Author: Jared Richardson

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Auctioning Mechanic (Part 1/2)

Auctioning Sketch

Please Note: This is the first of two articles on auctioning as a tabletop game mechanic. The second article may be accessed here.

Auctions are fun. Have you ever sat in an auction, curious to see what deals you can find, only to realize that you can’t even understand the auctioneer? Worse, you may have innocently reached up to scratch your head in confusion, only to hear as the first legible word, “Sold!” and realize that you had inadvertently bought the old creaky rocker in the corner for a greatly inflated price.

While auctioning in board and card games is usually much less error-prone and much more informal, auctioning can be a great way to provide risk-reward tradeoffs in a more strategic way than dice rolling does.

Take a few minutes to review the article below for an overview of some of the many ways that auctioning can be utilized as an engaging tabletop game mechanism in the games you design and create. Hopefully this sparks some additional ideas, which I would love to hear about in the comments below!

Overview of the Auctioning Mechanic

Auctioning has taken many different forms in a wide variety of games, and can lead to some very fun and sometimes stressful experiences. Usually only the winning bidder receives benefits from bidding, but sometimes the losing bidders are partially compensated with something of lesser value. The Parker Brothers designed several early games with auctioning mechanisms that are still popular today, including Monopoly and Rook.

Monopoly uses one of the more straightforward types of auctioning, where if a player doesn’t want to pay the asking price for a property, he or she must put the property up for auction and place the starting bid. The next player may either pass or place a higher bid, and this continues until one player has placed a bid that no other player is willing to increase, and the player with the winning bid pays the full price. This is often referred to as an English Auction, and is quite common. Many games establish a rule that once players pass once, they are out of the auction and may not bid again, which helps encourage continued participation.

Rook has a similar auction, but with a twist. Players are in teams, but may not communicate with each other. Bids are constrained to increments divisible by five in order to speed up the bidding phase, and players must bid or pass in turn order, though in other games bids may be constrained in other ways. Players’ bids are predictive, and each team guesses at how many points their team will make based on the contents of their hand. In addition, in Rook the players bid on an ambiguous prize, without knowing the cards they will receive for the winning bid. This sometimes leads to interesting situations, such as team members bidding against each other to be able to end up in the best possible position. Skull King employs a similar predictive bidding mechanism, but players are penalized for ending up either over or under their bids, and must hit them exactly.

Auction mechanics can take many other forms, including the following as listed below:

  • Dutch Auctions: These reverse the typical flow by gradually decreasing the price until any player is willing to accept the goods at the current asking price. This can add a lot of tension as players hope to get the items at the lowest price possible, but want to bid before the other players for fear of losing the bid.
  • Multiple Lots: Sometimes players bid on either multiple items in a lot, or multiple lots at a time in order to auction more items more quickly. Many times this bidding takes place silently, and players privately place bids for all lots at once. Private bids are also used in other contexts, but may sometimes lead to a tie, which must be resolved. Other times, players might be assigned a lot based on their position in a single bid.
  • Use of Funds Raised: Usually the funds raised are returned to the bank or common pool, but at times the money paid by the winning bidder is distributed among the losers of the bid, or may even be paid to a single player, such as the one with the lowest bid or the one taking a pre-specified place in the bidding.
  • Other Possible Constraints: Often bids are constrained in various ways including those mentioned above, but auctions and bids may also be constrained in the following ways:
    • By the bidding going only once around and giving each player one chance only to place a bid.
    • By placing an item on a board space representing a fixed bid amount, which fixes both the amounts that may be bid and the number of bids that may be placed.
    • By utilizing bidding phases that do not occur at set intervals, but are rather initiated by other events, or even by the players themselves, as is the case in Chicago Express.
    • By restricting bidding to only players that perform some kind of task of dexterity or meet some other condition within the game.
    • By having bidding tokens represent a fixed amount, and requiring winning players to pay an amount equal to the number of bids placed on the lot.
    • By replacing items won in a bid with the items used to bid for them.
    • By putting funds paid for a winning bid into use within the game, whether they are distributed to the other players or put somewhere else. For example, Chicago Express invests the funds raised from the winning bid into the train company under consideration, which sometimes leads players to bid more than required to fund their companies.

What are some interesting ways you have seen auctioning be used as a board or card game mechanic? What are some other ideas for how it can be used? Please comment below with your thoughts!

Please Note: This is the first of two articles on auctioning as a tabletop game mechanic. The second article may be accessed here.

While auctioning in board and card games is usually much more informal than traditional auctions, auctioning as a game mechanic can be a great way to provide risk-reward tradeoffs in a more strategic way than dice rolling would.

Auctioning Sketch

Examples of Games that use [Mechanic]

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Other Tabletop Game Mechanics to Explore

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Worker Placement Mechanic

Worker Placement Sketch

Within business programs, colleges usually dedicate multiple classes and even full departments to logistics. Many successful real-life businesses are even built around logistics and organizing resources. Logistics plays a role in many industries, but as board and card game players we have a special term for logistics. We call it worker placement.

Worker placement is all about logistics. Planning what things need to be done in what order, and deploying sufficient resources to accomplish those tasks are all key components of worker placement as a board and card game mechanic.

Let’s take a closer look at worker placement and how it relates to designing and playing great tabletop games of any type.

Overview of Worker Placement

For our discussion here, worker placement is defined as using physical components of some sort to select, reserve, or take an action within the game. Some games thematically call these components workers, while others merely use the components as they are to incorporate the mechanic into the game. Either way, worker placement is a great way to engage players in the game, and can tie into many different themes to make the game mechanics easier to grasp.

A good example of thematic worker placement is in Bruxelles 1897, where each player has a set of architect cards of varying strength and cost, which they place as they obtain items (represented by other cards) at the world fair. Placing specific architect cards is a balance between maximizing the strength of the cards (to adequately compete for majorities) while minimizing the cost. Regardless of strength, architect cards can also be played to the Brussels area to claim free actions, but an increasing number of architect cards must be played each time.

A more abstract utilization of the mechanic is seen in Pentago and Azul, where the workers are simply marbles or tiles that don’t represent anything in particular, and placing workers in specific locations to create the right patterns is the key function of the game.

As the above examples illustrate, there are many methods for implementing worker placement into a game. Workers may all be the same, or may be unique; and each worker placed may trigger an action or ability or control a location.

Important Considerations with Worker Placement

Some common characteristics of worker placement include the following items:

  • Scarcity of Workers, Actions, or Locations: Most frequently either the available workers, actions, or locations, or some combination of them all are limited in quantity or availability. This necessitates strategy in deciding which and how many workers to place, which actions to claim first, and which locations to occupy. For example, in Carcasonne a player must sometimes choose between multiple open locations, and blocks the chosen location from other players’ workers. In Alhambra, on the other hand, each tile is unique and must be placed with care to avoid blocking future actions for oneself.
  • Increasing Cost of Actions or Locations: Rather than strictly limiting the availability of actions or locations, another common implementation of worker placement involves increasing the cost of taking an action as time passes or the more times the action is used. This means that more workers or more valuable workers will be required to continue to take an action, and players will be encouraged to be among the first to take that action to best minimize their cost. One example of this is in Bruxelles 1897 when using the Brussels area.
  • Resetting Workers or Long-term Placement: Many games implement a condition that when met, resets workers so that they can be rearranged and placed in a different order or combination; often, new rounds are used as this resetting condition. In other games, workers once placed remain for a long time, even for the whole game such as the buildings in Settlers of Catan.
  • Moving or Upgrading Workers: Sometimes workers, once placed, can be moved to new locations or upgraded to change the affect they have on the game. For example, the settlers in Catan Histories: Settlers of America – Trails to Rails once placed can be moved around the board and later upgraded to establish settlements. In Falconry, any card that is placed to claim a location may be later moved to claim a new area.
  • Continued Worker Engagement: Usually the placement of a worker continues to trigger actions and affects play long into the game and over multiple turns, such as with placing tents in Trekking the National Parks. In some cases, however, placing workers triggers one-time effects and claiming an action again requires placing another worker, such as in Wingspan, where cubes are placed once per turn and a one-time action is triggered.

Cautions and Tips for Using Worker Placement

When utilizing worker placement as a game mechanic, care must be taken to neither oversimplify nor overcomplicate the decision making process. Too simple of a mechanic might make placing workers feel like a mindless, meaningless decision, while too complicated of a mechanic structure might make turns take much longer than they should as players try to analyze every outcome.

The games Kingdomino and Bruxelles 1897 both use worker placement well, but they might each border an opposing line without crossing it altogether.

On one hand, Kingdomino risks including too simple of worker placement as players place workers to select a single tile, but it mitigates that risk by having the tile chosen affect the order of play and contain multiple elements that effect your personal kingdom grid.

On the other side of the coin, Bruxelles 1897 risks overcomplicating decisions as players placing their architects must consider several different action types, number of surrounding architects, strength of surrounding architects, and other game elements; however, it does a good job of providing all the available information and minimizing ambiguity so that players have some of the guesswork removed and are able to move forward with their turns.

However you implement worker placement into your game, take time to consider these elements and playtest with others to ensure that player decisions are neither too simple, nor too complex. You’ll do great!

What are some interesting ways you have seen worker placement be used as a part of a game? What are other ways that worker placement can be utilized that haven’t been addressed in the post above? Please comment below with your thoughts!

Worker placement is using physical components of some sort to select, reserve, or take an action within the game. Some games thematically call these components workers, while others merely use the components as they are to incorporate the mechanic into the game. Worker placement is a great way to engage players in the game, and…

Worker Placement Sketch

Examples of Games that use Worker Placement

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Other Tabletop Game Mechanics to Explore

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Falconry Card Game: Outwit, Outsmart, Outlast

A new strategic card game from Circle J Games will be launching on Kickstarter and Gamefound on March 13, 2023

Launch Date for 18-day campaign: March 13, 2023

Participate in the Kickstarter Campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1879039421/falconry

Gamefound Launch Preview: https://gamefound.com/projects/jared/falconry

UPDATE (3/14/2023): Gamefound requested that we not simultaneously run a campaign on their platform if it is currently running on another platform, so in compliance with their request we have cancelled our Gamefound campaign. Backers are invited to either participate in the Kickstarter campaign or use our pre-request form to be notified when Falconry is available for purchase.

Pre-request a Copy on Our Form: https://forms.gle/empo2PPHqzGk2Ucm9

This spring, Circle J Games is launching a threefold crowdfunding project for a new strategic card game, Falconry. With flexible area control and countless gameplay possibilities, Falconry offers a unique and challenging experience for families and friends alike.

Falconry comes with beautiful, fully created art and graphic design, and six play-tested variations. In a unique approach to crowdfunding, Falconry offers three ways to contribute to the development of the game, including options for people with any level of commitment and comfort.

A Threefold Approach

To support as many types of backers and contributors as possible, Circle J Games will be launching on both Kickstarter and Gamefound, with an invitation to users of both platforms to participate. The manufacturing quotes for Falconry were split into separate goals for Kickstarter and Gamefound so that if either one funds alone, the game will be provided to that platform’s backers, and if both campaigns successfully fund together, then enough games will be produced to continue distribution through Circle J Games for additional families and individuals into the future.

This model provides a very low-risk option for board game players on both platforms to contribute and receive one or more copies of Falconry. For potential backers who may be unsure about using either platform, Circle J Games has provided a third option for indicating interest in and commitment to purchasing the game, using a form on its website (CircleJGames.com). Using this form, Circle J Games will create a list of backers who would rather purchase a copy through the website this fall, assuming that the crowdfunding projects successfully fund.

This unique threefold approach means that any potential backer, no matter the level of comfort and commitment, can participate in bringing this game to life and will be able to obtain the first edition of the game at a discounted rate.

About Falconry

 Falconry is a card placement strategy game, where thinking ahead matters. As one of several competing nobles, players place markers, send out falconers and birds, and seek to outmaneuver other contestants for the grand prize.

Each noble begins by placing his or her falconer, and the race is on! Falconers and birds can be used to claim other players markers for themselves, and falconers can ambush other players’ birds. Players race to be the first to align 5 or 6 cards in a row (depending on the variant).

Variations include forming alliances between players that require new strategies, as well as asymmetric game play, where a single player faces two allied opponents.

Challenging and enjoyable elements of Falconry include the following:

  • Falconry is a completely strategy-based game.
  • The game focuses on card laying and area-control mechanics.
  • Nobles employ falconers and birds to reclaim key locations and open new strategies.

Discover new challenges with family and friends as you try out Falconry!

Game Information and Links

Number of Players: 2–4

Time to Play: 5–15 Minutes

Recommended Age: 8+

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/circlejgames

For more information, please reply in the comments or contact Jared at Circle J Games using the Contact Us form in the footer below.

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Component Drafting Mechanic

Most of the time, board and card game players like decisions. We like the feeling of power that comes from choosing how we play the game and feeling like we have a say in the outcome of the game. We like to use our agency to solve problems and make important decisions. One very common way of giving players additional decisions during a game is through component drafting.

Component drafting in tabletop games is a lot like investing. Players decide what to invest in, and hope that the game pans out in a way that maximizes their return. From a designer’s point of view, component drafting can help us design games that players will become personally invested in as they play, creating real highlights of satisfaction, triumph, and insight.

As we look at examples of how some games utilize component drafting to increase player involvement, think about other ways that component drafting might be used, and consider sharing your thoughts below!

Overview of Component Drafting

Component drafting, as we use it here, refers to physical components, such as cards, dice, or resources that are consciously chosen from a supply, whether personally or generally available. For our purposes, random selection such as is used in Scrabble does not qualify as component drafting.

Component drafting usually includes removal of physical components from a supply as a player takes possession of those components. Components are often free to draft, but frequently come with an opportunity cost as available options may change rapidly. There are exceptions to this rule, especially when resources are used for component drafting; such as in Settlers of Catan, where players’ resources are exchanged to draft building and cards for points or additional benefits.

Examples of component drafting in board games are quite varied. In Trekking the National Parks, for example, players make decisions about which colored stones they will collect, and gain points at the end if they have a majority in those colors. In addition, players draft resource cards based on their plan for moving around the board and acquiring park cards. In this case component drafting is less central to the game, while in Sushi Go, component drafting plays a main role as players draft a card from individual hands, pass the remaining cards to a neighbor, and make another selection from their new hand of cards. Treasure Hunter and 7 Wonders both employ a similar card-drafting mechanic, but incorporate other components to complicate decision making and add more complex objectives.

Important Considerations with Component Drafting

Though distinct from action drafting and worker placement, component drafting has similar functions and can sometimes be combined with them to create unique ways to play. Kingdomino is a good example of this, as players take turns placing workers to reserve blocks of land, which they then draft to place in their own personal kingdom grid. There is frequently a tradeoff between selecting the best tile and taking the first turn the next round.

When using component drafting as a key part of a game, providing a variety of drafting options is usually a good choice as it can enable multiple winning strategies and complex decisions. Wingspan is one example of this as players collect resources, then birds, which provide various abilities and options throughout the game. As players draft resources and birds they must consider future needs, how cards interact, where to put eggs, and player-specific goals. The more variety there is in drafting options, the more players will be able to take into consideration as they decide what to draft.

In games where component drafting is more of a peripheral mechanic, keeping drafting options simple is usually a good idea, so that players can focus on the main mechanic and how it relates to the theme. For example, Fun Employed is a game about selling your resume (a hand of cards) to the hiring manager, and component drafting only comes into play when trading out cards for your resume. In this case, all players simultaneously access a shared pool of attribute cards, from which they may freely select or draft cards to exchange with those in their hands. This continues until all players are ready to move forward to their job interview, which is the main portion of the game. Card drafting is a useful aspect, but the game does a good job of simplifying the drafting process so that players can focus on the most important parts of the game.

Cautions and Tips for Using Component Drafting

When designing component drafting as a core mechanic in a game, care should be taken to avoid giving the first player an undue advantage. Some games do this by balancing cards and available options, while other games randomly distribute a selection of options to each player as they simultaneously draft cards and other components.

When cards are well-balanced or seeing all available options is important, open drafting can be useful, where all players see all available options and select from a common pool. Where cards are unbalanced or when players should have limited knowledge about available options, a closed draft is usually more useful, where players only see a portion of what is available or privately select what cards or components to draft. Good examples of an open draft include Alhambra and Dominion, while good examples of a closed draft are Sushi Go and Treasure Hunter.

Component drafting may be used either to gain immediate abilities and advantages, or with an engine-building component to prepare for the rest of the game. In whatever way component drafting is used, however, care should be taken to contribute to the core purpose of the game rather than to detract from it with either too much or too little decision making.

What are some interesting ways you have seen component drafting be used as a part of a game? How else can component drafting be used to enhance decision making? Please comment below with your thoughts and insights!

Examples of Games with Component Drafting

  • 7 Wonders
  • Alhambra
  • Azul
  • Dominion
  • Fun Employed
  • Kingdomino
  • Settlers of Catan
  • Sushi Go
  • Treasure Hunter
  • Trekking the National Parks
  • Wingspan

Are there other game mechanics or topics you would like to see explored further? Please comment below with any requests.

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Action Drafting Mechanic

For millennia, rulers all around the world have gained, displayed, and employed their power by drafting citizens for armies, road construction, and colossal building projects. Without the ability to draft people and resources for various purposes, these leaders would really have very little power.

Finally, in more recent years, we have gotten tired of being left on the draftee end of the exchange and have decided to become the draftors—wresting our very own sense of power and control by inventing drafting for board and card games.

Action drafting is a useful mechanic that involves the conscious selection of actions from a similar, shared, or partially shared pool.

Together let’s look at some of the ways that action drafting has been used in board games in the past in order to create an experience-based guide for how we can identify it in other games and use it well in tabletop games we create.

Overview of Action Drafting

Action drafting, as we use it here, refers to actions that are selected from a shared or individual supply that reduces the availability of that action in the future. Actions selected by removing a component and actions selected by placing a worker or marker piece are subsets of action drafting, and will be described in subsequent articles. For our purposes, action drafting as a mechanic describes making an action without taking components or placing workers. Frequently, action drafting includes a mechanism to reset actions to create a new available supply.

One of my favorite games that includes action drafting as a primary mechanism is Chicago Express. This game includes shared actions that may only be taken a set number of times per round, including Auction, Develop, and Expand. As these actions are selected or drafted, a ticker marks the remaining times that action may be taken that round. Once two out of three actions have reached their limit, that round ends with a dividend phase and the next round begins as all three tickers are reset to their starting positions.

That is a good example of action drafting from a limited pool, but some games employ action drafting in a less limited fashion, such as Chess. In Chess, each player has a set of pieces that represent different actions that may be taken to affect the board in a special way. In this case, players begin with the same action options, but the actions that each player drafts affect the other player in various ways.

Board and card games can employ action drafting in many different ways, and action drafting can be a great resource for board and card game designers alike.

Important Considerations with Action Drafting

Action drafting in games should usually be balanced for all players. This may be accomplished by making action options available to all players in a shared pool, by giving all players duplicate action options that they may use as desired, or by giving players access to different action options in a balanced way.

Forbidden Island, for example, employs a very limited type of action drafting that is individual to each player by assigning each player a special ability that may be drafted, or employed, once per turn. These abilities vary from player to player, but are generally balanced as to their usefulness and strength.

Action drafting in board games might take on familiar forms such as the shared available action pool in Chicago Express or the varying player abilities in Forbidden Island, or it could have different decks, boards, or options that become available as players take various actions or activate their abilities. Many options exist for using boards, cards, and other components that enable actions to be drafted as needed. Another example might be in Dominion, where selecting and purchasing cards employs a card drafting mechanic, but playing those cards each turn employs an action drafting mechanic.

Action drafting in card games is a little more tough to find, but can still be used. One example is Ahead in the Clouds, where specific double-sided cards represent buildings, and when each building is used that card is flipped to reveal a different option on the other side. This keeps the option set continually rotating, and is a very simple way to visually track what actions are taken on each turn. I haven’t yet played this particular game, but the mechanic it uses for its buildings is quite intriguing and sparks a lot of potential ideas that can be used in future card games.

Cautions and Tips for Using Action Drafting

Action drafting should usually have various limits in order to be meaningful. While games like Trekking the National Parks and others successfully use action drafting to provide a selection of actions that may be taken each turn by any player, using action drafting in this way can easily start to feel mundane or pointless.

Potential solutions to avoid this problem might be to provide a sufficient variety in possible actions, to limit actions’ availability by number of uses or by specific players, or to design conditions that make potential action sets change over the course of the game. One game that does this well is Villainous, in which players take on the roles of different villains with different objectives. Each turn, each player must move his or her villain token to a new region that provides a different set of potential actions for that turn. This keeps players engaged in planning their turns carefully, and thinking ahead about what actions they need to keep available for future turns.

Action drafting can be a great base mechanic for a board or card game, as long as it is regulated in meaningful ways that provide interesting decisions throughout the game. As a general rule, the more limitations that go into potential action drafting in a game, the more thinking and decision making will play a part in that game.

What are some interesting ways you have seen action drafting be used as a part of a game? How else can action drafting be used in innovative ways? Please comment below with your thoughts!

Examples of Games with Action Drafting

  • Ahead in the Clouds
  • Chess
  • Chicago Express
  • Forbidden Island
  • Trekking the National Parks
  • Villainous

Are there other game mechanics or topics you would like to see explored further? Please comment below with any requests.

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Dice Rolling Mechanic

The term dicey has come to imply risky and uncertain situations, and with good reason. The roll of a die is nearly synonymous with chance and luck, and yet a wide variety of games have come to utilize dice and dice rolling in innovative ways.

Tabletop game designers have found a large variety of ways to couple strategy with the luck of rolling dice, and have done so in a variety of ways. Let’s explore some of these methods below as we consider how dice rolling can be incorporated with many different types of mechanisms.

Overview of Dice Rolling

Dice rolling is probably one of the most widely used game mechanics, and is incorporated in quite a lot of different games to varying degrees. Some games, such as Farkle and Liar’s Dice include dice as the only component of the game, while others supplement dice rolling with something else that helps control the mechanic, such as the structured scoring sheet in Yahtzee.

Other games include dice rolling only as a supplement to other driving mechanics, such as in Settlers of Catan, where a pair of dice are used to dictate resource distribution, but do not control other key aspects of the game. Some games, such as Wingspan, allow for selection within a dice roll to help incorporate some amount of strategy within random results, where a dice roll determines resource options, and players then choose from the available resources.

However it is being used, dice rolling has found its way into a stunning variety of tabletop games, and will likely continue to be used in games well into the future.

Important Considerations with Dice Rolling

Dice rolling can easily be used to create set collection and push-your-luck sorts of games, but they can also be utilized in so many other scenarios. Here are a few considerations:

  • Dice rolling is a wonderful randomizer and can be used in nearly any game to consistently select a random result. Board games that have random selection from a small number of options can often substitute either standard or customized dice for cards that must be mixed or items that are randomly pulled from a bag.
  • Dice rolling is less helpful when increasing or diminishing specific resources must be shown, but this mechanic can still be employed to some degree when options may be added or removed as a set, such as in Rolling Through the Ages where dice rolling is combined with a sort of engine-building mechanic as additional dice are added throughout the game.
  • Dice rolling can serve to offer constantly shifting option sets, whenever player options need to be limited or changed within finite boundaries during a game. In this setting, dice (representing option sets) can be added, removed, re-rolled, or switched out throughout the course of a game.
  • The number of dice may also be used to indicate strength or influence in settings where power randomly fluctuates and plays into other outcomes. This includes combat games, such as Risk, or other sorts of games where wielding influence is important.

Cautions and Tips for Using Dice Rolling

Still, it is important to remember that dice rolling can be overused. With the exception of games that are based only on dice rolling, too much interaction with dice can easily make the game’s outcome feel random and abstract unless you are very careful with how dice are incorporated.

Dice rolling might be the whole game, as in Don’t You Forget It; or it may be central, as in Settlers of Catan; or alternatively it may be a randomizer only peripheral to the game’s key function, as in Chameleon. However it is used, dice rolling should leave room for at least some additional interesting decisions, otherwise you might end up with a random race, not much more involved than Candyland. For instance, even though dice rolling moves players around the board in Monopoly, the game’s central feature is managing money and making buy, build, or pass decisions.

To help you get started in deciding how you will involve dice rolling as a part of your game, here are some examples of ways that it can be used. Come up with something creative, and remember to not distract from your core mechanic and theme!

  • As the whole game, dice rolling can be rather abstract, but can still be used in a variety of ways including pushing your luck, organizing specific sets and combinations, or bluffing.
  • As a central part of a game, dice rolling can be used to distribute resources, provide action abilities, or move players around a board.
  • As a peripheral part of a game, dice rolling can be used to select what resources are available, provide coordinates for a group, or provide additional actions. Dice rolling can also be used as a great randomizer to help provide strong dummy opponents in single-player games.

What are some interesting ways you have seen dice rolling be used as a part of a game? How else can dice be used, even in strategic games? Please comment below with your thoughts!

Examples of Games with Dice Rolling

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Board Game Mechanics: An Overview

Board Game Mechanics

To begin this series on board and card game mechanics, here is a brief overview of what they are, and why knowing more about them can be useful. Throughout this article I’ll refer to board and card game mechanics as board game mechanics, tabletop game mechanics, game mechanics, or even just mechanics to simplify the usage.

Board Game Mechanics

What are Board Game Mechanics?

Beginning with this question is important for our discussion, as there are many ways that game mechanics can be thought of and defined. For the purposes of these articles, we will define mechanics as the mechanisms or rules that direct how the game works, understanding that a board or card games’ individual combination of mechanics is what sets it apart from other games and makes it unique.

By this definition, the terms rules and mechanics can sometimes be used synonymously; however, it is important to remember that even games that utilize a similar mechanic usually use specific instructions and game components to define the mechanic in a unique way that meaningfully sets each one apart from other similar games.

In the articles that follow we will discuss general categories of game mechanics with the understanding that most games will define, interpret, combine, and employ these general categories of mechanics in various ways to create uniquely enjoyable games.

Why are Board Game Mechanics Important?

A game’s mechanics are usually set forth and outlined in an instruction sheet or booklet, and in most cases should be clear and comprehensive so that players rarely, if ever, encounter uncertainties as to what is permissible or not.

Artwork and graphic design are often a wonderful component of board and card games, but are usually insufficient to make a game enjoyable to play. Have you ever played a game where you thought something like this? I would almost be willing to frame this box and put it on my wall—the art is that great—but it’s really not a game I would ever want to play again. If you have ever thought this about a game, that game was probably suffering from insufficient or unbalanced mechanics.

A board or card game with well-designed mechanics works together as one unit, makes logical and intuitive sense when played, and is enjoyable to play. Strong, well-designed mechanics are ultimately the biggest reason why any game gets brought to the table again and again and again. Board and card games with great mechanics are fun to play!

Why Learn About Board Game Mechanics?

For both experienced and first-time board and card game designers, understanding the core components of mechanics is key. Game designers need a constantly improving understanding of mechanics to develop unique and balanced games that are engaging and play well. Learning about mechanics used in existing games and thinking about the various ways they can be restructured and translated into new games can help inspire, enlighten, and guide designers as they create new and innovative tabletop games.

For board and card game players, a deep understanding of tabletop game mechanics can help improve their enjoyment of existing games, facilitate a better understanding of their games’ rules, and guide their future exploration of games containing favorite old or new mechanics.

Driving a car can be a much more interesting experience when we have an understanding of how vehicle mechanics work, and repairs are feasible even when something goes wrong. The same applies to board and card games. As I have started to become more cognizant of the unique combinations of mechanics that add life and energy to games, those games have become more fun to play, and I have started to see new ways that games can be combined, developed, and designed to provide new and enjoyable experiences.

Hopefully for all of us, learning about board and card game mechanics becomes an engaging and ongoing journey of discovery that opens new doors to thinking about, designing, and enjoying games. For me, the ultimate goal of board and card games is to bring families closer together and strengthen friendships so that we all can find more true joy and learn and grow together on our journey through life.

What experiences have you had with board and card games that have been a blessing to you? What experiences have you enjoyed while playing board and card games with family and friends? Please comment below with your thoughts!

A board or card game with well-designed mechanics works together as a single unit, makes logical and intuitive sense when played, and is enjoyable to play. Strong, well-designed mechanics are ultimately the biggest reason why any game gets brought to the table again and again and again. Board and card games with great mechanics are…

Board Game Mechanics

Tabletop Game Mechanics to Explore