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By now, you’d be forgiven for thinking we MUST be running out of mechanisms now. We’ve covered 20 so far, after all. But no, fear not, intrepid adventurers! We have at least another 10 to go! The world of board gaming is vast and varied, but don’t worry. There will be some familiar faces popping up as we have a look at five more board game mechanisms.
Push Your Luck – Luke Pickles
Do you feel lucky… punk? I mean… gamer? This is one of those mechanisms that will probably be pretty familiar to most. Ultimately, Push Your Luck is about taking that extra turn, just one more card flip, one more roll of the dice, in the hope that it’ll pay off for you. Blackjack is the classic example and Can’t Stop is the small board game version where you just want to push the die rolls a little further.
However, I personally much prefer a game where you have a lot of decisions to make and the luck factor can be mitigated by player choices. I’m talking about Quacks of Quedlinburg.
In Quacks, you and your opponents are playing as quack doctors, brewing potions at market and selling them to fools... I mean, customers. But because you’re a quack, you’ll be throwing ingredients in at random, just trying to push out the potions. Simultaneously, players will be drawing individual chips out of their bag and playing them into the cauldron, slowly progressing outwards. You want to push yourself as far as you can to get victory points and extra money to buy better chips to use later, but if you go too far and exceed a total of 7 on your cherry bombs, your pot will explode!
I love Quacks. So much so, I bought the mega-box shortly after it became available. There are several things I love about it. Firstly, exploding doesn’t hurt the player too much, which means it won't put players off from pushing themselves too far. And even if they do, there’s a wonderful catch-up mechanism in the form of Rat Tails. Everyone who’s behind the first player gets a number of rat tails thrown into their pot, meaning their potion will be more valuable. There’s a huge variety of ingredients, which you can mix and match as you want.
If you love pushing your luck, you might want to look at Cubitos, a dice-based racing game in a strangely cuboidal world, or Wonderland’s War, a game described as “Battle Quacks” set in the world of Alice in Wonderland.
Semi Co-Operative – Andy Broomfield
Semi co-operative games mechanisms are an interesting breed. As players, you’re all working together to accomplish something, all the time knowing that maybe everyone is going to win except you.
Hellapagos from Gigamic is a great introduction to this kind of game. It plays from three to a whopping 12 players and packs a lot of good quality components into a fairly small box.
You and your companions have been washed up on a desert island (beautifully shown by a card holder depicting a boat with a gaping hole in the side). If you want to escape, you’ll need to work together build a raft as well as gathering food and water to keep everyone in your party alive. To make matters worse, there’s a hurricane brewing so you don’t have long to build a vessel capable of carrying you all to safety. Or at least some of you to safety.
On your turn, you’ll choose to either gather wood by venturing into the forest (a nice push-your-luck element where pulling the wrong ball from the hessian bag sees you being bitten by a snake and out of the next round, losing your voting privileges at the same time). You might choose to gather water based on the island’s weather or attempt to search the wreckage of your marooned ship.
To get to the next round, or to escape, you need enough food and water for every survivor on the raft. If you’re short on rations, players all vote to see who dies of hunger or thirst – a stark choice for a family game. Having a raft big enough to support a party who have enough rations to leave sees those players win at the expense of the others.
It’s a quick game, with neat components and some tongue-in-cheek references too – fancy scavenging the wreckage just to find a copy of Quoridor? But it’s interesting to see players turn on each other when supplies get low and someone’s got to leave the group, albeit through starvation.
If you like this and are looking for a step up in semi co-operative games, you might want to try Tiny Epic Zombies in its co-op mode, or Fog Of Love with its relationship trials and tribulations.
Trading – Panto Pete
Trading! The life blood of our economy (the same within board game mechanisms). The very process that has let civilizations grow and flourish throughout the ages. Now you can replicate the thrill of the trade in a board game near you! Well one of very many, actually, as so many of the great games involve some sort of trading especially if you consider construction as a sort of trading: raw materials for buildings. I used to be a sole trader and no that didn’t mean I dealt in fish but once you’ve got the feel for buying and selling it’s with you for life.
So let me introduce you to trading in a board game. Our chosen point of departure is Century Spice Road. This excellent game from Plan B Games is essentially just trading. The elegant designed and good-looking game is themed on the Spice Road that opened up the East in the 15th Century. You trade in 4 spices of increasing value: Turmeric, Saffron, Cardamon and Cinnamon (or Yellow, Red, Green & Brown). In a little under 50 minutes, you’ll load spices on your caravan, trade them with merchants for more or better spices and eventually cash them in for Point cards at your destination. It’s quick and a joy to play with interesting little decisions at every step. The trick is to work out which of the trades are the most valuable and if you can set yourself up for multiple trades in one turn.
When you graduate from this gem there are two more in the Century series: Eastern Wonders where you set sail to sea and a New World which adds Worker Placement and Engine Building mechanisms. Then there’s others such as Splendor, trading gems and the lovely little 2-hander Jaipur with camels thrown in. Once you’re off down the trade route you’ll be trading everywhere. Go forth and prosper!
Dice Placement – Dan Street-Phillips
Worker placement mechanisms have been a staple in board games for a long time. One of the most iconic modern board games, Carcassonne allows you to place your limited meeples (a term coined for this game merging the world “my” and “people”) to score points. However, in more recent years, the development of dice as workers has really picked up. Traced back to games like Kingsburg (2007) and perhaps most famously, Troyes (2010) dice placement works, in principle, like standard worker placement. However the key difference is how you might use the value of the dice to enhance your placement. Take Fantastic Factories for example. At the beginning of each turn you roll a pool of dice and then you get to place those dice on set spaces. As you build the tableaux of cards in front of you, your dice will have more options. Some spaces will dictate a certain number you will need to achieve that action. Others will give you resources equal to the number you have placed.
So do you want more energy this turn by placing a ‘3’ dice or is that better placed somewhere else in order for you to get an extra blueprint? You want a slightly more complex version of this then in Ahoy you are sailing the seven seas as pirates and smugglers and a ‘6’ could grant you a powerful attack or you can use it to sail right across the map to a matching tile. Or for those who want to explore the more complex world of tabletop games then Bitoku not only sees your dice being placed but also high numbers might stop others from placing in the same area. Whatever complexity you are interested in, dice placement is an interesting device and is there anything most satisfying that the clunk of rolling a handful of dice!
Story-Telling – Tom Harrod
Want a tabletop experience with story-telling mechanisms at its heart? Lucky for you, there’s plenty of options! Story-telling within tabletop games tends to include a pre-written narrative of sorts. The players discover this as the game evolves. Often, there are many pathways and many choices. This also means consequences-galore! The delightful thing about this is that it drives the plot in different, unique, unpredictable directions!
Story-telling in tabletop gaming tends to be a co-operative affair. You’re all in it together, living and breathing the story as it unfolds around you. A fantastic starting point for you could be The Adventures of Robin Hood, by Kosmos Games. This sees 2-4 players playing as Robin Hood, Little John, Maid Marian and Will Scarlet in ye olde Nottingham.
There’s a huge board that has an ‘advent calendar’ vibe. There’s over 100 flaps on the board that you can reveal, depending on your in-game choices. Items or non-playable characters lie in wait underneath, all whom change the beat of the mission! Where will you explore? Who will you chat to? Will the guards capture you, and if they do, can you fight your way to freedom? The game comes with a hardback tome, which acts as both an organic rulebook and method for advancing the plot. There’s nine adventures in the box, increasing in difficulty. Plus, the new Friar Tuck in
Danger expansion provides four more exciting missions…
Looking for more? Red Raven Games also provide bucket-loads of story-telling mechanisms within their games. Above and Below provides multiple-option narrative adventures if you venture into the ‘Below’ half of the game. Sleeping Gods is a full-blown exploration campaign. You sail around islands aplenty, manage your own ship and crew, and get into scraps!
Meanwhile, Oath (Leder Games) is another campaign, but this one is a far heavier, competitive option. This features action selection, area majority, hand management, and negotiation. It has a wonderful ‘save’ system. The winner from the previous game gets to keep their end-game state. They also get promoted to Chancellor. This means in the next game they are political public enemy number one, with a big target on their chest! Oath is the kind of game that produces its own stories, born out of the political intrigue you create around the table.
And then, of course, there’s also the world of tabletop RPGs, such as Dungeons & Dragons. The best place to read about this, if you haven’t played before, could be my blog series, here.