, sniper attacks, or jam guns (Illustration 13.1b). Illustration 13.1b The cards in Combat Commander serve many purposes. Players use Orders and Actions to command their units. The other features are various types of randomizers.

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CAR-08 Multi-Use Cards All of this allows a compact way to present a wide range of information. It also gives savvy players the ability to track which die rolls have been used, for example, to modulate their play accordingly.

Sample Games

Andean Abyss (Ruhnke, 2012) The Ares Project (Engelstein and Engelstein, 2011) Ceylon (Zinsli and Zinsli, 2018) Combat Commander: Europe (Jensen, 2006) Gloomhaven (Childress, 2017) Glory to Rome (Chudyk, 2005) La Granja (Keller and Odendahl, 2014) We the People (Herman, 1993)

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CAR-09 Tags

Description

Game objects, typically cards, have icons or other identifiers that identify them as belonging to specific categories. These tags may trigger special effects and/or have values and meaning that can vary, even within the scope of a single play. Tags are additional parameters on top of the base meaning of the game element, so tags represent a means of coupling the game element with more mechanisms and systems. Tags are also bookmarks that can reference a variable set of possible rules that are encoded elsewhere, so they are also a means to modularize, or uncouple, game triggers and game effects.

Discussion

Tags sit quite close to the boundary between a mechanism and a graphical representation, and they are among the most common and useful approaches to creating interconnections between game elements and categories. A card or similar game element is a collection of parameters. Some parameters have specific game meaning, such as the speed or strength of a unit, or the color of a pawn. Other parameters may have no game meaning at all, as is often the case with the size of a pawn or marker. Some

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CAR-09 Tags parameters have a variable meaning based on other cards, game conditions, scenario rules, and more. Tags indicate that a card has additional implications and parameters. Suits of cards in traditional card games are a kind of tag that puts cards into one of four categories. This is an Ur-mechanism that one can find in an enormous number of games. Viewed in this way, card colors, suits, and types can all be considered tags. There is not a substantial distinction between using a card color, icon, or keyword to differentiate cards from one another, and the choice of which visual representation to use is largely a matter of usability. Color is a favorite primary method of distinguishing card categories, but as the number of parameters a card needs to store increases, tags are a handy solution. Tags are also somewhat more amenable to storing multiple values. While it is possible for a card to belong to several colors, it can be a strain to represent this clearly. Multiple tags on a card are more legible when representing a handful of parameters. Tags are useful for a few different purposes: as an additional fixed dimension of categorization of a card, creating a variable that can be defined differently in different scenarios. Tags as an additional fixed dimension are familiar features of many card-driven games. Costs for playing a card from hand are often represented with icons, as in 7 Wonders. These could be viewed as a kind of tag. Terraforming Mars builds on this idea by presenting category tags, such as Space, Plants, and Science. Some tags, like Space and Building tags, allow players to pay the cost of the associated card with an alternate resource, like titanium and steel. These are fixed attributes of these tags, which apply to all players at all times. Tags are also used in Terraforming Mars in a contingent way. Space tags have no fixed meaning on their own. However, in some games, they may contribute towards achieving certain milestones, they may be themselves the subject of a majority competition, playing a card with a Space tag may trigger some effect, and some cards may require a certain number of Space tags to be in a player’s tableau as a prerequisite. The various other tags in the game operate similarly using this consistent pattern as a language for the game’s mechanisms. This consistency in functional relationships makes it easier to grasp the rules as a system, while the sheer variety of tags and possible effects provides a large toolbox of possible effects. The combination of tag types, mechanisms that key off of the tags, and the effects themselves create a highly expressive system that

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can describe many different kinds of projects, from hurling asteroids at a planet to nurturing plants under a dome to searching for microbial life in the red dust of Mars. Scenario-based games often use tags to create a similar variability from scenario to scenario. In Horrified, the symbol “!” is used to indicate that a monster’s special ability should be triggered. Each game is played with a selection of different monsters, each with its own special ability. The trigger simply says to trigger a monster’s special effect. The effect that occurs depends on the specific monsters that happen to be in the game. This type of modularity is part of the toolkit of object-oriented programming, which seeks to uncouple inputs, mechanisms, and outputs in order to create many little machines that accept a defined input, perform some basic function, and produce a defined output. The machines, or modules, can then be strung together in different ways to produce complex interactions. The game design leverages these ideas, but in many cases, the goal of the designer is to retain certain couplings and to create interesting decisions based on those couplings. The examples above demonstrate how the same method, tagging, can be used for either coupling or uncoupling. The first method, of adding parameters to a given entity, couples that new parameter with all the pre-vious parameters, uses, and values of the entity. It is one more element to consider in how to use that element to the best advantage. The last example shows how to uncouple triggers and effects, so that the designer can include greater variety and content, within a smaller set of rules and components. The second example is a masterful use of tagging for both coupling and uncoupling and demonstrates the enormous power and flexibility of the mechanism. Magic: The Gathering makes extensive use of tags. There are several varieties. “Evergreen” keywords are abilities that are common and players are expected to know, like Flying and First Strike. These typically do not include explanations of what they do on the cards. “Set” keywords are new keywords introduced with new sets, such as the Morph ability that was introduced in the Onslaught block. Set keywords are explained on each card. The keywords in this case are a shorthand for players who are familiar with them. Finally, “Reminder” tags are keywords that are generally consistent in when they trigger, but the precise effect varies from card to card. Morbid, introduced in Innistrad, is an example of this (Illustration 13.2).

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CAR-09 Tags

Sample Games

7 Wonders (Bauza, 2010) Horrified (Uncredited, 2019) Magic: The Gathering (Garfield, 1993) Terraforming Mars (Fryxelius, 2016) Illustration 13.2 Abomination of Gudul card from Magic: The Gathering. In addition to the CREATURE and HORROR tags, the ability section includes the Evergreen FLYING keyword and Set MORPH keyword. Note that FLYING does not include an explanation, while MORPH does.

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Game Index ў ў Note: This Game Index shows what mechanisms used a particular game as an example. It is not intended to be a full cross-reference of all mechanisms that each of these games includes. …and then, we held hands, Chircop and Massa, 2015: ACT-20 Layering, CAR-03 Melding 10 Days in the USA, Moon and Weissblum, 2003: VIC-21 Ordering 20 Questions, Unknown: UNC-13 Induction 25 Words or Less, Sterten, 1996: AUC-17 Bids as Wagers 6 Nimmt, Kramer, 1994: RES-22 Kill Steal The 7th Continent, Roudy and Sautter, 2017: MOV-16 Map Addition, SET-05 Combo Abilities, STR-08 Scenario/ Mission/Campaign Games 7 Wonders, Bauza, 2010: ACT-02 Action Drafting, CAR-06 Drafting, CAR-09 Tags, ECO-10 Discounts, RES-26 Neighbor Scope, SET-01 Set Valuation 7 Wonders Duel, Bauza and Cathala, 2015: ACT-20 Layering, CAR-06 Drafting, VIC-15 Circuit Breaker/Sudden Death, VIC-19 Tug of War 13th Age, Heinsoo and Tweet, 2013: RES-19 Dice Selection 1830, Tresham, 1986: ACT-15 Gating and Unlocking, ECO-03 Market, ECO11 Upgrades, ECO-14 Ownership, SET-04 Network Building, VIC-04 Victory Points as Resource, VIC-10 Exhausting Resources 1960: The Making of the President, Leonhard and Matthews, 2007: ACT-04 Action/ Event, ARC-04 Territories and Regions 4000 ad, Doherty, 1972: MOV-24 Hidden Movement, RES-01 High Number Abalone, Lalet and Levi, 1987: ACT-21 Slide/ Push, RES-11 Static Capture Above and Below, Laukat, 2015: ACT-18 Narrative Choice Abracada…What?, Kim, 2014: UNC-05 Roles with Asymmetric Information Ace of Aces, Leonardi, 1980: MOV-11 Relative Position Acquire, Sackson, 1964: ECO-03 Markets, ECO13 Investment, ECO-14 Ownership, STR-01 Competitive Games Action Castle, Soren 2009: ACT-18 Narrative Choice Advanced Squad Leader, Greenwood, 1985: ARC-08 Line of Sight, RES-03 Critical Hits and Failures, STR-08 Scenario/Mission/Campaign Games The Adventurers: The Temple of Chac, Blossier and Henry, 2009: MOV-14 Bias Aeon’s End, Riley, 2016: CAR-05 Deck Building, ECO-20 Resource Queue Age of Empires III: The Age of Discovery, Drover, 2007: TRN-05 Claim Turn Order Age of Mythology: The Board Game, Drover, 2003: RES-07 Rock, Paper, Scissors Age of Steam, Wallace, 2002: AUC-10 Selection Order Bid, ECO-07 Loans, SET-04 Network Building, STR-08 Scenario/ Mission/Campaign Games, TRN-03 Bid Turn Order, VIC-04 Victory Points as a Resource, VIC-18 Catch the Leader Agricola, Rosenberg, 2007: ACT-02 Action Drafting, ACT-15 Gating and Unlocking, ECO-08 Always Available Purchase, ECO-17 Increase Value of Unchosen Resources, TRN-05 Claim Turn Order, VIC-01 Victory Points from Game State, WPL-01 Standard Worker Placement, WPL03 Acquiring and Losing Workers, WPL-05 Adding and Blocking Buildings, WPL-07 Building Actions and Rewards, WPL-08 Turn Order and Resolution Order Airlines, Moon, 1990: ECO-13 Investment, VIC01 Victory Points from Game State, VIC-12 Fixed Number of Events Alcatraz: The Scapegoat, Cywicki, Cywicki, and Hanusz, 2011: STR-06 Single Loser Games

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Game Index Alhambra, Henn, 2003: SET-02 Tile-Laying, UNC-09 Probability Management Alien Frontiers, Niemann, 2010: WPL-04 Workers-As-Dice, WPL-05 Adding and Blocking Buildings Ambush!, Butterfield and Smith, 1983: STR-04 Solo Games Among the Stars, Bagiartakis, 2012: CAR-06 Drafting Amun-Re, Knizia, 2003: AUC-06 Constrained Bidding, AUC-15 Fixed Placement Auction Anachrony, Amann, Peter, and Turczi, 2017: STR-04 Solo Games Android, Clark and Wilson, 2008: SET04 Network Building, VIC-14 Connections Android Netrunner, Garfield and Litzsinger, 2012: ACT-01 Action Points Andean Abyss, Ruhnke, 2012: CAR-08 Multi-Use Cards Animals On Board, Sentker and zur Linde, 2016: SET-01 Set Valuation Animal Upon Animal, Miltenberger, 2005, RES05 Physical Action, RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Antike, Gerdts, 2005: ACT-10 Rondel Apples to Apples, Kirby and Osterhaus, 1999: RES-16 Player Judge Archipelago, Boelinger, 2012: STR-05 Semi-Cooperative Games The Ares Project, Engelstein and Engelstein, 2011: CAR-08 Multi-Use Cards, RES-20 Action Speed, VIC-17 King of the Hill Arkham Horror, Krank, Launius, Petersen, and Willis, 1987: STR-02 Cooperative Games, STR-05 Semi-Cooperative Games Arkham Horror: The Card Game, French and Newman, 2016: CAR-07 Deck Construction, STR-04 Solo Games The Artemis Project, Chow and Rocchi, 2019: AUC-18 Auction Compensation, WPL-04 Workers-As-Dice Article 27: The UN Security Council Game, Baden, 2012: RES-15 Voting Ascending Empires, Cooper, 2011: RES-10 Physical Action, RES-24 Flicking Ascension: Deckbuilding Game, Fiorillo and Gary, 2010: CAR-05 Deck Building, ECO08 Always Available Purchase Asgard, Zizzi, 2012: WPL-03 Acquiring and Losing Workers Assault of the Giants, Parks, 2017: ACT03 Action Retrieval, UNC-09 Probability Management Atmosfear, Tanner, 1991: VIC-13 Elapsed Real Time Attack Vector: Tactical, Burnside, Finley, and Valle, 2004: MOV-01 Tessellation, MOV-05 Resource to Move, MOV-09 Impulse Attika, Merkle, 2003: ECO-11 Upgrades AuZtralia, Wallace, 2018: TRN-13 Time Track Ave Caesar, Riedesser, 1989: VIC-07 Race, MOV-01 Tessellation Axis & Allies, Harris, Jr., 1981: ARC-01 Absolute Control, ARC-03 Troop Types, RES02 Stat Check, RES-13 Minimap, STR-03 Team-Based Games Aye, Dark Overlord, Bonifacio, Crosa, Enrico, Ferlito, and Uren, 2005: STR-06 Single Loser Games Azul, Kiesling, 2017: VIC-01 Victory Points from State, VIC-05 Hidden and Exposed Victory Points, VIC-09 Fixed Number of Rounds, VIC-11 Completing Targets B-17: Queen of the Skies, Frank and Shelley, 1981: RES-04 Ratio/Combat Results Table, STR-04 Solo Games Backgammon, Unknown, 3000 bce: MOV-02 Roll and MoveBANG!, Sciarra, 2002: UNC-04 Hidden Roles, VIC-08 Player Elimination Barbarossa, Teuber, 1988: RES-17 Targeted Clues Bärenpark, Walker-Harding, 2017: SET-03 Grid Coverage Baseball Highlights: 2045, Fitzgerald, 2015: CAR-07 Deck Construction, STR04 Solo Games Battle Cry, Borg, 2000: ACT-05 Command Cards Battle Masters, Baker, 1992: TRN-11 Random Turn Order Battleball, Baker, 2003: MOV-07 Different Dice, RES-01 High Number BattleLore, Borg, 2006: ACT-05 Command Cards Battles of Westeros, Kouba, 2010: ACT-13 OncePer-Game Abilities Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game, Konieczka, 2008: ACT-13 Once-Per-Game Abilities, RES-15 Voting, STR-03 Team-Based Games, STR-07 Traitor Games, UNC-04 Hidden Roles, UNC-10 Variable Setup BattleTech, Brown, Leeper, and Weisman, 1985: MOV-04 Movement Points

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Game Index Bausack, Zock, 1987: RES-10 Physical Action, RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Beasts of Balance, Buckenham and Fleetwood, 2016: RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Bed, Wed, Dead: A Game of Dirty Decisions, Murray, 2016: UNC-14 Questions and Answers Belfort, Cormier and Lim, 2011: ECO-14 Ownership, WPL-01 Standard Worker Placement, WPL-02 Workers of Differing Types Ben Hur, du Poel, 1987: MOV-05 Resource to Move Best Treehouse Ever, Almes, 2015: CAR-06 Drafting Betrayal at House on the Hill, Daviau, Glassco, McQuilian, Selinker, and Woodruff, 2004: STR-07 Traitor Games Between Two Cities, O’Malley, Pedersen, and Rosset, 2015: RES-26 Neighbor Scope, SET-02 Tile-Laying, STR-04 Solo Games, VIC-20 Highest Lowest Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig, O’Malley and Rosset, 2018: RES-26 Neighbor Scope The Big Idea, Ernest, 2000: RES-16 Player Judge Bingo, Unknown: ACT-19 Bingo Bismarck, Roberts and Shaw, 1962: RES-13 Minimap Black Angel, Dujardin, Georges, and Orban, 2019: ACT-21 Slide/Push Blitzkrieg, Pinsky and Shaw, 1965: ARC07 Zone of Control, MOV-01 Tessellation Blockhead!, D’Arcey, 1952: RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Blokus, Tavitian, 2000: SET-03 Grid Coverage Blue Lagoon, Knizia, 2018: MOV-13 Chaining, STR-09 Score and Reset Games Bohnanza, Rosenberg, 1997: CAR-04 Card Draw, Limits, and Deck Exhaustion, ECO-20 Resource Queue Bonfire, Feld, 2020: ACT-11 Action Selection Restrictions BONK, Harvey, 2017: STR-09 Score and Reset Games The Bottle Imp, Cornett, 1995: CAR-01 Trick Taking Brass, Wallace, 2007: ECO-05 Income, ECO-07 Loans, ECO-11 Upgrades, SET-04 Network Building Brawl, Ernest, 1999: TRN-07 Real-Time Break the Safe, Uncredited, 2003: VIC-13 Elapsed Real Time Breakout: Normandy, Greenwood and Stahler, 1992: ACT-14 Advantage Token Brew Crafters, Rosset, 2013: WPL-05 Adding and Blocking Buildings Bridge, Vanderbilt, 1908: AUC-17 Bids as Wagers, CAR-01 Trick Taking, TRN-05 Claim Turn Order Brikks, Warsch, 2018: SET-03 Grid Coverage Buck Rogers: Battle for the 25th Century, Grubb, 1988: MOV-22 Multiple Maps, RES13 Minimap C&C Ancients, Napoleonics, etc., Borg, 2006– 2018: ACT-05 Command Cards Cable Car, Henn, 2009: VIC-14 Connections, VIC-16 Finale Cacao, Walker-Harding, 2015: SET-01 Set Valuation Calimala, Lopiano, 2017: ACT-11 Action Selection Restrictions Camel Up, Bogen, 2014: MOV-02 Roll and Move, UNC-01 Betting and Bluffing Camelot, Jolly, 2005: TRN-14 Passed Action Token Can’t Stop, Sackson, 1980: UNC-02 PushYour-Luck, UNC-09 Probability Management Candyland, Abbot, 1949: TRN-01 Fixed Turn Order Captain Sonar, Fraga and Lemonnier, 2016: MOV-24 Hidden Movement, STR03 Team-Based Games, TRN-08 Punctuated Real-Time Car Wars, Irby and Jackson, 1981: MOV-09 Impulse Carcassonne, Wrede, 2000: ACT-22 Matching, ARC-05 Area Parameters, SET-02 Tile-Laying, UNC-07 Unknown Information, VIC-02 Victory Points from Player Actions Cards Against Humanity, Dillon, Dranove, Halpern, Hantoot, Munk, Pinsof, Temkin, and Weinstein, 2009: RES16 Player Judge Careers, Brown, 1955: MOV-01 Tessellation Carson City, Georges, 2009: WPL-05 Adding and Blocking Buildings Cartographers, Aden, 2019: ACT-19 Bingo Castle Dice, Peterschmidt, 2013: ECO-01 Exchanging Castle Panic, De Witt, 2009: STR-05 Semi-Cooperative Games

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Game Index Castles of Burgundy, Feld, 2011: VIC-09 Fixed Number of Rounds Catacombs, Amos, Kelsey, and West, 2010: RES10 Physical Action, RES-24 Flicking Catan, Teuber, 1995: CAR-06 Drafting, ECO01 Exchanging, ECO-02 Trading, ECO-05 Income, ECO-11 Upgrades, ECO-12 Random Production, SET01 Set Valuation, SET-04 Network Building, UNC-10 Variable Setup, VIC-03 Temporary and Permanent Victory Points, VIC-07 Race Catch Phrase!, Williamson, 1994: RES-23 Hot Potato, TRN-14 Passed Action Token Catch the Moon, Riffaud and Rodriguez, 2017: RES-25 Stacking and Balancing The Cave of Time, Packard, 1979: ACT-18 Narrative Choice Cave Troll, Jolley, 2002: ARC-03 Troop Types Caveman Curling, Quodbach, 2010: STR-03 Team-Based Games Caverna: The Cave Farmers, Rosenberg, 2013: WPL-03 Acquiring and Losing Workers Caylus, Attia, 2005: ECO-14 Ownership, TRN06 Pass Order, WPL-01 Standard Worker Placement, WPL-05 Adding and Blocking Buildings, WPL-07 Building Actions and Rewards, WPL-08 Turn Order and Resolution Order Celebrity, Unknown: STR-03 Team-Based Games Century: Spice Road, Matsuuchi, 2017: ACT03 Action Retrieval, ECO-01 Exchanging, ECO-15 Contracts, ECO-17 Increase Value of Unchosen Resources, TRN-01 Fixed Turn Order Ceylon, Zinsli and Zinsli, 2018: ACT-08 Follow, CAR-08 Multi-Use Cards Chainsaw Warrior, Hand, 1987: MOV-19 Move Trough Deck Champions of Hara, Barber, VanNest, and Zimmerman, 2018: ACT-03 Action Retrieval Champions of Midgard, Steiness, 2015: UNC08 Hidden Information, WPL-04 Workers-As-Dice Charades, Unknown, early nineteenth century: UNC-06 Communication Limits Charterstone, Stegmaier, 2017: STR-10 Legacy Games Cheat, Unknown: UNC-01 Betting and Bluffing Checkers, Unknown: ARC-06 Force Projection, MOV-01 Tessellation, MOV-03 Pattern Movement, RES-11 Static Capture Chess, Unknown, ∼1200: ARC-06 Force Projection, ECO-11 Upgrades, MOV-01 Tessellation, MOV-03 Pattern Movement, RES-11 Static Capture, STR-01 Competitive Games Chicago Express, Wu, 2007: AUC-02 English Auction, ECO-03 Market, ECO-13 Investment Chinatown, Hartwig, 1999: ECO-02 Trading Chinese Checkers, Monks, 1892: MOV-03 Pattern Movement Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger, (Uncredited, 2018): ACT-18 Narrative Choice Chopper Strike, Uncredited, 1976: MOV-01 Tessellation Churchill, Herman, 2015: VIC-19 Tug of War Chutes and Ladders, See Snakes & Ladders Circle the Wagons, Aramini, Devine, and Kluka, 2017: ACT-20 Layering, CAR-03 Melding Citadels, Faidutti, 2000: ACT-02 Action Drafting, TRN-10 Role Order Civilization, Tresham, 1980: ACT-16 Tech Trees/Tech Tracks/Tech Bonuses, ARC-02 Area Majority/Influence, ECO-02 Trading, ECO-06 Automatic Resource Growth, ECO10 Discounts, RES-09 Alternate Removal, RES-23 Hot Potato, TRN02 Stat Turn Order Clash of Cultures, Marcussen, 2012: ACT-16 Tech Trees/Tech Tracks/Tech Bonuses Cleopatra and the Society of Architects, Cathala and Maublanc, 2006: RES-23 Hot Potato, VIC-08 Player Elimination Climb!, Michaud, 2008: RES-10 Physical Action Clue, Pratt, 1949: MOV-23 Shortcuts, UNC03 Memory, UNC-08 Hidden Information, UNC-12 Deduction Cluzzle, Hamilton, 2004: RES-17 Targeted Clues CO2, Lacerda, 2012: STR-05 Semi-Cooperative Games Coal Baron, Kiesling and Kramer, 2013: WPL05 Adding and Blocking Buildings Coaster Park, Almes, 2017: RES-25 Stacking and Balancing

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Game Index Cockroach Poker, Zeimet, 2004: STR-06 Single Loser Games, UNC-01 Betting and Bluffing Cockroach Salad, Zeimet, 2007: ACT-22 Matching Codenames, Chvátil, 2015: VIC-02 Victory Points from Player Actions, UNC-12 Deduction Coimbra, Brasini and Gigli, 2018: ACT-02 Action Drafting Coloretto, Schacht, 2003: SET-05 Combo Abilities Colossal Arena, Knizia, 1997: UNC-11 Hidden Control Colt Express, Raimbault, 2014: ACT-06 Action Queue Combat Commander: Europe, Jensen, 2006: ACT-05 Command Cards, CAR-08 Multi-Use Cards Command & Colors, Borg, 2006: ARC-03 Troop Types, RES-05 Die Icons Conan, Henry, Bauza, Bernard, Cathala, Croc, Maublanc, and Pouchain, 2016: STR-03 Team-Based Games Concept, Beaujannot and Rivoliet, 2013: ACT-23 Drawing Concordia, Gerdts, 2013: ACT-03 Action Retrieval, ACT-10 Rondel, ECO-01 Exchanging, ECO-03 Markets, SET04 Network Building, VIC-06 EndGame Bonuses, VIC-11 Completing Targets Conquest of the Empire, Harris, Jr., 1984: ARC05 Area Parameters Conspiracy, Solomon, 1973: UNC-11 Hidden Control Container, Delonge and Ewert, 2007: ECO-05 Income, ECO-07 Loans Copycat, Friese, 2012: WPL-01 Standard Worker Placement Core Worlds, Parks, 2011: ECO-04 Delayed Purchase, UNC-09 Probability Management Core Worlds: Galactic Orders, Parks, 2012: ACT17 Events Cosmic Encounter, Eberle, Kittredge, Norton, and Olatka, 1977: ACT-12 Variable Player Powers, ECO-18 Negotiation, ECO-19 Alliances, RES-01 High Number, RES-08 Prisoner’s Dilemma, UNC-06 Communication Limits Cosmic Kaboom, Loomis, 2016: RES-24 Flicking Cosmic Wimpout, Swilling, 1975: RES-21 Rerolling and Locking Cottage Garden, Rosenberg, 2016: SET-03 Grid Coverage Coup, Tahta, 2012: UNC-01 Betting and Bluffing, UNC-04 Hidden Roles, VIC-08 Player Elimination Crazy Eights, Unknown: ACT-22 Matching Crazy Karts, Perret, 2016: UNC-06 Communication Limits Critical Mass, Chang, 2018: RES-20 Action Speed Crokinole, Unknown, before 1876: AUC-14 Dexterity Auction, RES-24 Flicking Crossbows & Catapults, Frigard and Sala, 1983: RES-24 Flicking Crude: The Oil Game, St. Laurent, 1974: ECO-03 Market, ECO-12 Random Production, RES-26 Neighbor Scope Cry Havoc, Rodiek, Oracz, and Walczak, 2016: RES-14 Force Commitment Cryptic, Duncan and Veevers, 2018: UNC-12 Deduction Custom Heroes, Clair, 2017: CAR-02 Ladder Climbing Cutthroat Caverns, Covert, 2007: RES-22 Kill Steal Cyclades, Cathala and Maublanc, 2009: AUC-06 Constrained Bidding, AUC-15 Fixed Placement Dai Senso!, Emrich, Powell, and Vasta, 2011: ARC-03 Troop Types Dark Moon, Derrick, 2011: UNC-04: Hidden Roles Darkover, Eberle, Kittredge, and Olatka, 1979: RES-07 Rock, Paper, Scissors Dart Wars, Reymond, 2006: RES-10 Physical Action Darter, Byrne and Conkey, 2004: MOV-14 Bias Das Letzte Paradies, Knizia, 1993: AUC-09 Second-Bid Auction Das Regeln Wir Schon, Schmiel, 1994: RES-15 Voting Daytona 500, Kramer, 1990: MOV-15 Move Multiple Units Dead Last, Grosso and Patton, 2016: RES-07 Prisoner’s Dilemma Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game, Gilmour and Vega, 2014: ACT-18 Narrative Choice, STR-07 Traitor Games, STR-08 Scenario/Mission/Campaign Games, TRN-04 Progressive Turn Order

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Game Index Deckscape, Chiachierra and Sorrentino, 2017: STR-08 Scenario/Mission/Campaign Games Decrypto, Dagenais-Lesperance, 2018: RES-17 Targeted Clues, UNC-12 Deduction Defenders of the Realm, Launius, 2010: STR-05 Semi-Cooperative Games Democrazy, Faidutti, 2000: RES-15 Voting Demon’s Run, Matheny, 1981: MOV-14 Bias Descent: Journeys in the Dark, (Second Edition) (Clark, Konieczka, Sadler, and Wilson, 2012) Descent: Journeys in the Dark, Wilson, 2005: MOV-16 Map Addition, RES-01 High Number, RES-05 Die Icons, STR-03 Team-Based Games Detroit-Cleveland Grand Prix, Kramer, 1996: MOV-15 Moving Multiple Units Deus, Dujardin, 2014: CAR-04 Card Draw, Limits and Deck Exhaustion Diamonds, Fitzgerald, 2014: CAR-01 Trick Taking, CAR-04 Card Draw, Limits, and Deck Exhaustion Die Macher, Schmiel, 1986: VIC-09 Fixed Number of Rounds Die Speicherstadt, Feld, 2010: AUC-16 Dutch Priority Auction Dimension, Luchau, 2014: VIC-06 End Game Bonuses Diner, O’Malley, 2014: TRN-14 Passed Action Token Diplomacy, Calhamer, 1959: ARC-01 Absolute Control, ECO-18 Negotiation, MOV-01 Tessellation, RES-08 Prisoner’s Dilemma, TRN-09 Simultaneous Action Selection Diskwars, Gelle, Hardy, Jolly, and Petersen, 1999: MOV-20 Movement Template, RES-10 Physical Action Divine Right, Rahman and Rahman, 1979: ARC-01 Absolute Control Dixit, Roubira, 2008: RES-17 Targeted Clues Dominant Species, Jensen, 2010: ARC-03 Troop Types Dominion, Vaccarino, 2008: ECO-04 Delayed Purchase, ECO-08 Always Available Purchase, UNC-09 Probability Management, UNC-10 Variable Setup, VIC-10 Exhausting Resources Dominion and Expansions, Vaccarino, 2008: CAR-05 Deck Building Dominoes, Unknown: ACT-22 Matching Don’t Break the Ice, Uncredited, 1965: RES-10 Physical Action Don’t Tip the Waiter, Collicott, 2014: RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Down with the King, Rahman and Rahman, 1981: RES-04 Ratio/Combat Results Table Downfall of Pompeii, Wrede, 2004: MOV-12 Mancala Downforce, Daviau, Jacobson, and Kramer, 2017: MOV-01 Tessellation, MOV-15 Moving Multiple Units Dracula’s Feast, Hayward, 2017: UNC-04 Hidden Roles The Dragon & Flagon, Engelstein, Engelstein, and Engelstein, 2016: ACT06 Action Queue, MOV-10 Programmed Movement, TRN-13 Time Track Dragon Castle, Hach, Ricci, and Silva, 2017: ACT-20 Layering Dragon Dice, Smith, 1995: RES-05 Die Icons Dragon Island, Fitzgerald, 2017: MOV-16 Map Addition Dragon’s Gold, Faidutti, 2001: ECO-13 Investment Drakon, Jolly, 2001: ACT-13 Once-Per-Game Abilities Draughts, See Checkers Dream Factory, Knizia, 2000: AUC-12 Closed Economy Auction, ECO-05 Income Dropzone Commander, Lewis, 2012: MOV-06 Measurement duck! duck! Go!, Nunn, 2008: MOV-10 Programmed Movement Duel in the Dark, de Pedro, 2007: MOV-24 Hidden Movement The Duke, Holcomb and Mclaughlin, 2013: MOV-03 Pattern Movement Dune, Eberle, Kittredge, and Olatka, 1979: ACT-12 Variable Player Powers, AUC-04 Sealed-Bid Auction, ECO-19 Alliances, MOV-18 Map Deformation, RES-14 Force Commitment, STR-03 Team-Based Games, UNC-01 Betting and Bluffing, VIC-11 Completing Targets Dungeon Fighter, Buonfino, Silva, and Sorrentino, 2011: RES-10 Physical Action Dungeon Lords, Chvátil, 2008: ACT-02 Action Drafting Dungeon Petz, Chvátil, 2011 Dungeon Run, Bistro, 2011: RES-22 Kill Steal Dungeon Twister, Boelinger, 2004: MOV-18 Map Deformation

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Game Index Dungeons & Dragons, Arneson and Gygax, 1977 ACT-18 Narrative Choice, RES-02 Stat Check, RES-03 Critical Hits and Failures Dungeoneer, Denmark, 2003: MOV-23 Shortcuts Duplicate Bridge, Vanderbilt, 1908: ACT-19 Bingo Dystopian Wars, Fawcett, Flack, Glover, Padfield, Sammarco, and Sinclair, 2010: RES03 Critical Hits and Failures Eclipse, Tahkokallio, 2011: ACT-16 Tech Trees/ Tech Tracks/Tech Bonuses, ECO-05 Income, MOV-16 Map Addition, RES-05 Die Icons, STR-03 TeamBased Games, UNC-07 Unknown Information, VIC-02 Victory Points from Player Actions Eclipse (rule variant), Tahkokallio, 2011: TRN14 Passed Action Token Games Eggs & Empire, Pinchback and Riddle, 2014: AUC-10 Selection Order Bid, AUC13 Reverse Auction Egizia, Acchittocca, Brasini, Gigli, Luperto, and Tinto, 2009: WPL-05 Adding and Blocking Buildings Eight-Minute Empire: Legends, Laukat, 2013: ARC-04 Territories and Regions El Grande, Kramer and Ulrich, 1995: ARC-02 Area Majority/Influence, ARC-05 Area Parameters, AUC-11 Multiple Lot Auction, MOV-01 Tessellation, TRN-03 Bid Turn Order, UNC-03 Memory, VIC-01 Victory Points from Game State Elfenland, Moon, 1998: MOV-05 Resource to Move Elementos, Katz, 2015: ARC-06 Force Projection Eleusis, Abbott, 1956: UNC-13 Induction Eminent Domain, Jaffee, 2011: ACT-08 Follow, CAR-05 Deck Building Empire Builder, Bromley and Fawcett, 1982: ACT-17 Events, ECO-14 Ownership, ECO-15 Contracts, MOV-04 Movement Points, SET-04 Network Building, VIC-04 Victory Points as Resource, VIC-07 Race, VIC-14 Connections Empires in Arms, Pinder and Rowland, 1983: ECO-19 Alliances Empires of the Void II, Laukat, 2018: ACT-04 Action/Event Escape from Colditz, Brechin, Degas, and Reid, 1973: VIC-13 Elapsed Real Time Escape: The Curse of the Temple, Ostby, 2012: MOV-16 Map Addition, RES-21 Rerolling and Locking, TRN-07 Real-Time, VIC-13 Elapsed Real Time Ethnos, Mori, 2017: SET-01 Set Valuation, VIC01 Victory Points from Game State Euphoria: Build A Better Dystopia, Stegmaier and Stone, 2013: WPL-02 Workers of Differing Types, WPL-03 Acquiring and Losing Workers, WPL-05 Adding and Blocking Buildings Europe Engulfed, Evans and Young, 2003: RES02 Stat Check Evo, Keyaerts, 2001: ACT-17 Events Evolution: The Beginning, Crapuchetts, 2016: CAR-04 Card Draw, Limits, and Deck Exhaustion Exit: The Game, Brand and Brand, 2016: STR02 Cooperative Games, STR-08 Scenario/Mission/Campaign Games, VIC-13 Elapsed Real Time The Expanse Board Game, Engelstein, 2017: ACT-04 Action/Event, ACT-15 Gating and Unlocking, TRN-01 Fixed Turn Order, VIC-04 Victory Points as a Resource, VIC-12 Fixed Number of Events, VIC-18 Catch the Leader Expedition, Kramer, 1996: MOV-13 Chaining, RES-11 Static Capture Exploding Kittens, Inman, Lee, and Small, 2015: RES-23 Hot Potato Fabled Fruit, Friese, 2016: STR-10 Legacy Games, WPL-06 Single Workers, WPL-07 Building Actions and Rewards Factory Fun, van Moorsel, 2006: ECO-01 Exchanging Fairy Tale, Nakamura, 2004: CAR-06 Drafting A Fake Artist Goes To New York, Sasaki, 2012: ACT-23 Drawing, UNC-05 Roles with Asymmetric Information Falling, Ernest, 1998: RES-23 Hot Potato, TRN-07 Real-Time Fantasy Business, Boelinger, 2002: RES-08 Prisoner’s Dilemma Fantasy Sports Auctions, Unknown: AUC-03 Turn Order Until Pass Auction Favor of the Pharaoh, Lehmann, 2015: UNC-02 Push-Your-Luck A Feast for Odin, Rosenberg, 2016: SET-03 Grid Coverage

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Game Index Feudum, Swanson, 2018: ACT-01 Action Points Fiji, Friese, 2006: AUC-04 Sealed-Bid Auction Finca, Sentker and zur Linde, 2009: ACT-10 Rondel, ACT-13 Once-Per-Game Abilities, MOV-12 Mancala Order First Class: All Aboard the Orient Express, Ohley, 2016: TRN-05 Claim Turn Order Fische Fluppen Frikadellen, Friese, 2002: MOV22 Multiple Maps Fist of Dragonstones, Faidutti and Schacht, 2002: AUC-04 Sealed-Bid Auction FITS, Knizia, 2009: ACT-19 Bingo, SET-03 Grid Coverage Flash Point: Fire Rescue, Lanzig, 2011: STR-04 Solo Games Movement Flick ‘em Up, Beaujannot and Monpertuis, 2015: RES-10 Physical Action, RES-24 Flicking Flip City, Chen, 2014: ECO-11 Upgrades Flip Ships, Klenko, 2017: RES-10 Physical Action, RES-24 Flicking The Fog of War, Engelstein, 2016: ACT-14 Advantage Token, VIC-15 Circuit Breaker/Sudden Death Fold-it, Goh, 2016: ACT-20 Layering For Sale, Dorra, 1997: AUC-10 Selection Order Bid Forbidden Island, Leacock, 2010: ACT-01 Action Points, CAR-04 Card Draw, Limits, and Deck Exhaustion Forbidden Stars, Bailey, Kniffen, and Konieczka, 2015: ACT-09 Order Counters Formula De, Lavauer and Randall, 1991: MOV04 Movement Points, MOV-07 Different Dice, UNC-02 Push-YourLuck, VIC-07 Race Formula Motor Racing, Knizia, 1995: MOV-11 Relative Position Fortress America, Uncredited, 1986: RES-02 Stat Check Forum Trajanum, Feld, 2018: ACT-11 Action Selection Restrictions France 1944: The Allied Crusade in Europe, Herman, 1986: RES-04 Ratio/ Combat Results Table Counters, TRN-06 Pass Order, WPL-05 Adding and Blocking Buildings, WPL-08 Turn Order and Resolution Order Frank’s Zoo, Matthäus and Nestel, 1999: RES07 Rock, Paper, Scissors French Toast, Hayward, 2021: UNC-12 Deduction Fresh Fish, Friese, 2014: AUC-11 Multiple-Lot Auction Friday, Friese, 2011: STR-04 Solo Games Furnace, Lashin, 2021: AUC-18 Auction Compensation, RES-24 Flicking The Fury of Dracula, Hand, 1987: MOV-24 Hidden Movement FUSE, Klenko, 2015: STR-02 Cooperative, VIC-13 Elapsed Real Time Galactic Destiny, Mauro, O’Maoileoin, Pulis, and Pulis, 2007: RES-15 Voting Galaxy Trucker, Chvátil, 2007: CAR-07 Deck Construction, MOV-11 Relative Position, SET-02 Tile-Laying, VIC01 Victory Points from Game State The Game, Benndorf, 2015: UNC-06 Communication Limits The Gallerist, Lacerda, 2015: WPL-06 Single Workers The Game, Benndorf, 2015: ACT-22 Matching A Game of Trones, Petersen and Wilson, 2003: ACT-09 Order Counters, ACT-14 Advantage Token, AUC04 Sealed Bid Auction, AUC-13 Reverse Auction, AUC-18 Auction Compensation, ECO-18 Negotiation, RES-18 Tie-Breakers, TRN-03 Bid Turn Order, TRN-09 Simultaneous Action Selection Ganz schön clever, Warsch, 2018: STR-04 Solo Games Geography, Unknown: ACT-22 Matching Get Bit!, Chalker, 2007: MOV-11 Relative Position Get the Goods, Ado and Moon, 1996: ECO-13 Investment, VIC-12 Fixed Number of Events Gettysburg, Roberts, 1958: ARC-07 Zone of Control, RES-04 Ratio/Combat Results Table Ghost Chase, Haferkamp, 2001: MOV-24 Hidden Movement Ghost Fightin’ Treasure Hunters, Yu, 2013: VIC10 Exhausting Resources Gizmos, Walker-Harding, 2018: ECO-01 Exchanging Glass Road, Rosenberg, 2013: ECO-01 Exchanging Glen More, Cramer, 2010: TRN-13 Time Track

Page 594

Game Index Glenn Drover’s Empires: Galactic Rebellion, Drover, 2016: ARC-03 Troop Types, WPL-02 Workers of Differing Types Global Mogul, Crenshaw, 2013: ECO-05 Income Gloom, Baker, 2005: ACT-20 Layering Gloomhaven, Childres, 2017: ACT-03 Action Retrieval, CAR-05 Deck Building, CAR-08 Multi-Use Cards Glory to Rome, Chudyk, 2005: ACT-08 Follow, CAR-08 Multi-Use Cards, SET-05 Combo Abilities Go, Unknown, 2200 bce: MOV-01 Tessellation, RES-12 Enclosure, TRN-01 Fixed Turn Order, VIC-01 Victory Points from Game State, VIC-02 Victory Points from Player Actions Go Fish, Unknown: CAR-03 Melding, UNC-14 Questions and Answers Goa, Dorn, 2004: ACT-11 Action Selection Restrictions, ECO-15 Contracts Going, Going, GONE!, Nicholson, 2013: AUC14 Dexterity Auction Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension, Young, 2013: MOV-14 Bias The Great Dalmuti, Garfield, 1995: CAR-02 Ladder Climbing Greed Incorporated, Doumen and Wiersinga, 2009: ECO-03 Market, ECO-14 Ownership Guardians, Flores, 2018: VIC-19 Tug of War Guess Who?, Coster and Coster, 1979: UNC-12 Deduction Guilds of London, Boydell, 2016: VIC-09 Fixed Number of Rounds Gulo Gulo, Granau, Kramer, and Raggan, 2003: RES-10 Physical Action Guillotine, Peterson, 1998: ECO-20 Resource Queue, MOV-11 Relative Position The Guns of August, Beyma and Davis, 1981: RES-04 Ratio/Combat Results Table Gunslinger, Hamblen, 1982: ACT-06 Action Queue Haggis, Ross, 2010: CAR-02 Ladder Climbing Hanabi, Bauza, 2010: STR-02 Cooperative Games, UNC-03 Memory, UNC-06 Communication Limits, UNC-12 Deduction, VIC-21 Ordering Hannibal, Bauza, 2010: RES-06 Card Play Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage, Simonitch, 1996: ACT-04 Action/Event Hansa Teutonica, Steding, 2009: SET-04 Network Building Harbour, Almes, 2015: AUC-09 Second-Bid Auction Hare & Tortoise, Parlett, 1973: MOV-05 Resource to Move, VIC-07 Race Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, Forrest-Pruzan Creative, Mandell, and Wolf, 2016: STR-10 Legacy Games Headbanz, Glimne and Strandberg, 1991: UNC-05 Roles with Asymmetric Information Hearthstone, Donais and Sakomoto, 2014: ECO08 Always Available Purchase Hearts, Unknown, 1850: AUC-13 Reverse Auction, TRN-05 Claim Turn Order, VIC-15 Circuit Breaker/ Sudden Death Hecatomb, Elliott and Tweet, 2005: ACT-20 Layering Heroes of Land, Air & Sea, Almes, 2018: ARC05 Area Parameters Hey, That’s My Fish!, Cornett and Jakeliunas, 2003: MOV-17 Map Reduction High Rise, Hova, 2019: TRN-13 Time Track High Society, Knizia, 1995: AUC-06 Constrained Bid, AUC-13 Reverse Auction, RES23 Hot Potato, TRN-05 Claim Turn Order, VIC-08 Player Elimination, VIC-12 Fixed Number of Events Hive, Yianni, 2001: ARC-06 Force Projection, MOV-21 Pieces as Map, STR-09 Score-and-Reset Games Hoax, Eberle, Horn Jr., Kittredge, and Olatka, 1981: RES-15 Voting Hoity Toity, Teuber, 1991: RES-07 Rock, Paper, Scissors; RES-08 Prisoner’s Dilemma Hol’s Der Geier (Raj), Randolph, 1988: AUC-05 Sealed Bid with Cancellation Honey Buzz, Salomon, 2020: ACT-11 Action Selection Restrictions Honshu, Malmioja, 2016: CAR-03 Melding Horrified, Uncredited, 2019: CAR-09 Tags Hostage Negotiator, Porfirio, 2015: STR-04 Solo Games Hot Potato, Unknown, 1800’s: TRN-14 Passed Action Token A House Divided, Chadwick and Emrich, 1981: MOV-01 Tessellation The Hunger Games: District 12 Strategy Game, Guild, Kinsella, and Parks, 2012: VIC-08 Player Elimination Hunt for the Ring, Maggi, Mari, and Nepitello, 2017: STR-03 Team-Based Games, UNC-12 Deduction

Page 595

Game Index I’m the Boss, Sackson, 1994: ECO-18 Negotiation ICECOOL, Gomez, 2016: RES-24 Flicking Imagine, Fujita, Nakashima, Ohki, Oikawa, 2015: ACT-23 Drawing Imperial, Gerdts, 2006: ACT-10 Rondel, ECO14 Ownership Impulse, Chudyk, 2013: ACT-07 Shared Action Queue Incan Gold, Faidutti and Moon, 2005: MOV19 Move Trough Deck, RES-08 Prisoner’s Dilemma, STR-09 Score- and-Reset Games, TRN-09 Simultaneous Action Selection, UNC-02 Push-Your-Luck, VIC-01 Victory Points from Game State Infinity, Rodriguez, 2005: MOV-06 Measurement, RES-02 Stat Check Ingenious, Knizia, 2004: VIC-20 Highest Lowest Inis, Martinez, 2016: ARC-02 Area Majority/ Influence, RES-09 Alternate Removal Innovation, Chudyk, 2010: CAR-03 Melding Insider, Kwaji, Okano, Shinma, and Itoh, 2016: UNC-05 Roles with Asymmetric Information Intrigue, Dorra, 1994: ECO-16 Bribery, ECO-18 Negotiation Iron Dragon, Bromley and Wham, 1994: MOV22 Multiple Maps Isle of Skye: From Chieftain to King, Pelikan and Pfister, 2015: SET-02 Tile-Laying Isolation, Kienitz, 1972: MOV-17 Map Reduction Israeli Air Force Leader, Verssen and Verssen, 2017: CAR-07 Deck Construction Istanbul, Dorn, 2014: WPL-06 Single Workers, WPL-08 Turn Order and Resolution Order Jenga, Scott, 1983: RES-10 Physical Action, RES-25 Stacking and Balancing, STR-06 Single Loser Games Jórvík, Feld, 2016: AUC-16 Dutch Priority Jungle Speed, Vuarchex and Yakovenko, 1997: ACT-22 Matching, RES-10 Physical Action Junk Art, Cormier and Lim, 2016: RES-10 Physical Action, RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Junta, Goldberg, Grossman, Marsh, Marsh, Tsao, and Vrtis, 1978: RES-15 Voting Kabuto Sumo, Miller, 2021: ACT-21 Slide / Push Kamasutra, Faidutti, 2000: RES-10 Physical Action Kanban, Lacerda, 2014: WPL-06 Single Workers Kapitän Wackelpudding, McGuire and McGuire, 1994: RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Karuba, Dorn, 2013: UNC-07 Unknown Information Kemet, Bariot and Montiage, 2012: ACT-01 Action Points, ACT-11 Action Selection Restrictions, ACT-16 Tech Trees/Tech Tracks/Tech Bonuses, ARC-03 Troop Types, RES-06 Card Play, UNC-01 Betting and Bluffing, VIC-02 Victory Points from Actions, VIC-03 Temporary and Permanent Victory Points, VIC-07 Race Games Kepler, Bariot and Montiage, 2012: TRN-04 Progressive Turn Order Ker-Plunk, Goldfarb and Soriano, 1967: RES-10 Physical Games Keydom, Breese, 1998: Worker Placement Introduction Keyflower, Breese, 2012: Worker Placement Introduction Keyforge: Call of the Archons, Garfield, 2018: ACT-11 Action Selection Restrictions Khronos, Urbon and Vialla, 2006: MOV-22 Multiple Maps Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot, Bellinger, 2002: ACT-06 Action Queue, VIC-16 Finale King of Tokyo, Garfield, 2011: ARC-05 Area Parameters, RES-21 Rerolling and Locking, UNC-02 Push-Your-Luck, UNC-07 Unknown Information, VIC-01 Victory Points from Game State, VIC-17 King of the Hill Kingdom of Solomon, duBarry, 2012: WPL-05 Adding and Blocking Buildings, WPL-07 Building Actions and Rewards Kingdomino, Cathala, 2016: CAR-06 Drafting, SET-02 Tile-Laying Kingsburg, Chiarvesio and Iennaco, 2007: STR‑05 Semi-Cooperative Games, UNC-08 Hidden Information, UNC-09 Probability Management, WPL-04 Workers-As-Dice KLASK, Bertelsen, 2014: STR-09 Score-andReset Games Klondike Solitaire, Unknown, 1783: ACT-20 Layering, VIC-21 Ordering

Page 596

Game Index Kodama Forest, Iglesias and Riley, 2020: RES-26 Neighbor Scope Kolejka, Madaj, 2011: ECO-20 Resource Queue Kraftwagen, Cramer, 2015: ACT-07 Shared Action Queue Kremlin, Hostettler, 1986: UNC-11 Hidden Control La Granja, Keller and Odendahl, 2014: ACT-02 Action Drafting, CAR-08 Multi-Use Cards Last Will, Suchy, 2011: WPL-03 Acquiring and Losing Workers, WPL-08 Turn Order and Resolution Order Latice, Vincent, 2015: SET-02 Tile-Laying Lazer Ryderz, Amato and Kline, 2017: MOV-13 Chaining, MOV-20 Movement Template Le Havre, Rosenberg, 2008: ECO-14 Ownership Legacy of Dragonholt, Valens, Clark, Flanders, Mitsoda, and Spyridis 2017: ACT-18 Narrative Choice, STR-10 Legacy Games Legendary Encounters family of deck-building games, Cichoski and Mandel, 2014: STR-05 Semi-Cooperative Games Leonardo Da Vinci, Acchittocca, Brasini, Gigli, Luperto, and Tinto, 2006: WPL-02 Workers of Differing Types Level 7 [Omega Protocol], Schoonover, 2014: STR-03 Team-Based Games Leverage, Slimp, 1977: RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Liar’s Dice, Unknown, ∼1800: VIC-08 Player Elimination Libertalia, Mori, 2012: RES-18 Tie Breakers, RES-20 Action Speed, TRN-09 Simultaneous Action Selection Liberté, Wallace, 2001: VIC-15 Circuit Breaker/ Sudden Death Light Speed, Ernest and Jolly, 2003: TRN-07 Real-Time, VIC-10 Exhausting Resources Little Devils, Feldkotter, 2012: CAR-01 Trick Taking The Little Prince: Make Me a Planet, Bauza and Cathala, 2013: TRN-04 Progressive Turn Order Loaded Questions, Poses, 1997: UNC-14 Questions and Answers Long Shot, Handy, 2009: MOV-02 Roll and Move, MOV-15 Move Multiple Units Lord of the Rings, Knizia, 2000: STR-02 Cooperative Games, VIC-07 Race Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, French, 2011: STR-04 Solo Games Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation, Knizia, 2002: UNC-03 Memory, UNC-12 Deduction Lords of Creation, Wallace, 1993: MOV-01 Tessellation Lords of Waterdeep, Lee and Tompson, 2012: ACT-15 Gating and Unlocking, CAR-06 Drafting, ECO-14 Ownership, VIC-02 Victory Points from Player Actions, WPL-01 Standard Worker Placement, WPL03 Acquiring and Losing Workers, WPL-05 Adding and Blocking Buildings, WPL-08 Turn Order and Resolution Order Lotus, Goddard and Goddard, 2016: ACT-20 Layering, CAR-03 Melding Love Letter, Kanai, 2012: UNC-08 Hidden Information, VIC-08 Player Elimination M.U.L.E., Berry, 1983: AUC-14 Dexterity Auction Machi Koro, Suganuma, 2012: ECO-12 Random Production, UNC-09 Probability Management Maelstrom, Hardy, Jolly, and Petersen, 2001: MOV-21 Pieces as Map Mage Knight Board Game, Chvátil, 2011: STR04 Solo Games Magic: The Gathering, Garfield, 1993: CAR‑06 Drafting, CAR-07 Deck Construction, CAR-09 Tags, RES‑01 High Number, RES-06 Card Play, RES-20 Action Speed, SET-05 Combo Abilities, TRN-17 Interrupts The Magic Labyrinth, Baumann, 2009: UNC-03 Memory Magic Maze, Lapp, 2017: STR-02 Cooperative Games Magic Money, Hiwiller, 2020: AUC-04 Sealed Bid Auction Mahjong, Unknown, ~1850: CAR-03 Melding Maiden’s Quest, Shannon, 2018: ECO-11 Upgrades, MOV-19 Move Trough Deck Majesty: For the Realm, Andre, 2017: AUC-08 Dutch Auction Major General: Duel of Time, Liu, Moorman, Yeong, and Zhao, 2017: ACT-07 Shared Action Queue

Page 597

Game Index Malifaux, Caroland, Johns, and Weber, 2009: RES-03 Critical Hits and Failures Mancala, Unknown, 700: MOV-12 Mancala The Manhattan Project, Tibbetts, 2012: WPL01 Standard Worker Placement, WPL-02 Workers of Differing Types, WPL-05 Adding and Blocking Buildings, WPL-08 Turn Order and Resolution Order Manila, Delonge, 2005: UNC-01 Betting and Bluffing Manitoba, Conzadori and Pranzo, 2018: ACT-11 Action Selection Restrictions Mansions of Madness, Koneisczka, 2011: STR-02 Cooperative Games, STR-03 TeamBased Games Mao, Unknown: UNC-13 Induction Marracash, Dorra, 1996: ECO-20 Resource Queue Mars Open: Tabletop Golf, Hoyle, 2018: RES-24 Flicking Mascarade, Faidutti, 2013: UNC-04 Hidden Roles Master of Renaissance: Lorenzo il Magnifico – The Card Game, Luciano and Mangone, 2019: ACT-21 Slide / Push Master of the Galaxy, Bokarev and Seleznev, 2018: MOV-01 Tessellation Mastermind, Meirowitz, 1971: UNC-12 Deduction Mechs vs. Minions, Cantrell, Ernst, Librande, Saraswat, and Tiras, 2016: ACT-06 Action Queue, ACT-15 Gating and Unlocking, STR-02 Cooperative Games, STR-08 Scenario/Mission/ Campaign Games Medici, Knizia, 1995: AUC-07 Once-Arond Auction Medieval Academy, Poncin, 2014: CAR-06 Drafting Meeple Circus, Millet, 2017: RES-10 Physical Action Melee/Wizard, Jackson, 1977: MOV-04 Movement Points MegaCity Oceania, Draper and Fox, 2019: RES25 Stacking and Balancing Memoarrr!, Bortolini, 2017: UNC-03 Memory Memoir ’44, Borg, 2004: ACT-05 Command Cards, ARC-05 Area Parameters, CAR-04 Card Draw, Limits, and Deck Exhaustion, RES-05 Die Icons, STR-08 Scenario/Mission/Campaign Games Memory, Unknown, 1959: UNC-03 Memory Menara, Richtberg, 2018: RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Merchants of Amsterdam, Knizia, 2000: AUC-08 Dutch Auction, TRN-08 Punctuated Real-Time Mice and Mystics, Hawthorne, 2012: STR-02 Cooperative Games Mille Bornes, Dujardin, 1954: TRN-17 Interrupts The Mind, Warsch, 2018: UNC-01 Betting and Bluffing, UNC-06 Communication Limits, VIC-21 Ordering Mind MGMT: The Psychic Espionage “Game”, Cormier and Lim, 2021: MOV-24 Hidden Movement Mint Works, Blaske, 2017: WPL-01 Standard Worker Placement Mississippi Queen, Hodel, 1997: MOV-05 Resource to Move, MOV-16 Map Addition Modern Art, Knizia, 1992: AUC-02 English Auction, AUC-07 Once-Around Auction Monopoly, Darrow and Magie, 1933: ACT-17 Events, AUC-01 Open Auction, ECO-05 Income, ECO-07 Loans, ECO-11 Upgrades, MOV-01 Tessellation, MOV-02 Roll and Move, STR-01 Competitive Games, TRN-01 Fixed Turn Order, TRN16 Lose a Turn, VIC-08 Player Elimination Monsters Menace America, Connors and Knight, 2005: VIC-16 Finale Morels, Povis, 2012: AUC-08 Dutch Auction Mottainai, Chudyk, 2015: ACT-07 Shared Action Queue, ACT-08 Follow, SET05 Combo Abilities Mow Money, Saunders, 2016: ECO-15 Contracts Mu, Matthäus and Nestel, 1995: ECO-19 Alliances Mush, Moon, 1994: MOV-05 Resource to Move, MOV-07 Different Dice Mush! Mush!: Snow Tails 2, Lamont and Lamont, 2013: MOV-08 Drift, VIC-07 Race The Mushroom Eaters, Hayden, 2013: MOV-16 Map Addition Mysterium, Nevskiy and Sidorenko, 2015: UNC-05 Roles with Asymmetric Information, UNC-06 Communication Limits, UNC-12 Deduction

Page 598

Game Index Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper, Fitzgerald, 1998: CAR-04 Card Draw, Limits, and Deck Exhaustion Mystic Vale, Clair, 2016: ACT-20 Layering, ECO-11 Upgrades, UNC-02 Push-Your-Luck Mythology, Peek, 1980: UNC-11 Hidden Control Navegador, Gerdts, 2010: ACT-10 Rondel Navia Dratp, Yamazaki, 2004: MOV-03 Pattern Movement Near and Far, Laukat, 2017: STR-08 Scenario/ Mission/Campaign Games The Networks, Hova, 2016: CAR-06 Drafting, TRN-06 Pass Order New Amsterdam, Allers, 2012: AUC-07 OnceAround Auction New York Slice, Allers, 2017: ECO-09 I Cut, You Choose Nexus Ops, Cantino and Kimball, 2005: ARC03 Troop Types, ARC-05 Area Parameters, RES-02 Stat Check Mechanism, VIC-02 Victory Points from Actions, VIC-17 King of the Hill Niagara, Liesching, 2004: ACT-21 Slide / Push, MOV-14 Bias Nightfall, Gregg, 2011: ACT-22 Matching Nippon, Sentieiro and Soledade, 2015: ECO-05 Income NMBR9, Wichman, 2017: SET-03 Grid Coverage No Tanks!, Gimmler, 2004: AUC-12 Closed Economy, AUC-13 Reverse Auction Nobody But Us Chickens, Nunn, 2003: RES-07 Rock, Paper, Scissors Noria, Wagner, 2017: ACT-11 Action Selection Restrictions The Normandy Campaign, Chadwick, 1983: MOV-24 Hidden Movement Nothing Personal, Avery and Vasel, 2013: UNC11 Hidden Control Nuclear War, Malewicki, 1965: ACT-06 Action Queue, VIC-08 Player Elimination Number 9, Wichman, 2017: SET-03 Grid Coverage Nuns on the Run, Moyersoen, 2010: ARC-08 Line of Sight Nur Peanuts!, Meister, 2001: MOV-02 Roll and Move Nyctophobia, Stippell, 2018: UNC-05 Roles with Asymmetric Information Oh My Goods!, Pfister, 2015: STR-02 Cooperative Games, UNC-02 Push-Your-Luck Old Maid, Unknown, ∼1700: RES-23 Hot Potato, STR-06 Single Loser Games The Omega Virus, Gray, 1992: MOV-17 Map Reduction, STR-05 Semi-Cooperative Games, VIC-13 Elapsed Real Time One Deck Dungeon, Cieslik, 2016: MOV-19 Move Trough Deck, STR-04 Solo Games One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Alspach and Okui, 2014: UNC-04 Hidden Roles Onirim, Torbey, 2010: STR-04 Solo Games Onitama, Sato, 2014: ARC-06 Force Projection, RES-11 Static Capture Ora et Labora, Rosenberg, 2011: ECO-15 Contracts Orléans, Stockhausen, 2014: ACT-16 Tech Trees/Tech Tracks/Tech Bonuses, SET-05 Combo Abilities, STR02 Cooperative Games, TRN-15 Interleaved vs. Sequential Phases, UNC-09 Probability Management Pack & Stack, Eisenstein, 2008: SET-03 Grid Coverage Pairs, Ernest, Glumpler, and Peterson, 2014: STR-06 Single Loser Games Panamax, d’Orey, Sentieiro, and Soledade, 2014: ACT-21 Slide / Push, MOV-15 Moving Multiple Units Pandemic, Leacock, 2008: ACT-01 Action Points, UNC-07 Unknown Information, VIC-10 Exhausting Resources, VIC-11 Completing Targets, VIC-12 Fixed Number of Events Pandemic family of games, Leacock, 2008: STR02 Cooperative Games, STR-08 Scenario/Mission/Campaign Games Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, Daviau and Leacock, 2015: STR-10 Legacy Games Pantone: The Game, Rogers, 2018: ACT-23 Drawing PanzerBlitz, Dunnigan, 1970: ARC-08 Line of Sight, MOV-01 Tessellation Paperclip Railways, Boydell, 2011: SET-04 Network Building Parcheesi, Unknown, 400: MOV-02 Roll and Move, TRN-01 Fixed Turn Order, VIC-07 Race

Page 599

Game Index Patchistory, Jung and Kim, 2013, ACT-20 Layering Patchwork, Rosenberg, 2014: ECO-20 Resource Queue, SET-03 Grid Coverage Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, Selinker, Brown, O’Connor, Peterson, and Weidling, 2013: CAR-05 Deck Building, STR-08 Scenario/Mission/ Campaign Games Pax Britannica, Costikyan, 1985: ARC-01 Absolute Control Pax Pamir Second Edition, Wehrle, 2019: AUC08 Dutch Auction The Peloponnesian War, Herman, 1991: STR-04 Solo Games Photosynthesis, Hach, 2017: ARC-06 Force Projection Pick-A-Polar Bear, Landsvogt, 2013: TRN-07 Real-Time Pictionary, Angel, 1985: ACT-23 Drawing, UNC-06 Communication Limits Pick-Up Sticks, Unknown, ~1850: RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Pictomania, Chvátil, 2011: ACT-23 Drawing Pie Face, Uncredited, 1964: RES-10 Physical Action Piece O’ Cake, Allers, 2008: ECO-09 I Cut, You Choose Pikoko, Porter, 2018: UNC-08 Hidden Information Pillars of the Earth, Rieneck and Stadler, 2006: TRN-11 Random Turn Order, WPL08 Turn Order and Resolution Order Pirate and Traveller, Sanderson, 1908: MOV-01 Tessellation Pit, Cayce, Gavitt, and Parker, 1903: ECO02 Trading, TRN-08 Punctuated Real-Time Pit Crew, Engelstein, 2017: TRN-07 Real-Time PitchCar, du Poël, 1995: RES-24 Flicking, STR‑03 Team-Based Games Power Grid, Friese, 2004: AUC-03 Turn Order Until Pass Auction, AUC-18 Auction Compensation, ECO03 Market, SET-04 Network Building, TRN-02 Stat Turn Order, TRN-15 Interleaved vs. Sequential Phases, VIC-04 Victory Points as Resource, VIC-18 Catch the Leader Power Grid: Factory Manager, Friese, 2009: WPL-03 Acquiring and Losing Workers Praetor, Novac, 2014: WPL-02 Workers of Differing Types, WPL-03 Acquiring and Losing Workers President, Unknown: CAR-02 Ladder Climbing Primordial Soup, Matthäus and Nestel, 1997: MOV-14 Bias, VIC-01 Victory Points from Game State The Princes of Florence, Kramer, Ulrich, and Ulrich, 2000: SET-03 Grid Coverage Puerto Rico, Seyfarth, 2002: ACT-02 Action Drafting, ACT-08 Follow Games, ACT-16 Tech Trees/Tech Tracks/ Tech Bonuses, ECO-17 Increase Value of Unchosen Resources, TRN04 Progressive Turn Order Puzzle Strike, Sirlin, 2010: UNC-09 Probability Management Pyramid of Pengqueen, Merkle, 2008: MOV-24 Hidden Movement Pyramid Solitaire, Unknown: ACT-20 Layering QE, Birnbaum, 2019: AUC-04 Sealed-Bid Auction Quadropolis, Gandon, 2016: SET-02 TileLaying, TRN-04 Progressive Turn Order Quao, Rivaldi and Rivaldi, 2007: UNC-13 Induction Quarriors!, Elliott and Lang, 2011: RES-05 Die Icons Quartermaster General, Brody, 2014: MOV-13 Chaining Qwirkle, Ross, 2006: SET-02 Tile-Laying Ra, Knizia, 1999: AUC-06 Constrained Bidding, AUC-12 Closed Economy Auction, UNC-02 Push-Your-Luck Race for the Galaxy, Lehmann, 2007: ACT-02 Action Drafting, CAR-04 Card Draw, Limits and Deck Exhaustion, SET-05 Combo Abilities, TRN10 Role Order, UNC-01 Betting and Bluffing, VIC-06 End-Game Bonuses, VIC-10 Exhausting Resources, VIC-11 Completing Targets Rack-O, Uncredited, 1956: VIC-21 Ordering Raccoon Tycoon (Drover, 2018): AUC-03 Rail Baron, Erickson and Erickson, 1977: ECO14 Ownership, SET-04 Network Building Rail Pass, Green, 2019: VIC-21 Ordering Railroad Ink, Hatch and Silva, 2018: ACT-19 Bingo

Page 600

Game Index Railroad Tycoon: The Boardgame, Drover and Wallace, 2005: ECO-07 Loans Railway Rivals, Watts, 1984: ECO-14 Ownership Railways of the World, Drover and Wallace, 2005: ECO-07 Loans Ravenous River, Shalev, 2016: STR-09 Scoreand-Reset Games, UNC-04 Hidden Roles The Really Nasty Horse Racing Game, Knock, 1987: MOV-15 Move Multiple Units Red7, Chudyk and Cieslik, 2014: STR-09 Score‑and-Reset Games Redcap Ruckus, Ude, 2021: ACT-21 Slide/Push The Resistance, Eskrisge, 2009: ECO-18 Negotiation, ECO-19 Alliances, RES-15 Voting The Resistance: Avalon, Eskrisge, 2012: UNC-04 Hidden Roles The Republic of Rome, Berthold, Greenwood, and Haines, 1990: ECO-18 Negotiation, RES-15 Voting, STR-05 Semi-Cooperative Games Retreat to Darkmoor, Loomis and Shalev, 2016: ARC-02 Area Majority/Influence, ECO-20 Resource Queue Reversi, Mollet and Waterman, 1883: ARC-02 Area Majority/Influence, RES-12 Enclosure Revolution!, duBarry, 2009: AUC-11 MultipleLot Acution Rex: Final Days of an Empire, Eberle, Goodenoungh, Kitteredge, Konieczka, Olatka, and Petersen, 2012: RES-14 Force Commitment Rhino Hero, Frisco and Strumph, 2011: RES-25 Stacking and Balancing, STR-06 Single-Loser Games, STR-09 Scoreand-Reset Games Richtofen’s War, Reed, 1972: MOV-01 Tessellation Riff-Raff, Cantzler, 2012: RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Rise and Decline of the Tird Reich, Greenwood and Prados, 1974: MOV-04 Movement Points, TRN-02 Stat Turn Order, VIC-15 Circuit Breaker/ Sudden Death Rise of Augustus, Mori, 2013: ACT-19 Bingo Rising Sun, Lang, 2018: RES-14 Force Commitment, RES-18 Tie-Breakers Risk, Lamorisse and Levin, 1959: ARC01 Absolute Control, ARC-04 Territories and Regions, MOV-01 Tessellation, RES-01 High Number, RES-18 Tie-Breakers, STR-01 Competitive Games, VIC-08 Player Elimination Risk Legacy, Daviau and Dupuis, 2011: ACT18 Narrative Choice, ARC-04 Territories and Regions, STR-10 Legacy Games Risk: Star Wars Edition, D’Aloisio, Rucker, and Van Ness, 2015: ACT-05 Command Cards Roadkill, Greenwood and Verssen, 1993: MOV11 Relative Position Roads and Boats, Doumen and Wiersinga, 1999: ECO-01 Exchanging Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island, Trzewiczek, 2012: ACT-17 Events, STR-04 Solo Games Robo Rally, Garfield, 1994: ACT-06 Action Queue, MOV-10 Programmed Movement, MOV-14 Bias, TRN-09 Simultaneous Action Selection Rock Me Archimedes, Buchanan, 2012: RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Rococo, Cramer, Malz, and Malz, 2013: ECO-03 Market, WPL-01 Standard Worker Placement Roll for the Galaxy, Huang and Lehmann, 2014: UNC-09 Probability Management Roll Trough the Ages: The Iron Age, Lehmann, 2014: UNC-02 Push-Your-Luck Rome: City of Marble, Myers, 2015: SET-02 Tile-Laying Root, Wehrle, 2018: ACT-06 Action Queue, ACT-12 Variable Player Powers, RES19 Dice Selection Rummy, Unknown, ∼1850: CAR-03 Melding, SET-01 Set Valuation Rummikub, Hertzano, 1977: CAR-03 Melding The Russian Campaign, Edwards, 1974: ARC-07 Zone of Control, TRN-15 Interleaved vs. Sequential Phases, VIC-15 Circuit Breaker/Sudden Death Russian Railroads, Ohley and Orgler, 2013: ACT‑16 Tech Trees/Tech Tracks/Tech Bonuses, WPL-03 Acquiring and Losing Workers, WPL-05 Adding and Blocking Buildings

Page 601

Game Index Saboteur, Moyersoen, 2004: STR-07 Traitor GamesSagrada, Andrews, 2017: UNC-09 Probability Management Salem 1692, Hancock, 2015: UNC-04 Hidden Roles Samurai, Knizia, 1998: RES-12 Enclosure San Marco, Moon and Weissblum, 2001: ECO09 I Cut, You Choose Santa Fe, Moon, 1992: VIC-14 Connections Santiago, Heley and Pelek, 2003: ECO-16 Bribery Say Anything, Crapuchettes and Pillalamarri, 2008: RES-16 Player Judge Scan, Glass, 1970: RES-10 Physical Action Schoko & Co., Hirschfield and Monnet, 1987: ECO-15 Contracts Scotland Yard, Burggraf, Garrels, Hoermann, Ifland, Scheerer, and Schlegel, 1983: MOV-05 Resource to Move, MOV24 Hidden Movement Scythe, Stegmaier, 2016: AUC-04 SealedBid Auction, RES-14 Force Commitment, STR-04 Solo Games, UNC-10 Variable Setup SEAL Team Flix, Ruth and Tomas, 2018: RES-24 Flicking, RES-10 Physical Action Seasons, Bonnessée, 2012: CAR-06 Drafting, CAR-07 Deck Construction Secret Hitler, Boxleiter, Maranges, and Temkin, 2016: UNC-04 Hidden Roles Secret Labyrinth, Kobbert, 1998: RES-07 Rock, Paper, Scissors Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan, Clakins, 2011: UNC-03 Memory Senet, Unknown, ~2600 BCE: MOV-02 Roll and Move, STR-01 Competitive Games Sentient, Kevern, 2017: TRN-06 Pass Order Sentinels of the Multiverse, Badell, Bender, and Rebottaro, 2011: ACT-12 Variable Player Powers, STR-02 Cooperative Games SET, Falco, 1988: Set Collection Chapter Shadow Hunters, Ikeda, 2005: UNC-04 Hidden Roles Shadowrun: Crossfire, Elliot, Heinsoo, Lin, Marques, McCarthy, Schneider, and Watkins, 2014: CAR-05 Deck Building Shadows over Camelot, Cathala and Laget, 2005: STR-07 Traitor Games Shark, Vanaise, 1987: ECO-03 Market, ECO-13 Investment Sheriff of Nottingham, Halaban and Zatz, 2014: ECO-16 Bribery Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Tames Murders & Other Cases, Edwards, Goldberg, and Grady, 1981: STR-02 Cooperative Games Shogi, Unknown: MOV-03 Pattern Movement, RES-11 Static Capture Shogun/Samurai Swords/Ikusa, Gray, 1986: AUC11 Multiple Lot Auction Show & Tile, Loomis and Shalev, 2018: ACT23 Drawing, TRN-07 Real-Time, UNC-06 Communication Limits Sidereal Confluence, Deichmann, 2017: ECO-01 Exchanging, ECO-02 Trading Sidereal Confluence: Trading and Negotiation in the Elysian Quadrant, Deichmann, 2017: ACT-12 Variable Player Powers Sinking of the Titanic, Uncredited, 1975: MOV17 Map Reduction Skull and Roses, Marly, 2011: UNC-01 Betting and Bluffing Skull King, Beck, 2013: AUC-17 Bids as Wagers Sky Runner, Glimne, Karlsson and Sevelin, 1999: AUC-05 Sealed Bid with Cancellation, VIC-07 Race Sleuth, Sackson, 1971: UNC-12 Deduction Sluff Off, Dorra, 2003: AUC-17 Bids as Wagers, CAR-01 Trick Taking Small World, Keyaerts, 2009: ARC-01 Absolute Control, ECO-17 Increase Value of Unchosen Resources, VIC-04 Victory Points as Resource, VIC-05 Hidden and Exposed Victory Points, VIC-09 Fixed Number of Rounds Smart Phone, Inc, Lashin, 2018: ACT-20 Layering Smash Up, Peterson, 2012: ARC-02 Area Majority/Influence, CAR-07 Deck Construction Snakes & Ladders, Unknown, ∼200 bce: MOV01 Tessellation, MOV-02 Roll and Move, TRN-01 Fixed Turn Order, VIC-07 Race Snorta!, Childs and Richardson, 2011: ACT-22 Matching Snow Tails, Lamont and Lamont, 2008: MOV08 Drift Snowdonia, Boydell, 2012: WPL-03 Acquiring and Losing Workers Sorry!, Haskell, Jr. and Storey, 1929: MOV-01 Tessellation, RES-11 Static Capture, TRN-16 Lose a Turn, VIC07 Race

Page 602

Game Index Source of the Nile, Maker and Wesley, 1978: MOV-16 Map Addition Space Alert, Chvátil, 2008: ACT-06 Action Queue, STR-02 Cooperative Games, TRN-07 Real-Time, VIC-13 Elapsed Real Time Space Base, Clair, 2018: ECO-12 Random Production, VIC-15 Circuit Breaker/ Sudden Death Space Cadets, Engelstein, Engelstein, and Engelstein, 2012: MOV-10 Programmed Movement, RES-10 Physical Action, STR-02 Cooperative Games, TRN-14 Passed Action Token Space Cadets: Dice Duel, Engelstein and Engelstein, 2013: STR-03 TeamBased Games, TRN-08 Punctuated Real-Time Space Dealer, Stapelfeldt, 2006: TRN-12 Action Timer Space Freaks, Jantunen and Wikström, 2017: RES-22 Kill Steal Space Sheep, Rubbo, 2013: VIC-21 Ordering SpaceCorp: 2025-2300 AD, Butterfield, 2018: ACT-15 Gating and Unlocking Spades, Unknown: CAR-01 Trick Taking Spartacus: A Game of Blood and Treachery, Dill, Kovaleski, and Sweigart, 2012: AUC04 Sealed-Bid Auction Specter Ops, Matsuuchi, 2015: MOV-24 Hidden Movement, STR-03 Team-Based Games, UNC-06 Communication Limits, UNC-10 Variable Setup The Speicherstadt, Feld, 2010: VIC-09 Fixed Number of Rounds Spirit Island, Reuss, 2017: ACT-03 Action Retrieval, ACT-12 Variable Player Powers, STR-02 Cooperative Games Spit, Unknown: TRN-07 Real-Time Splendor, André, 2014: ECO-10 Discounts, TRN-01 Fixed Turn Order, VIC-02 Victory Points from Player Actions SPQF, Rodiek, 2018: ACT-08 Follow Spyfall, Ushan, 2014: UNC-05 Roles with Asymmetric Information Spyrium, Attia, 2013: AUC-16 Dutch Priority Auction, AUC-18 Auction Compensation Squad Leader, Hill, 1977: MOV-01 Tessellation, RES-04 Ratio/Combat Results Table, TRN-17 Interrupts Squint, Boss, 2002: ACT-23 Drawing Star Fleet Battles, Cole, 1979: MOV-09 Impulse Star Realms, Dougherty and Kastle, 2014: CAR05 Deck Building, ECO-08 Always Available Purchase Star Wars: Imperial Assault, Kemppainen, Konieczka, and Ying, 2014: STR-02 Cooperative Games, STR-03 TeamBased Games Star Wars: Rebellion, Konieczka, 2016: ARC-03 Troop Types, ECO-04 Delayed Purchase Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game, Little, 2012: MOV-20 Movement Template Starcraft: The Board Game, Konieczka and Petersen, 2007: ACT-09 Order Counters, RES-06 Card Play Starship Samurai, Vega, 2018: ACT-01 Action Points, VIC-19 Tug of War Stay Alive, Barlow, 1965: MOV-18 Map Deformation Steampunk Rally, Bishop, 2015: SET-05 Combo Abilities Stellar Conquest, Tompson, 1975: ACT-16 Tech Trees / Tech Tracks / Track Bonuses Sticheln, Palesch, 1993: CAR-01 Trick Taking Stockpile, Sobol and Orden, 2015: AUC-06 Constrained Bid, ECO-03 Market Stone Age, Brunnhofer, 2008: TRN-04 Progressive Turn Order, TRN05 Claim Turn Order, WPL-03 Acquiring and Losing Workers, WPL-05 Adding and Blocking Buildings, WPL-08 Turn Order and Resolution Order Storm Over Arnhem, Allen, 1981: ACT-14 Advantage Token Stop Tief, Doyle, 1979: MOV-24 Hidden Movement Stratego, Mogendorff, 1946: RES-07 Rock, Paper, Scissors; UNC-03 Memory Streetcar, Dorra, 1995: SET-04 Network Building String Railway, Hayashi, 2009: SET-04 Network Building Stroop, Chaffer, 2017: ACT-22 Matching Struggle of Empires, Wallace, 2004: ECO-19 Alliances Sub Search, Uncredited, 1973: MOV-01 Tessellation Suburbia, Alspach, 2012: AUC-08 Dutch Auction, SET-02 Tile-Laying, VIC05 Hidden and Exposed Victory Points, VIC-06 End-Game Bonuses Sumer, Favorov, Gunnarrson, Raab, and Suthers, 2017: AUC-14 Dexterity Auction

Page 603

Game Index Sundae Split, Bivins, 2017: ECO-09 I Cut, You Choose Super Skill Pinball 4-cade, Engelstein, 2020: ACT-19 Bingo Supremacy, Simpson, 1984: ECO-03 Market Survive: Escape From Atlantis, Courtland-Smith, 1982: MOV-17 Map Reduction, STR-05 Semi-Cooperative Games Sushi Go!, Walker-Harding, 2013: CAR-06 Drafting, SET-01 Set Valuation Suspend, Uncredited, 2012: RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Action Queue T.I.M.E Stories, Chassenet and Rozoy, 2015: STR-02 Cooperative Games, STR-08 Scenario/Mission/Campaign Games Taboo, Hersch, 1989: STR-03 Team-Based Games Take It Easy, Burley, 1983: ACT-19 Bingo Tales of the Arabian Nights, Freeman, Goldberg, Kaufman, Maroney, and Rolston, 1985: ACT-18 Narrative Choice Talisman, Harris, 1983: MOV-02 Roll and Move TAMSK, Burm, 1998: TRN-12 Action Timer Tannhäuser, Grosselin and Poli, 2007: ARC-08 Line of Sight Tash-Kalar: Arena of Legends, Chvátil, 2013: RES-11 Static Capture Team3, Cutler and Fantastic, 2019: UNC-06 Communication Limits Telephone, Unknown: RES-26 Neighbor Scope Telestrations, Uncredited, 2009: ACT-23 Drawing, RES-26 Neighbor Scope Terra Mystica, Drögemüller and Ostertag, 2012: ACT-17 Events Terraforming Mars, Fryxelius, 2016: CAR-09 Tags, STR-04 Solo Games, TRN-04 Progressive Turn Order, VIC-06 End-Game Bonuses Terror in Meeple City, Bauza nd Maublanc, 2013: RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Texas Hold’Em, Unknown: TRN-04 Progressive Turn Order Tebes, Prinz, 2007: TRN-13 Time Track Teseus: The Dark Orbit, Oracz, 2013: MOV-12 Mancala Trough the Ages: A Story of Civilization, Chvátil, 2006 and Trough the Ages: A New Story of Civiliation (tabletop and digital formats), Chvátil, 2015: ACT-01 Action Points, ACT-15 Gating and Unlocking, ACT-16 Tech Trees/Tech Tracks/Tech Bonuses, ACT-17 Events, AUC-03 Turn Order Until Pass Auction, AUC-08 Dutch Auction, AUC-09 SecondBid Auction, CAR-04 Card Draw, Limits, and Deck Exhaustion, ECO11 Upgrades, TRN-01 Fixed, TRN15 Interleaved vs. Sequential Phases, VIC-10 Exhausting Resources Trough the Desert, Knizia, 1998: RES-11 Static Capture, RES-12 Enclosure, MOV13 Chaining Tunder Alley, Horger and Horger, 2014: MOV15 Move Multiple Units Tichu, Hostettler, 1991: CAR-02 Ladder Climbing, UNC-01 Betting and Bluffing Ticket to Ride, Moon, 2004: CAR-04 Card Draw, Limits, and Deck Exhaustion, MOV-17 Map Reduction,SET-01 Set Valuation, SET-04 Network Building, STR-08 Scenario/Mission/ Campaign Games, VIC-02 Victory Points from Player Actions, VIC06 End-Game Bonuses, VIC-10 Exhausting Resources Tides of Madness, Čurla, 2016: CAR-06 Drafting Tigris & Euphrates, Knizia, 1997: VIC-05 Hidden and Exposed Victory Points, VIC-20 Highest Lowest Tikal, Kiesling and Kramer, 1999: ACT-01 Action Points, MOV-04 Movement Points Time ‘n’ Space, Stapelfeldt, 2013: TRN-12 Action Timer Games Time War, Peek, 1979: ECO-04 Delayed Purchase Tin Goose, Clakins, 2016: AUC-07 OnceAround Auction Tiny Epic Galaxies, Almes, 2015: ACT-08 Follow Tiny Epic Kingdoms, Almes, 2014: AUC-04 Sealed-Bid Auction, UNC-01 Betting and Bluffing Titan, McAllister and Trampier, 1980: ACT16 Tech Trees/Tech Tracks/Tech Bonuses, ARC-03 Troop Types, RES-02 Stat Check, RES-13 Minimap, RES-20 Action Speed Tobago, Allen, 2009: ECO-13 Investment, UNC-12 Deduction Tokaido, Bauza, 2012: TRN-13 Time Track Tokyo Highway, Shimamoto and Tomioka, 2016: RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Tonga Bonga, Dorra, 1998: ECO-16 Bribery

Page 604

Game Index Topple, Tibault, 1983: RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Trade on the Tigris, Engelstein and Sturm, 2018: ECO-02 Trading, RES-18 Tie-Breakers Traders of Genoa, Dorn, 2001: ECO-16 Bribery Trains and Stations, Lang, 2013: MOV-01 Tessellation Trajan, Fled, 2011: MOV-12 Mancala TransAmerica, Delonge, 2001: VIC-14 Connections, SET-04 Network Building Trapwords, Chvátil, 2018: UNC-12 Deduction Triassic Terror, Hawes, 2013: ARC-03 Troop Types Tribune: Primus Inter Pares, Schmiel, 2007: WPL-01 Standard Worker Placement Trick of the Rails, Hayashi, 2011: CAR-01 Trick Taking Trouble, Kohner, Kohner, and Kroll, 1965: RES11 Static Capture, TRN-16 Lose a Turn Tsuro, McMurchie, 2004: SET-04 Network Building Tumblin’ Dice, Grayson, 2004: RES-24 Flicking Tutankhamen, Knizia, 1993: MOV-14 Bias Twilight Imperium, Petersen, 1997: ACT-16 Tech Trees/Tech Tracks/Tech Bonuses, ARC-03 Troop Types, TRN-05 Claim Turn Order Twilight Struggle, Gupta and Matthews, 2005: ACT-04 Action/Event, ACT-14 Advantage Token, ARC-02 Area Majority/Influence, ARC-04 Territories and Regions, MOV-01 Tessellation, UNC-09 Probability Management, VIC-01 Victory Points from State, VIC-09 Fixed Number of Rounds, VIC-15 Circuit Breaker/ Sudden Death, VIC-19 Tug of War Twin Tin Bots, Keyaerts, 2013: ACT-06 Action Queue, MOV-10 Programmed Movement Twixt, Randolph, 1962: SET-04 Network Building, VIC-14 Connections Two Rooms and a Boom, Gerding and McCoy, 2013: UNC-04 Hidden Roles Tzolk’in: The Mayan Calendar, Luciani and Tascini, 2012: ACT-11 Action Selection Restrictions, WPL-01 Standard Worker Placement, WPL02 Workers of Differing Types, WPL-08 Turn Order and Resolution Order Ubongo, Rejchtman, 2003: SET-03 Grid Coverage Ulm, Burkhardt, 2016: ACT-21 Slide / Push Ultimate Werewolf, Alspach, 2010 UNC04:Hidden Roles Uncharted Seas, Fawcett and Sims, 2008: RES03 Critical Hits and Failures Undermining, Tolman, 2011: ECO-15 Contracts Unlock! series, Various, 2017: STR-02 Cooperative Games, STR-08 Scenario/Mission/Campaign Games, TRN-07 Real-Time Unmatched, Daviau and Jacobson, 2019: ARC08 Line of Sight Uno, Robbins, 1971: ACT-22 Matching, TRN16 Lose a Turn Up Front, Allen, 1983: MOV-11 Relative Positon Valley of the Kings, Cleaver, 2014: CAR-05 Deck Building Valparaiso, Malz and Malz, 2018: ACT-06 Action Queue, RES-22 Kill Steal Vegas Showdown, Stern, 2005: AUC-15 FixedPlacement Auction Via Appia, Feldkötter, 2013: ACT-21 Slide / Push Victorian Masterminds, Bauza and Lang, 2019: ACT-09 Order Counters A Victory Lost: Crisis in Ukraine 1942–1943, Nakamura, 2006: TRN-11 Random Turn Order Vikings, Kiesling, 2007: AUC-08 Dutch Auction Villa Paletti, Payne, 2001: RES-10 Physical Action Village, Brand and Brand, 2011: WPL-02 Workers of Differing Types, WPL-03 Acquiring and Losing Workers Vinci, Keyaerts, 1999: ECO-17 Increase Value of Unchosen Resources, VIC-05 Hidden and Exposed Victory Points Visitor in Blackwood Grove, Flanagan and Seidman: UNC-13 Induction Viticulture, Stegmaier and Stone, 2013: TRN-04 Progressive Turn Order Volt: Robot Battle Arena, Matsuuchi, 2014: MOV-10 Programmed Movement Völuspá, Caputo, 2012: SET-02 Tile-Laying Vortex, Hardy, Jolly, and Petersen, 2001: MOV21 Pieces as Map Walk the Dogs, Moon and Weissblum, 2005: ECO-20 Resource Queue Walk the Plank!, Steely and Tinney, 2013: TRN04 Progressive Turn Order

Page 605

Game Index Wallenstein, Henn, 2002: RES-10 Physical Action War, Unknown: RES-01 High Number War of the Ring, Di Meglio, Maggi, and Nepitello, 2004: ACT-02 Action Drafting, ARC-04 Territories and Regions, MOV-24 Hidden Movement, RES-06 Card Play, STR-03 Team-Based Games, VIC-11 Completing Targets Warhammer 40,000, Chambers, Johnson, Priestly, and Torpe, 1993: ACT-17 Events Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Uncredited, 2015: ARC-08 Line of Sight, MOV-06 Measurement, RES-02 Stat Check Warmachine/Hordes, McVey, Snoddy, and Wilson, 2003: ACT-13 Once-PerGame Abilities, RES-03 Criticals Warpgate, Nichipurov, 2018: ACT-11 Action Selection Restrictions Warrior Knights, Carver, Clequin, Faidutti, and Konieczka, 2006: TRN-11 Random Wartime: The Battle of Valyance Vale, Guild, Lackey, Parks, and Tempkin, 2017: TRN-12 Action Timer We the People, Herman, 1993: ACT-04 Action/Event, ACT-22 Matching, CAR-08 Multi-Use Cards, RES-06 Card Play Wealth of Nations, Carroll, 2008: ECO-03 Market, ECO-07 Loans Welcome to Centerville, Jensen, 2017: VIC-20 Highest Lowest Wendake, Sabia, 2017: VIC-20 Highest Lowest Werewolf, Davidoff and Plotkin, 1986: ECO-18 Negotiation, ECO-19 Alliances, RES-15 Voting, STR-07 Traitor, UNC-04 Hidden Roles, VIC-08 Player Elimination Werewords, Alspach, 2017: UNC-05 Roles with Asymmetric Information Wheedle, Knizia, 2002: ECO-13 Investment Who in the Room, Uncredited, 2018: UNC-14 Questions and Answers Wildlands, Wallace, 2018: RES-22 Kill Steal Win, Lose, or Banana, Cieslik, 2009: UNC-05 Roles with Asymmetric Information Wings of War, Angiolini and Paglia, 2004: MOV20 Movement Template Wisdom of Solomon, duBarry, 2018: WPL-07 Building Actions and Rewards Witness, Bodin, 2014: UNC-06 Communication Limits Wits & Wagers, Crapuchettes, 2003: UNC01 Betting and Bluffing, UNC-14 Questions and Answers Wiz-War, Jolly, 1983: MOV-18 Map Deformation Wizard, Fisher, 1984: AUC-17 Bids as Wagers, CAR-01 Trick Taking Wok Star, Fowers, 2010: TRN-12 Action Timer Games World in Flames, Pinder and Rowland, 1985: ECO-04 Delayed Purchase, MOV-01 Tessellation, MOV-22 Multiple Maps World War II: Barbarossa to Berlin, Raicer, 2002: ACT-04 Action/Event Xia: Legends of a Drift System, Miller, 2014: MOV-16 Map Addition Yacht Race, Uncredited, 1960: MOV-14 Bias Yahtzee, Lowe, 1956: RES-21 Rerolling and Locking, UNC-02 Push-Your-Luck Yedo, Ginste and Plancke, 2012: MOV-18 Map Deformation, WPL-07 Building Actions and Rewards You Need Drew’s Truck, Young, 2003: SET-03 Grid Coverage Yspahan, Pauchon, 2006: ACT-02 Action Drafting Yura Yura Penguin, Ryoko, 2019: RES-25 Stacking and Balancing Zendo, Heath and Looney, 2001: UNC-13 Induction Zombie Dice, Jackson, 2010: RES-21 Rerolling and Locking Zombie in my Pocket, Lee, 2010: RES-08 Prisoner’s Dilemma Zombie Teenz Evolution, Lobet, 2020: STR-10 Legacy Games

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Index ў ў Absolute Control, 486–487 Acquiring and Losing Workers, 413–414 Action Drafting game, 43 Action Drafting system, 81–83 Action/Event system, 87–89 Action Points, 78–80 Action Queue, 92–94 Action Retrieval, 84–86 Action Retrieval system, 73 Actions, 51, 77 Action Drafting system, 81–83 Action/Event, 87–89 Action Points, 78–80 Action Queue, 92–94 Action Retrieval, 84–86 Action Selection Restrictions, 104–105 Advantage Token, 110–111 Bingo, 123–124 Command Cards, 90–91 Drawing, 137–139 Events, 118–119 Follow mechanism, 97–98 Gating and Unlocking, 112–114 Layering, 125–129 Matching, 134–136 Narrative Choice, 120–122 Once-Per-Game Abilities, 108–109 Order Counters, 99–101 Rondel systems, 102–103 Shared Action Queue, 95–96 Slide/Push, 130–133 Tech Trees/Tech Tracks/Track Bonuses, 115–117 Variable Player Powers, 106–107 Action Selection mechanism, 55 Action Speed, 189–190 Action Timer mechanism, 61–63, 66 Adding and Blocking Buildings, 417–419 Advantage Token mechanism, 110–111 AI, see Artificial intelligence Alliances, 350–351 Alpha player problem, 6 Alternate Removal, 162–163 Always Available Purchases, 324–325 Area Control, 485 Absolute Control, 486–487 Area Majority/Influence, 488–490 Area Parameters, 496–498 Force Projection, 499–500 Line of Sight (LOS), 503–506 Territories and Regions, 494–495 Troop Types, 491–493 Zone of Control, 501–502 Area Majority games, 39, 163, 215, 386 Area Majority/Influence, 488–490 Area Parameters, 496–498 Armor symbol, 153 Artificial intelligence (AI), 5, 13–14 Asymmetry in games, 2 Auctions, 355 Auction Compensation, 403–405 Bids as Wagers, 400–402 Closed-Economy Auction, 387–388 Constrained Bidding, 370–372 Dexterity Auction, 392–393 Dutch Auction, 375–378 Dutch Priority Auction, 397–399 English Auction, 359–360 Fixed-Placement Auction, 394–396 Multiple-Lot Auction, 384–386 Once-Around Auction, 373–374 Open Auction, 357–358 Reverse Auction, 389–391 Sealed-Bid Auction, 365–367 Sealed Bid with Cancellation, 368–369 Second-Bid Auction, 379–381 Selection Order Bid, 382–383 Turn Order Until Pass Auction, 362–364 Automatic Bias mechanisms, 460 Automatic Resource Growth, 320–321 Azul, 237 Balancing games, 205 Basic Resource Points (BRPs), 37 Batch Queue approach, 93 Battle Board, 171 Battle games, 145 Betting and Bluffing, 263–266 Betting games, 290 Bias mechanism, 460–462 Bids as Wagers, 400–402 Bid Turn Order, 38–39 Bingo, 123–124 Bluffing, 263–265

Page 607

Index Breese, Richard, 407 Bribery, 343–344 BRPs, see Basic Resource Points Building Actions and Rewards, 422–423 Buy Power Plants, 70 Campaign games, 22–24, 27 Card Draw, 536, 537 Card games, 10, 25 Card Mechanisms, 527 Card Draw, Limits, and Deck Exhaustion, 536–538 Deck-Building games, 539–542 Deck Construction, 548–551 Drafting, 543–547 Ladder-Climbing games, 532–533 Melding, 534–535 Multi-Use Cards, 552–555 Tags, 556–559 Trick-Taking games, 529–531 Card Play, 155–156 Castillo, 272 Catch the Leader mechanism, 36, 250–251, 466 CCG, see Collectible Card Games Chaining, 458–459 Circuit Breaker, 244–245 City cards, 207 Claim Turn Order Action, 43–46 Classic card games, 273 Climbing games, 532–533 Closed-Economy Auction, 387–388 Closed Economy mechanism, 319 Collectible Card Games (CCG), 545 Combat Card, 155–156 Combat Results Table (CRT), 149–151 Combo Abilities, 523–525 Command Card systems, 90–91 Communication, gameplay overcoming, 1 Communication Limits, 283–285 Communications-based co-op games, 12 Competitive games, 2–3 Completing Targets system, 236–237, 253 Connections, 242–243 Constrained Bidding, 370–372 Contracts, 341–342 Cooperative game engine, 20 Cooperative games, 1, 4–7, 245, 536 Cooperative Limited Card Games, 12 Critical Hits and Failures, 147–148 Crossroads mechanism, 121 Crossword puzzles, 12 CRT, see Combat Results Table Daviau, Rob, 27 Deck-Building games, 539–542 Deck Construction, 548–551 Deck exhaustion, 536–538 Deduction, 298–300 Delayed Purchase, 315–317 Designers, experience-oriented, 3 Dexterity Auction, 392–393 Dexterity games, 26 Dice, 268–269 Dice Pool, 82, 142 Dice Selection, 187–188 Die Icons, 152–154 Different Dice, 446 Discounts, 328–329 Drafting, 543–547 Drawing, 137–139 Drift, 447 Duplicate Bridge, 124 Dutch Auction, 375–378 Dutch Priority Auction, 397–399 Economic games, 215, 221 Economics, 307 Alliances, 350–351 Always Available Purchases, 324–325 Automatic Resource Growth, 320–321 Bribery, 343–344 Contracts, 341–342 Delayed Purchase, 315–317 Discounts, 328–329 Exchanging, 308–309 I Cut, You Choose, 326–327 Income, 318–319 Increase Value of Unchosen Resources, 345–347 Investment, 335–337 Loans, 322–323 Market, 312–314 Negotiation, 348–349 Ownership, 338–340 Random Production, 332–334 Resource Queue, 352–354 Trading, 310–311 Upgrades, 330–331 Edge effect, 216 Elapsed Real Time, 52, 240–241 Enclosure, 169–170 End-Game Bonuses, 225–226 End-Game Elimination mechanism, 230 English Auction, 359–361 Event Deck, 87 Events, 118–119 “Evergreen” keywords, 558 Exchanging, 308–309 Exhausting Resources, 234–235 Experience-oriented designers, 3

Page 608

Index Fake Artist, 138 Fantasy Flight Games, 10 Finale, 246–247 First Player token, 40 Fixed Number of Events, 238–239 Fixed Number of Rounds, 232–233 Fixed-Placement Auction, 394–396 Fixed Turn Order, 34–35 Flicking games, 198–200 Follow mechanism, 97–98 Force Commitment, 174–176 Force Projection, 499–500 Free-for-all games, 401 Friendly resolution, 185–186 Game end and victory, 213 Catch the Leader, 250–251 Circuit Breaker/Sudden Death, 244–245 Completing Targets, 236–237 Connections, 242–243 Elapsed Real Time, 240–241 End-Game Bonuses, 225–226 Exhausting Resources, 234–235 Finale, 246–247 Fixed Number of Events, 238–239 Fixed Number of Rounds, 232–233 Hidden and Exposed Victory Points, 223–224 Highest Lowest, 255–256 King of the Hill (KotH), 248–249 Ordering, 257–259 Player Elimination, 229–231 Temporary and Permanent Victory Points, 219–220 Tug of War, 252–254 VIC-07 Race, 227–228 Victory Points as a Resource, 221–222 Victory Points from Game State, 214–216 Victory Points from Player Actions, 217–218 Game Teory, 355 Gating and Unlocking mechanism, 112–114, 471 Good player-aids, 21 Grid Coverage, 516–518 Guild faction, 95 Hand-comparison games, 528 Hand Limits, 536 Hard Zone of Control, 501 Hate-drafting, 546 Hexagonal Tessellations, 432 Hidden and Exposed Victory Points, 223–224 Hidden Control, 296–297 Hidden Information, 288–289 Hidden Movement, 480–484 Hidden movement games, 300 Hidden-movement hunting games, 10 Hidden Roles games, 275–280 Hidden Trackable Information (HTI), 271–272 Hierarchical systems, 309 Highest Lowest, 255–256 High Number, 142–145 Hot Potato, 195–197 HTI, see Hidden Trackable Information Hunting games, hidden-movement, 10 I Cut, You Choose mechanism, 326–327 “I Go, You Go” structures, 69, 75 Image-association games, 299 Impulse, 448–449 Income, 318–319 Increase Value of Unchosen Resources, 345–347 Induction, 301–304 Influencer mechanisms, 460 In-game balancing, 2–3 Input randomness, 261 Intellectual-Property (IP)-based games, 494 Interactive fiction, 12 Interleaved Action Queues, 99 Interleaved Turn Structure, 99 Interleaved vs. Sequential Phases, 69–71 Interrupts, 75–76 Investment, 335–337 Invicta Plastics, 299 IP-based games, see Intellectual-Property-based games Kapitän Wackelpudding, 202 Kill Steal, 193–194 King of the Hill (KotH) mechanism, 248–249 Knizia, Reiner, 371, 380 Ladder-Climbing games, 527, 532–533 “Last-in-First-out” (LIFO) system, 65, 76 Layering, 125–129 Leacock, Matt, 4 Legacy games, 27–29 LIFO system, see “Last-in-First-out” system Line of Sight (LOS), 503–506 Loans, 322–323 LOS, see Line of Sight “Lose a Turn” effects, 72–74 Map Addition mechanism, 465–466 Map Deformation, 469–470 Map Reduction, 467–468 Market, 312–314 Matching, 134–136 Measurement, 444–445 Melding, 534–535 Memoarrr!, 271

Page 609

Index Memory games, 271–274 Miniatures games, 505 Minimap, 171–173 Mission games, 23 Movement, 429 Bias mechanism, 460–462 Chaining, 458–459 Different Dice, 446 Drift, 447 Hidden Movement, 480–484 Impulse, 448–449 Mancala, 456–457 Map Addition mechanism, 465–466 Map Deformation, 469–470 Map Reduction, 467–468 Measurement, 444–445 Movement Points, 440–441 Movement Template, 472–474 Move Trough Deck, 471 Moving Multiple Units, 463–464 Multiple Maps, 477–478 Pattern Movement, 437–439 Pieces as Map, 475–476 Programmed Movement, 450–452 Relative Position, 453–455 Resource to Move, 442–443 Roll-and-Move games, 435–436 Shortcuts, 479 Tessellation, 431–434 Movement Points, 440–441 Movement Template, 472–474 Move Trough Deck, 471 Moving Multiple Units, 463–464 Multiple game structures in the same box, 1 Multiple-Lot Auction, 384–386, 394 Multiple Maps, 477–478 Multi-Use Cards, 552–555 Narrative Choice, 120–122 Narrative Choice systems, 121 Near Field Communications (NFC), 204 Negotiation, 348–349 Neighbor Scope, 208–211 Network-Building mechanisms, 519–522 NFC, see Near Field Communications Non-AI games, 5 Non-hierarchical systems, 309 Non-Vickrey Auctions, 380 Old Maid style, 196 Once-Around Auction, 373–374 Once-Per-Game Abilities, 108–109 One vs. All games, 10 Open Auction, 357–358 Open Economy mechanism, 319 Order Counters, 99–101 Ordered High Number system, 143 Ordering, 257–259 Order Token stacks, 99 Output randomness, 141, 261 “Overlord”-style games, 7 Ownership, 338–340 Palm Trees, 168 Paper-and-pencil games, 12 Passed Action Token, 66–68 Pass Order, 47–49 Pattern Movement, 437–439 PD, see Prisoner’s Dilemma Pedersen’s Automa system, 13 Phases, 33 Physical Action, 164–166 Pieces as Map, 475–476 Player Action system, 214, 215 Player Elimination, 229–231 Player Judge, 180–181 Plinth, 204 Point-to-Point systems, 520–521 Power Cards, 38–39 POW players, see Prisoner Of War players Prisoner Of War (POW) players, 241 Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD), 159–161 Private Contracts, 341 Probability Management, 290–292 Programmed Movement, 450–452 Progressive games, 41 Progressive Turn Order, 40–42 Public Contracts, 341 Punctuated Real-Time Game, 53–54 Push-Your-Luck mechanism, 192, 196, 204, 267–270 Pyrrhic victory, 155 Quantized slides, 130 Quarterbacking, 5 Questions and Answers, 305–306 Race games, 213, 227, 264, 431 Raid tokens, 100 Railroad games, 113 Random Production, 332–334 Random Turn Order, 59–60 Ratio/Combat Results Table, 149–151 Real-Time Games, 50–52 Record-based games, 13 Region Scoring card, 214 Regressive, 41 Relative Position, 453–455

Page 610

Index “Reminder” tags, 558 Rerolling and Locking, 191–192 Resolution, 51, 141 Action Speed, 189–190 Alternate Removal, 162–163 Card Play, 155–156 Critical Hits and Failures, 147–148 Dice Selection, 187–188 Die Icons, 152–154 Enclosure, 169–170 Flicking games, 198–200 Force Commitment, 174–176 High Number, 142–144 Hot Potato, 195–197 Kill Steal, 193–194 Minimap, 171–173 Neighbor Scope, 208–211 Physical Action, 164–166 Player Judge, 180–181 Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD), 159–161 Ratio/Combat Results Table, 149–151 Rerolling and Locking, 191–192 Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS), 157–158 Stacking and Balancing, 201–207 Stat Check, 145–146 Static Capture, 167–168 Targeted Clues, 182–183 Tiebreakers, 184–186 Voting, 177–179 Resource Queue, 352–354 Resource to Move, 442–443 Reverse Auction, 389–391 Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS), 157–158 Role Order, 57–58 Role-playing games (RPGs), 15, 27, 213 Roles with Asymmetric Information, 280–282 Roll-and-Move games, 72, 431, 435–436, 479 Rolling Queue, 93 Rondel systems, 102–103 Round, 32, 33 RPGs, see Role-playing games RPS, see Rock, Paper, Scissors Sackson, Sid, 267–268 Sand timers, 61 Scenario-based games, 558 Scenario/mission/campaign games, 22–24 Scheduled trigger, 215 Score-and-reset games, 25–26 Scoring cards/tokens, 215 Sealed-Bid Auction, 365–367 Sealed Bid with Cancellation, 368–369 Second-Bid Auctions, 379–381 Second-Price Auctions, see Second-Bid Auctions Selection Order Bid, 382–383 Semi-cooperative games, 15–17 Set Collection, 445 Combo Abilities, 523–525 Grid Coverage, 516–517 Network Building, 519–522 Set Valuation, 509–512 Tile-Laying, 513–515 “Set” keywords, 558 Set Valuation, 509–512 Shared Action Queue, 95–96 Shedding games, 527 Shortcuts, 479 Simultaneous Action Selection Game, 55–56 Single-loser games, 18–19 Single Workers, 420–421 Skirmish games, 10 Slide/Push, 130–133 Social deduction games, 299 Soft Zone of Control, 501 Solo games, 12–14 Speed Matching, 165 Splaying, 128 Stacking and Balancing, 201–207 Stacking games, 18, 25 Standard Worker Placement, 409–410 Stat Check, 145–146 Static Capture, 167–168 Stat Turn Order, 36–37 Strategic war games, 316 Stroop Effect, 136 Structure of game, 1 competitive games, 2–3 cooperative games, 4–7 legacy games, 27–29 scenario/mission/campaign games, 22–24 score-and-reset games, 25–26 semi-cooperative games, 15–17 single-loser games, 18–19 solo games, 12–14 team-based games, 8–11 traitor games, 20–21 Sudden Death condition, 244–245, 253 Tactics cards, 175 Tags, 556–559 Targeted Clues, 138, 182–183 TCG, see Trading card games Team-based games, 8–11 Tech Trees, 115–117 “Telephone,” 210 Temporary and Permanent Victory Points, 219–220 Territories and Regions, 494–495

Page 611

Index Tessellation, 431–434 Tematic board games, 8 Trone track, 38 Tiebreakers, 184–186 Tie-breaking, 3 Tile-Laying, 513–515 Time Track, 64–65 Track, 331 Trading, 310–311 Trading card games (TCG), 549 Traitor games, 20–21, 276 Transparent cards, 128 Tribute pool, 230 Trick-Taking games, 273, 351, 529–531 Trivia games, 306 Troop Types, 491–493 Tug of War, 252–254 Turn, 32, 33 Turn Order and Resolution Order, 424–427 Turn order and structure, 31 Action Timer mechanism, 61–63 Bid Turn Order, 38–39 Claim Turn Order, 43–46 Fixed Turn Order, 34–35 Interleaved vs. Sequential Phases, 69–71 Interrupts, 75–76 Lose a Turn, 72–74 Passed Action Token, 66–68 Pass Order, 47–49 Progressive Turn Order, 40–342 Punctuated Real-Time Game, 53–54 Random Turn Order, 59–60 Real-Time Games, 50–52 Role Order, 57–58 Simultaneous Action Selection Game, 55–56 Stat Turn Order, 36–37 terminology, 32–33 Time Track, 64–65 Turn Order Until Pass Auction, 362–364 Uncertainty, 261 Betting and Bluffing, 263–266 Communication Limits, 283–285 Deduction, 298–300 Hidden Control, 296–297 Hidden Information, 288–289 Hidden Roles games, 275–279 Induction, 301–304 Memory games, 271–274 Probability Management, 290–292 Push-Your-Luck, 267–270 Questions and Answers, 305–306 Roles with Asymmetric Information, 280–282 Unknown Information, 286–287 Variable Setup, 293–295 Unfriendly resolution, 186 Unit limits, 497 Unknown Information, 286–287 Upgrades, 330–331 Uwe Rosenberg designs, 423 Variable Player Powers, 106–107, 110–111 Variable Setup, 293–295 Venn diagram, 20 Vickrey Auctions, see Second-Bid Auctions VIC-07 Race, 227–228 Victory Points (VPs), 13, 45, 213, 219–220, 250, 516 from Game State, 214–216 Hidden and Exposed Victory Points, 223–224 from Player Actions, 217–218 as a Resource, 221–222 Temporary and Permanent Victory Points, 219–220 track, 37, 244 Vital Lacerda game, 420 Voting, 177–179 Voting-based player elimination, 278 VPs, see Victory Points War games, 12 Warsaw Pact event, 88 “Waters Rise” cards, 113 Werewolves, 276–277, 280 Western games, 34 Wheeling, 545–546 Winner Takes All, 143 Wolfgang Kramer card system, 463 Word-association games, 299 Word searches, 12 Worker Placement, 43, 73, 407 Acquiring and Losing Workers, 413–414 Adding and Blocking Buildings, 417–419 Building Actions and Rewards, 422–423 Single Workers, 420–421 Standard Worker Placement, 409–410 Turn Order and Resolution Order, 424–427 Workers-As-Dice, 415–416 Workers of Differing Types, 411–412 Yomi, 56, 92, 265 “Zaniness” factor, 165 ZOC, see Zone of Control Zone of Control (ZOC), 501–502

第二版简介

（内容保留英文原文，请参阅对应章节的翻译内容）

Quartz 4

Explorer

12_Introduction_to_the_Second_Edition

Introduction to the Second Edition

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