What boardgame, or mechanic in a boardgame, do you find so clever in its simplicity?
I'll start: the solo system in A Feast for Odin. You just have to control two hands/colors that block each other's worker placement. No automa, no special rules.
@judgyweevil Tokaido. The movement system is simple, yet defines the strategy of the entire game.
The game is a journey game, along a path. On your turn, you can move forward as far as you like, letting you claim whatever location you like. But the next turn always belongs to the person positioned in the rear most position along the path. And that means the person in the rear can keep taking turns until they are no longer in the rear.
Jumping forward is a risky move, because you are giving your opponents the chance to keep taking turns until they catch you.
So each time you take a move, you end up weighing those elements. It's strategic, yet elegant in its simplicity
Legacy games. Just the concept that results from one game carry over to the next. The first legacy game I played was Gloomhaven. The giant map with stickers is a really fun way to mark progress.
When I played Gloomhaven with my late best friend during the pandemic (one of the reasons why the early lockdowns felt like a paradoxically idyllic period), we used blu tac to temporarily affix the stickers to the relevant cards because the stickers felt too permanent (I know there's reusable sticker sets, but we didn't have thought). Unfortunately he died in 2021 of COVID.
Some months later, when Frosthaven finally turned up in the mail, I packaged up Gloomhaven to give to a friend. As I peeled off the blutacked stickers from cards, I realised that I regretted how our anxiety had caused us to not properly engage in the legacy component of the game. The person I was gifting this to also was close to my late best friend, so I was deeply sad when I imagined an alternative world in which they and their local friends would be seeing the marks that we had left on the game, like the enhancements on the Spellweaver and Cragheart's cards. Sure, not sticking the stickers on properly was probably better for resale value, but I tend to not sell stuff anyway, because I find it overly taxing in executive function — I prefer to gift stuff on if possible.
That's the bitter part of the story, and the sweet part to temper the sadness is that I feel like I understand legacy games much better now, and when I get a chance to play Frosthaven (one of my local friends has a difficult to schedule around job at the moment), I will stick those bloody stickers with enthusiasm this time. I will always cherish the memories of gaming with my late friend, and I don't need to have physical artifacts to demonstrate that. However, this time, I'm not going to let a nebulous prospective future distract me from properly engaging with the game on its terms.
That is really beautifully said
Sorry about your friend.
I am not sure if gloomhaven was my first legacy game but it did feel weird to put those stickers on the cards. After awhile it started to feel natural and nice to actually leave a permanent mark on the characters and the game. It is "your game".
I found Gloomhaven too punishing to get past the first few (failed) quests. I kept running out of cards and becoming exhausted.
It's easiest with 3 people. With 2 it can be difficult to work together. With 4 the amount of enemies can become overwhelming. As for running out of cards, don't use discard cards during the first few rounds! Check out the calculator at: https://www.boardgamemath.com/boardgames/gloomhaven/gloomhavenStaminaCalculator.html
Playing a discard on your first round means that you have 4 or 5 rounds less to play before you are exhausted. Don't forget you can always play a standard move or attack 2 action. You don't gave to play the discard action.
I couldn’t play normal Pandemic since I started with legacy
Ah! Why are we abandoning all those cities in South America?! We will have a hard time with getting into the continent next round!!
Uh what do you mean? The game is over…
I like Betrayal Legacy! It was fun! Still had some of the issues of non legacy, notably when the haunt starts the game can be wildly unbalanced towards one side or the other. I'm unsure how one would even help that.
Hanabi, with its 'face your cards the other way' concept.
Oo yeah, that's a good one
The deck building without reshuffling in Aeon's End. It sounded so strange at first, but as we played the game, we noticed how well it worked. You have to really think about when is a good time to buy spells, how you can make sure you can get a big burst of energy now and then, etc.
The way the threats escalate in Pandemic from the infection deck and how periodically you increase the threat and then add all the places that have already been infected back to the top of the deck so they're coming right back at you.
In wingspan it's neat how since the turn marker pieces are also used for end of round score markers, each round the game gets shorter just by scoring the previous.
The splay-of-cards mechanism to show a larger number of icons required for supremacy of actions.
Elegant and can be game changing.
You can try out an online game here.
This isn't mechanical really, but I really like the glass tokens in viticulture, because they allow you to see through them to see the value of the grape beneath the token. They're also satisfying to use.
Relatedly, I also like the way that the Dark souls board game has you track health and stamina: your character card is a thickish board that has square cutouts that represent your stamina and health bars, and then you put little cubes in the slots as you take damage or use stamina. I mostly like this because it feels satisfying. The board game itself isn't too great mechanically imo (when managing the enemy "AI", we would often joke about how it would be cool if there was some way to automate this clunky way of managing the enemies. Some computerised system perhaps...). When I played Gloomhaven a while later, I remember thinking that it felt mechanically similar to the Dark Souls board game, but far better executed.
I feel like I surely have better answers for your question, OP, but I can't think of them right now. But thanks for such an awesome question; I'm looking forward to reading other answers. I am also likely to try playing some solo Feast for Odin because of you; I've played it once, with friends, but I also have it as a mod on tabletop simulator, so I can try it there.
your character card is a thickish board that has square cutouts that represent your stamina and health bars, and then you put little cubes in the slots as you take damage or use stamina
That's actually a fairly common physical feature! And a lot more common if you take 3rd party component upgrades into account. It's called dual layer boards, and is one of the best upgrades a designer can implement imo.
I gave the term a Google, and it is a thing I've seen before (in Terraforming Mars, for example), so it's nice to put a name to the feature.
However, I don't think that's what you'd call what the Dark Souls Board game has, because the holes go right through the board, which only has one layer. You can see what I mean in this image. I suppose one could consider this as a crude implementation of what dual layer boards are implementing, but I think that part of why this is so satisfying is because it is a proper hole.
The viticulture tokens also don't stack so there's never a mistake of having two wines of the same number
Scout is the only card game of which I know that prevents you from reordering your private cards in your own hand!
Bohnanza is the same and it's one of the best card games ever.
It's not super common, no. Especially compared mechanisms like rondels or worker placement. And it seems so simple to just not move cards, but it's surprisingly difficult for so many people.
MtG players shuffle their hands compulsively. They don't even realize they're doing it.
What is the purpose of that mechanism?
In Bohnanza you are forced to plant the front card in your hand at the start of your turn, so you need to be smart about getting cards out of your hand before your turn if you want to control what cards you plant.
The game is all about scouting out top talent for your circus (inserting cards into your hand) versus showing off their complicated acts, whose strength is the card count of your valid played sets (which is dependent on your hand order). It's awesome!!!
People play out acts of 1-5 cards and can keep besting each other with stronger sets. If you can't beat, you buy one of the current act's performers on the spot from their circus owner and add it to your hand where it could hopefully give you a stronger set. It's wild that you take the performer mid-act, because the ongoing performance weakens live with that card/performer now being absent, and can now get bested by another player's act!
I'm not sure about clever necessary but I find the simple "play cards to convert cubes into other cubes" of Century: Spice Road surprisingly fun and addictive.
How the turns are determined in Nova Luna. It's always the person who's token is last who goes. As long as you're last you can keep taking turns. When you pass another player's token, your turn is over. Everyone is always able to see the turn order and you can (try to) calculate when your turn is and which tiles will be available to you.
@raparperi11 @judgyweevil That's the same mechanic Tokaido uses! It's the reason I love the game. Elegant in its simplicity!
In Unearth, the goal is to have enough points via die rolls on a card when a threshold is met to win the card. So higher rolls are generally better.
But, if you have poor luck, and roll below a 3, you get a little token that lets you buy other cards.
If you have the world's worst luck, and never roll above a 3, there's a good chance you can win the game through those other cards!
I like that you can switch out the faces of the dice in Dice Forge.
The way Gloomhaven did the road and city events.
Just a bunch of cards with a choice, and depending which characters are playing you get an outcome with a boon or misfortune. Afterwards the card might get removed and replaced by an other card to continue the little background plot (depending on the card and the choices made).
I don't seem to know the other games people are mentioning, so not sure how fitting this is, but Nefarious. I've introduced multiple people to the game and it never takes long. The core rules are simple, turns are simultaneous and quick, the games are short.
The actions you can take are simple enough that the cards in your hand include the details (with the caveat that I know the polish localized version).
The twist is, well... The twists. Every game you draw and reveal two twist cards that change the game rules, keeping things interesting.
As a bonus, I like the simultaneous turns. The actions you can take are represented by cards, and at the start of the turn everybody places an action card face down, and they are revealed simultaneously. No turn order, less waiting, more action, and a nice element of intrigue of trying to predict what the other players will play on a given turn.
I like Mastermind - the pegs are really satisfying to place
I personally love the action system in Arcs. The trick taking element forces you to seize on tactical opportunities and you really get the feeling you are different factions vying for control in a dramatic space opera when you play that game.