Game Mechanics

List of Mechanics:

1. Mid-game Mechanic Change: any aspect of the game can be changed in any way during the game, this can be a turning point in the game where the nature of the game changes, can inject life into a longer game, what about a game that focuses on the strategy of changing the mechanics to your favor?, too many changes in mechanics can be confusing so if there are a lot there should be a limited number of ways to change them and it should VERY clear when the mechanics have changed, requires from the player: thinking ahead, example: Star Fluxx
2. asynchronous turns: each player decides their actions for their turn at the same time without knowledge of what other players are doing that turn, to make the asynchronous turns meaningful the consequences for guessing right or wrong about what other players will do needs to be significant, additionally, it needs to not be obvious from the the current state of the game (of which all the players can see) will be taken, in other words, each player needs to have at least two courses of action that are viable on any given turn, requires from the player: prediction of player action
3. dynamic board: the board changes in some way either during the game, or is randomly generated at the start of the game, examples include a tile based map that is randomly generated at the start of the game, a map that is built out or revealed by player movement, or a board that changes from a known state to another state due to a game mechanic, good for adding replayability, requires from player: ability to react to changing circumstances
4. player cooperation: instead of playing against each other, the players can play against the game so that they either win or lose as a team, this can be combined with classic player competition in many ways, for instance: cooperation so that someone can win but only one player wins at the end (good for changing goals and motives), start as cooperative but change a player's role to competitive during the game, allow players to play both cooperatively and competitively whenever they wish but with only one ultimate winner, competitively as teams, and teams changing during the game (e.g. mutual protection treaties in Civ) requires from player: ability to work with others
5. player deception: some players are playing a role or objective counter to what the other players believe they are playing, is there a way for the game itself to deceive the players? the only thing is you would need clues from the game itself because there is no person to try to read so you'd need a way to read the game so to speak and you'd have to know in what ways the game might deceive you so you can decide how you want to play and you're not just moving around in the dark, requires from the player: ability to deceive and to read people or actions
6. player scoring dynaminism: a game with multiple human players should generally allow for every player to feel like they have at least a chance to win as close to the end of the game as possible, playing a game you feel like you can't win isn't fun, this has to be balanced with the skill factor of the game but generally a higher luck to skill ration makes it easy for new players, a common way of implementing this is to have the player in first face a more difficult challenge than the other players, this creates some rubberbanding but it can be overcome so it's not seen as cheap and it also creates a more subtle scenario to consider strategies other than going straight for the lead
7. post elimination player roles: if a game eliminates players, give the eliminated players a new role in the game in which they can't win, but they can still impact the game to help decide the ultimate winner
8. player roles: each player has differing roles in the game which allow them special abilities and attributes that affect the way they play the game, this is especially common in cooperative games
9. playing on the edge: reward aggressive play and by keeping the spectre of losing always on the player's mind, this keeps the player's interest and makes the game tense, doing that while also making sure the game is not to short is not so obvious, one way might be to give the player the chance to "save" themselves or otherwise stay in the game (see: post elimination player roles)
10. Manipulatin the random: if including a luck based action in a game, consider giving the player the ability to select what they want to keep and discard from the event so as to give the player the feeling of agency, requires from the player: judgement, more generally this can be seen as altering the random in that you might increase your odds on certain outcomes using some limited resource you have to succeed where you otherwise would have failed, an important distinction to make between dice rolls and card drawing is that with dice rolls it is theoretically not inevitable that you'll get what you need to win whereas with card drawing there are only so many cards in the deck, this problem with dice rolls needs to be mitigated to avoid frustration, one way to do so is to allow a die to be changed to a certain value by the player under some conditon, another difference to note between cards and dice is that there's more of a tendency to think a computer is purposefully altering dice rolls rather than card draw (or at least it happens with me), this might be because of the fallacy of believing a roll is 'due', even if you intellectually know it's a fallacy to believe that, there is no physical verification that the rolls are trustworthy (physically modeling the rolls might solve this issue but I'm not sure)
11. limited communication: a game where communication between players it artificially limited so that it's harder to discerne what is being said, e.g. charades, usually used in cooperative or team based games
12. action points: there are various actions that can be taken on a turn and the number of actions is limited but how the actions are used is not prescribed, this gives the player more freedom in their choices and makes for more a more varied experience each turn
13. area enclosure: players place or move pieces to surround as much area as possible, e.g. Go
14. betting: players risk in game currency (or something else with in game value) on a certain outcome occuring, Commodity Speculation is a type of betting but occurs over a longer time, new bets continue to be placed during that time, and player tend to have more influence over the the performance of the wager
15. card drafting: like card drawing but the players have come choice in which cards they pick, e.g. ticket to ride, depending on the particular implementation of this mechanic, this could be considered a subset of "selecting from the random" above
16. dice: not a mechanic in themselves but can be used for more than just randomness, they can be used as counters to keep track of quanities such as health, etc., or as a pieces to be moved around a board
17. hand managment: players have hands of cards that can be played in some sort of optimal sequence or group depending on the circumstances of the game, often cards have other uses in the game that obfuscate their best usage
18. pattern recognition: markers or other objects are moved around a board and the players must recognize some random or pre-determined pattern
19. player elimination: games where you have more than 2 players and a player can be eliminated but play continues, in a board game where you're playing with other people this can kill a game, especially if it happens quickly so it's wise to either delay player elimination as much as possible or have roles for eliminated players to play, see: post elimination player roles, additionally you might give eliminated players the ability to play their way back into the game
20. press your luck: a mechanic where the player must choose whether to keep facing a risky random event (dice roll, card draw, etc.), that may increase in risk each time, in order to attain greater rewards, this is a potent mechanic but becomes much more potent the longer the game goes because the players are more invested at that point so it's a mechanic that should either become more risky as the game goes along so as to not handicap players too early or a mechanic that's not introduced until a later phase of the game
21. balancing act: mechanic where a player is rewarded for trying to walk a middle path between two states both of which are bad for that player, e.g. Dixit (where you don't want to be too obvious or too vague in your descriptions), this is useful for making a game more subtle
22. shifting roles: each turn, the role of the main initiator of action on a turn shifts to the next player, this adds interest to a game by changing the way a player must think every so often, e.g. Dixit
23. ticking clock: a countdown is initiated and players must reach a victory condition before the timer hits zero, the timer can countdown each turn or during other events like card draws, this is usually found in co-op or team-based games, useful for making sure the game doesn't last too long
24. multiple victory conditions: most games have one victory condition but some have multiple ways to win, sometimes the games combine the conditions using a point system, multiple conditions generally adds a lot of complexity by default to the game so you should try to make the rest of the game fairly simple, it does also, however, allow for players to feel like they can win farther into the game and generally allow for comebacks as no player has the resources to dominate all conditions, conversely there can be multiple loss conditions to avoid
25. means of combination: combine pieces, moves, cards, actions, etc. to accomplish a goal that none alone could do, e.g. chess, this relies on the composability of the units
26. countering: giving players the ability to counter, negate, or alter the plays of others, e.g. Munchkin
27. rubber-banding: give players who are trailing or close to losing an advantage, must be balanced in a such a way that it doesn't feel cheap to the other players so generally it should only occur when the player is very close to losing and doesn't guarentee victory in an action directed at a single player, conversely you can make the game harder to the closer a player gets to victory which may be preferred
28. ability improvement/change: players acquire or improve abilities over the course of the game allowing them to deal with greater challenges or to reach a goal more easily, e.g. leveling in role-playing games, rather than XP and leveling for new abilities a different approach is to allow players to earn new abilities based on achievements so there is more direct correlation between actions performed and improvement
29. route/network building: points on a board that are to be connected by somehow acquiring the points, e.g. ticket to ride
30. set collection: goal of players to collect a set of items to either win or receive some benefit, e.g. risk, settlers of catan, etc.
31. goal selection: players select goal(s) at the beginning of the game and win or receive some benefit for attaining that goal, these goals can be secret for some added intrigue
32. stock holding: players can have a vested interest in a property, company, territory, et. without entirely owning it, to increase share usually comes a cost and to decrease share comes at a benefit
33. holdings: players select or are randomly dealt teritories or some other property the objective is to protect their own holdings while targetting the holdings of others
34. variable turn order: the order of turns varies due to some aspect of the game, could be random, based on performance, etc.
35. action drafting: there are a limited number of actions and players, in some order, claim the right to perform these actions on a given turn (usually by placing tokens), this can lead to not only claiming actions for your own benefit but blocking the opportunities of other players
36. action programming: players must choose what they will do on the next n-turns in advance and then the actions play out, usually the goal of this mechanic to have the players experience their plans going amusingly wrong, see also: Scripting
37. scripting: similar to Action Programming, scripting is a mechanic where a player decides what a piece will do ahead of time in every situation it might encounter (for instance, the piece will always attack an adjacent enemy, or always move forward two spaces, etc.), scripting in a board game would be very difficult for players to keep track of in all but the simplest of rulesets, additionally, players must be given the opportunity to influence the game after scripting has taken place or the game won't feel very interactive, another way to use scripting is for players to "script" themselves by placing limitations on how they must act in certain situations, this is essentially customizing rules for each player
38. area/property control: player is given control of an area or property (and it's associated abilities/benefits) by having the most investment or influence
39. auction/bidding: allow players to bid on items in the game to gain something in return for a cost determined by the market of other players, think about including a mechanic dropping the opening cost of the item if no one bids
40. grid-based movement: pieces move on a grid, usually squares or hexagons
41. memory testing: game calls upon players to remember something that happened earlier, probably not great for a computer game since the player can just write down the info
42. pattern building: player place pieces or components in a specific configuration for some benefit, see also: pattern recognition
43. pickup and deliver: travel to one spot on the board to retrieve and item and move it to a specified destination
44. non-transitive items: a game where there's a hierarchy of items in which some can beat others but also lose to others, e.g. rock-paper-scissors
45. trading: allow players to barter with each other for resources, cards, etc.
46. voting: allow players to vote on various aspects of a game, typically if some action with occur or not
47. variable turn composition: generally there are actions players can perform on their turn, with this mechanic, allowed actions on a given turn can change or the order of the actions change
48. loss avoidance: sometimes the goal of a game is not to be the first to a point total or goal but the last player to not be eliminated
49. puzzle guessing: a game where the goal is to solve a puzzle or mystery or some other logic problem
50. inversion: a mechanic where the current status of a game or some aspect of a game is flipped to an inverted or reversed state, this is probably not a mechanic you want to spring on players without them knowing that it can happen because then it will feel too much like the gameplay is arbitrary
51. state splitting: give the players the ability to perform two or more possible actions simultaneously generating two game states (probably represented by two boards) and then play then continue the game on both (for instance, move left and move right generating two game boards and then continue with each one), it might be a good idea to allow the players to pick which "reality" they want after a few moves and then discard the other one so it doesn't get too complicated, complexity is really the tough thing about this mechanic so keeping the base game fairly simple is key, another idea is to place the two new game states next to each other so that they then join to become one state but that would have to be the focus of the game
52. sabotage: similar to voting/vetoing (see: Resistance) give players the ability to secretly sabotage other players, usually this is done in advance so that when other players try to perform an action their plans go awry
53. trade-off: a mechanic where a player trades the some ability for another advantage which is usually in response to some circumstance that has occured in the game, for instance, trading the abilities of single powerful unit for many weaker units
54. propagation: taking an action in one part of a board triggers effects (usually a less intense version of the initial action's effect) on neighboring spaces, vertice's, areas, etc., e.g. Pandemic, it seems like it would easy for players to not consider the consequences of this mechanic (or to not consider it at all) so it needs to be dramatic and probably limited to only directly neighboring areas rather than creating a domino effect
55. composition grid: an example of Means of Combination, this mechanic allows players to give units new abilities based on where there are on the map as well as where there are in relation to other units, for instance a unit may have an ability that says: "apply ability gained from space occupied to all units in spaces adjacent to this unit" and the space may give the ability to heal a certain number of health points per turn, that unit can then heal all units adjacent to it for that number of points, this seems like an a really good way to add depth and variability to a game
56. resource/action banking: give players to choose not to exhaust their actions or resources on a given turn and save those actions for a later turn, care must be taken because it's easy for a game to become unbalanced toward the strategy of never banking or always banking which makes the point of the banking mechanic moot as no consideration is needed to decide what to do, this is a common concept in card games (Magic, Hearthstone, etc.) where there is a limit to the amount of cards you can have in your hand, this acts as a limit (in the case of Magic and Hearthstone it's one of a few limits) in the number of actions you can perform in a turn, this suggests that those games' designers found that always banking and playing a bunch of actions in one turn was too strong
57. ability-limiting/cooldown: to balance some abilities the cooldown mechanic is used to limit the use of the ability, other ways of limiting abilites could be hard per game/turn limits, having to acquire some item or perform some other action before the ability can be used
58. construction: players build items, units, etc. using components and the resulting properties of a finished item are determined by the composition and/or order (structure) of the component, a board game would probably allow for only the simplest version of this mechanic unless the game was distilled down and consistenting of this mechanic alone, the issue with this mechanic is in determining the resulting properties from the perspective of the player, it must be easy or else it may feel as if the game is arbitrary
59. Dimension Optimization: mechanic where there is more than one dimension of performance to worry about (e.g. prestige, piety, martial, etc. in CK2), these different dimensions should be balanced in such a way that doing well in one can lead to victory just as well as in doing well in any others, alternatively you can have the players try to balance all dimemsions with the goal being to stay as neutral as possible, including this mechanic in a board game has to be kept to just 3 or 4 dimensions at most and the results and current status have to be fairly obvious, good for allowing varying stategies
60. nemesis: competitive mechanic where some players are solely playing to stop their opponent from winning the game rather than trying to win and prevent their opponents from winning as well, generally this provides different abilities for each group of players
61. raising the stakes: as the player gets closer to victory you make the game more difficult to win, e.g. in Space Invaders as you kill enemies, the remaing enemies become faster, this builds excitement
62. racing: players compete to be the first to reach some status, whether that's a position on the board or some amount of total points, etc.