If you love tabletop games, you probably end up buying new games all the time. That's great, but it also means you have to learn how to play it and then teach it to your games group or your partner. Mind you, if you play solo, the teaching part isn't an issue of course - but in this article I want to focus on the teaching, rather than the learning.
Tabletop games come in a huge variety with many different mechanics - and in this article I want to focus on a number of action selection mechanism which I think are interesting. I am not talking about things like worker placement or dice rolling specifically, but how these general mechanics allow you to choose an action and sometimes affect what other players can do or how effective the action is.
We all know classic dice rolling games, like Yahtzee, or games using dice to decide the outcome of battles or events. You may also have heard of, and probably even played, roll and write games, such as Roll to the Top, Avenue, The Castles of Burgundy: The Dice Game and many more. However, more recent games use dice in quite different ways, creating interesting game mechanics that I want to talk about.
A lot of games are aimed at three or more players, even though most state a player count of two and up. That makes sense, because there is a large market for games aimed at games groups. Many of us enjoy playing tabletop games with friends, so it is easy to get three or more of you together. However, there is an ever growing number of games at single players - because there is an increasing demand for solo play.
A relatively recent trend in tabletop games is the idea of creating your own, custom version of a game. You use stickers to add new rules, tear up cards to remove them from the game and write names into boxes to personalize locations or characters, creating your unique game. These so-called legacy games are all about permanence, and it is this permanence that divides players.
Complex games can be great fun. You have to really stretch yourself and think several steps ahead, while having alternative strategies ready to respond to the other player’s actions. You wrack your brain to come up with the best solution on each turn. It takes a lot of thinking and therefore is enjoyable by people who like this sort of puzzle.
There are so many different games mechanics out there across the various tabletop games available these days. Gone are the days of rolling dice to move your meeple along a track. Even when you look at modern worker placement games, the traditional method of using a pool of meeples and a limited amount of worker slots has been superseded by new methods. Dice worker placement is more common now and introduces an element of chance which can help level the playing field in a game.
