Discussion: What are your favorite boardgame mechanics or gimmicks?
Discussion: What are your favorite boardgame mechanics or gimmicks?
As per title. I personally really enjoy deckbuilding / engine builders and civilisation games, but most of them understandably end just as you're hitting the sweet spot of getting your engine up and running. Probably why Through the Ages is my favorite game - has all the mechanics I like, but lasts long enough that I feel like I get a chance to run them.
I love the ship customization in Eclipse, each type of ship (scout, fighter, cruiser) has a certain number of squares on your board that you can put any ship competent into. You can add more engines so it can move further in one action, or computers so you're more likely to hit, or more guns so you roll more dice, or more shields so they are harder to destroy. You can find or research better components and all of your ships of the same class use the same blueprint.
I love how you can customize your units for how you want to play, but I'm not a fan of 4x games and wish there were other games with a similar mechanic.
Galaxy trucker, maybe? It's a very different game, but it does have the ship building mechanic
You can't exactly plan your Galaxy Trucker ship, it's more "doing the best you can with what you've found." For example: if you want to put a bunch of engines on your ship but don't find very many, then there is nothing you can do about that.
I'm a tactile person, so I really like minis and tokens. No flat character cutouts though please, I'll sometimes 3D print minis to replace those.
Recently picked up Moonrakers, which has little starships and metal coins for counters, and it lights my brain up like a Christmas tree.
I guess there's never been a better time for you to be a boardgamer, given the proliferation of deluxe production games :)
And I agree, it's so nice to be able to pick up and move around something that's not just cardboard chips!
Check out little plastic trains.
I love this so much and I don't have any games that can use it.
Agreed. One of my favorite things about the 2016 DOOM board game is these wonderful minis:
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In card games I always like that little spice that's added when discards can be picked up by someone else and used. It adds an element of "should I perhaps continue with this less-than-perfect hand, or should I risk helping someone else build the perfect hand?"
This is a huge part of Arboretum (do I discard this card I know you want or am I safe to discard this other card I might need), and also big part of Fantasy Realms
I don't know these games (I'm out of the loop on commercial and board games for the past 20-odd years, sadly) but I have loved this mechanism since playing the earliest rummy-family games from China. (Majiang is the most recent of a loooooooooooooooooong line of build-and-discard games in China.) The added spice of worrying if someone is going to use your discard to improve their hand or even complete it before you can do yours is part of why I like playing the rummy family.
I also like deck building but some games feel like everyone plays pretty much for oneself.
Deckbuilding + a board fits a sweet spot for me.
Tyrants of the Underdark is my favorite, it's a familiar deck building formula but has a central board with area control zones for players to fight over.
I also enjoyed my play of Dune: Imperium, but it has a lot of other things going on as well. (Worker placement, area control, resource management, action cards)
Yeah, some deckbuilders are way too multiplayer solitaire. I'll always love dominion but it definitely suffers from this. I found Clank, especially the latest entries, to be a good highly interactive deckbuilder.
I've only played one deck building game (Star Realms) and there were times when it felt like two people playing solitaire, only to suddenly burst into hard exchanges. It was kind of interesting.
Mystic Vale is a neat take on the deckbuilder. Each player starts with the same 20-card deck, but Instead of earning new cards to add to your deck, you modify the cards themselves.
You add these clear plastic cards into the sleeve that add or modify one of three sections on your cards.
Yeah, I like this mechanic, I want to see it tried by other games.
Unfortunately, i think Mystic Veil is too multiplayer solitare for me. And it seems like the winning strategy is always to snatch up all the Growth cards before anyone else so you can eventually draw nearly your whole deck every turn.
Edge of Darkness is good, unfortunately they made a mess of the Kickstarter to the point that it's not viable for it to get a retail release.
I do love me a multilayer player board
I love Space Cadets. It's a cooperative game where each player mans a station on a space ship.
And each station is its own mini-game.
For example, to shoot, you have to flick a token across the table to hit a mark.
Other stations have to fill out a shape with Tetris-like tiles, throw dice in a Yahtzee-like game, play memory, etc.
All with a time limit, and the captain can distribute the ship's energy to the stations, making the mini-games easier the more energy they get.Dice Forge's gimmick is that it's a dice builder (rather than a deck builder). Fun if you like rolling dice a lot and finding out what you get.
In a similar vein, Dice Throne is basically Yahtzee, but the combos you make are attacks at other players. Do I take this safe, easy combo, or reroll it all to go for my special attack?
Diplomacy's gimmick is that there is no randomizer other than how much you trust the other players. I feel like that isn't used enough in games. Even something like Secret Hitler has randomness of the deck.
Root's gimmick is that every player is a different faction that plays completely differently from everyone else. Makes finding a group to play with in person a challenge (due to the learning curve), but is surprisingly well balanced.
I love games that have different goals/mechanics/etc for each player. Even just different starting hands in a deck builder like Clank, or end goals like in Discworld.
Root's gimmick is that every player is a different faction that plays completely differently from everyone else. Makes finding a group to play with in person a challenge (due to the learning curve), but is surprisingly well balanced.
Arcs Blighted Reach is exactly this, cranked up to 11.
I've of my favorite mechanics comes from Unearth, specifically their catch-up/bad luck mitigating mechanic.
In a game where the goal is to have the winning die on a ruin as a cumulative threshold is reached, any dice rolled under 3 nets you a stone, which can be used to build you own ruins.
Roll poorly enough and you won't fall too far behind. Have the worst rolls every time and there's a good chance you can win without actually capturing a single ruin card.
I love how In spirit Island all the natural inhabitants and the spirits use wooden tokens and the invaders are made of plastic. Such a simple flavor thing but I love it so much.
One of my favorite mechanics is when you place tiles next to each other and the effectiveness of the tiles depends on what is next to them. Suburbia does this but almost goes too far in my opinion. It's way too much to easily keep track of.
A game called Cité is my favorite for this because you share a border with your opponents and you can make deals out of it. "I'll put my x2 multiplier on the border here if you give me one Cloth per turn."
Push-your-luck is a great time. Can't Stop uses it quite effectively.
I like games that involve mechanics that change the rules. Magic: the gathering is a big example of that, but Villainous also does it kinda, where each villain has their own goals and rules and the game is a race to achieve your villain's goals before the others do.