Game Mechanics : Action distribution

I definitely think this mechanic interesting and worth investigating.

One problem I foresee is that unless you have a fixed number of players in a game, it may be difficult to state specifically how many players get assigned actions.

One solution may be...

Assign all but one player an action.

This way, if you have 4 players, you award it to 3. If you have 3 players, you give it to 2, etc.

In a game of mine first player is determined in such a way that there can be a tie. There are two rules to cover it:

1. It's always true that the same player cannot be first twice in a row.

2. If there is still a tie then the first player marker is moved clockwise from the previous first player to the first tying player.

While it sounds slightly confusing, after one round everyone's got it and it works fine.

Just a thought. You'd probably want to change rule 1 to "if more than one player is tied to go first, if one of them was first last turn then he's out of consideration for this turn" or something, and it's important that the repeatedly rejected player still get a chance to play first.

Just a thought.

-- Matthew

I think this idea will be great, in part because I am working on a game with something similar!

I wouldn't worry about the "tie breaker" stuff at this point; that's a specific, and currently, you need to worry about the generalities.

A few things to take into account. While the "I'll choose you if you choose me" kind of negotiations are fine, it will be somewhat underwhelming if the game's entire system for choosing which other players will act reduces to this. Human nature being what it is, there will always be an ingredient of this, but you want to make sure there are other motivators for choosing who will take the action than simple "I'll scratch your back" stuff. For example, imagining your game was like PR, maybe you're choosing whom to allow to ship, and one player is shipping Tobacco, one is going to ship Corn, but you're shipping Tobacco as well and the other Tobacco player would fill the boat, preventing you from shipping, thus you'll choose the player who's shipping corn. This is a simple example, but you get the point.

Second, the reality is that it's going to be fairly common for one player to get hosed through no fault of his own, simply by not being allowed to take as many actions as the other players. To mitigate this, keep the game somewhat short, and keep the actions punchy. I wouldn't worry about ways to compensate "unchosen" players -- yet -- but it's certainly something I'd keep in mind as a possibly needed mechanic. Also, perhaps there could be a shifting number of players to take actions. For example, maybe there are 5 "Action cards" describing the actions to be taken, and then five "number cards" from 1-5 dealt out one to each action card, indicating how many people will be taking that action. So then you select an action, and select as many people to take that action as the number card indicates. In fact, just playing Puerto Rico as-is, but with this variant, would probably be *very* interesting.

Other than that, I'll share other thoughts with you as I get further along with my own similar game; it's currently on the back burner, but if I get it further forward on the oven, I'll let you know!

Best of luck!

-Jeff

I think you may have misunderstood (which wouldn't be surprising since I didn't state it clearly...)

The idea is that there are, say, 5 different actions; let's use "Puerto Rico" as an example and say that they are "Trader, Builder, Craftsman, Captain, Prospector".

Now, in addition, there are 5 cards, numbered 1-5. At the start of the "governor" round, they are laid out next to each Action card. So, maybe you get a situation like this:

Trader 4
Builder 2
Craftsman 1
Captain 5
Prospector 3

And the idea would be that this turn, 4 people will get to use the Trader role, so whoever chooses "Trader" decides which 4 people will take that action. Whoever chooses Builder will decide which 2 people will take that action.

Of course, this may not work at all with your idea, I just think it could add some additional variation each turn which could be interesting.

Another concern I just thought of is that this game may have a strong element of "players must adopt a certain play-style for the game to work right". This can be off-putting to some people (see the Mystery of the Abbey discussion in the "Game Reviews" forum as an example). I think it can be avoided, just something to watch out for.

Good luck!

-Jeff

I guess what I'm concerned about is that, thinking about any good game with negotiation or diplomacy, you want to have diplomacy be about "real things", rather than "petty diplomacy" -- "you attacked me, so now I'm going to attack you back." The concern comes in that perhaps the game will be ruled by "petty negotiation" rather than something more interesting, or rather, that players will be unclear what those more interesting bases for decisions will be, and so will just resort to "petty negotiation" ("I'll scratch you back if you scratch mine" kind of thing). These concerns may be completely unfounded, I guess it just depends on how the mechanics go. I'll withold judgement until reading the rules in the GDW!

-Jeff