I had a small revelation recently, and I'm trying to figure out whether it's significant or trivial. It is this: that nearly all of my game designs don't work, and most of them involve traveling, and the ones that work the best don't involve traveling. And now I'm wondering whether traveling is a difficult mechanic, or even usable at all, as a major mechanic of a game.
Now I need to define what I mean by traveling. I mean a game in which each player is represented by a single token (or sometimes a small number of tokens) on a board that represents a map of some area, and the players must move their tokens to different parts of the map in order to progress and win, and the movement must be along paths: to get from point A to point Z, you must travel through all the points between and cannot simply jump to arbitrary locations.
"Clue" is an example of a game with traveling as a major mechanic. Each player has a single pawn, which must walk around the floor plan of a house to collect clues. Note that the paths don't have to be drawn on the board; in Clue, the "corridors" between rooms are a checkerboard where you can wander at will.
There are some kinds of moving-piece games that I would like to exclude from the definition. I'm not interested in racing games, where the players all follow the same track and are simply trying to finish first. I'm not interested in roll-and-move games like Monopoly, where the players have little or no choice of where to move. And I'm not interested in wargames, where players have many pieces and are trying to expand borders, capture territory, or destroy the enemy pieces. I'm talking about games where players can choose to go here to do this, then decide to go there to do that, and where the traveling is one of the most important parts of the game.
A review of the BGG top 50 games shows not one game that uses traveling as the central mechanic, and only a few that use it at all. War of the Ring has a significant mechanic in which the Fellowship must travel from Rivendell to Mordor, but it is mostly a wargame. Farther down the list, #48 is RoboRally - Armed and Dangerous, which is a race game but one which lets you choose your path creatively, and in which those choices are significant. In the top 100, Maharaja has a traveling mechanic for the "architect" pieces, but players also have several available actions each turn that don't involve the location of their architects. All of these are excellent games, but none fits my definition of a non-racing, non-wargame with traveling as the central mechanic.
I can name a few games that do use traveling as a major mechanic. I mentioned Clue; but serious adult gamers usually don't regard Clue as a good game. Kill Doctor Lucky uses traveling; but it's only #1656 at BGG, and is another game that serious gamers generally don't take seriously. The highest-ranked game I've been able to think of that really fits the definition is Fury of Dracula at #175, and frankly (in my opinion!) that game has some serious flaws.
I wonder whether having traveling as a central mechanic limits players' choices too much. Players can choose where to go, but then must jump through whatever hoops are required to get there: roll the dice, don't step on the trap door, or whatever, but there are no significant decisions involved except the choice of destination. Once they've arrived, players do whatever they came to do; again no further decisions. Then just pick another destination and repeat. Put like that, it sounds very dull! But nearly anything sounds dull if you leave out the interesting details.
What do you think? What published games (good ones, in your opinion) have traveling as a major mechanic? What designs of your own include traveling, and what do you think of the result? Have you ever removed traveling from a design, or abandoned such a design, because you couldn't make it work? Have you ever designed a traveling game that was a brilliant success, and if so, what did you do to make it interesting?
I should have remembered All for One, a game I've played and enjoyed. It's another game that is only sort-of-kind-of what I'm talking about. One difference is that all of the character figures on the board can be moved by any player, so although a player may at the moment want to move one figure to a particular destination, there are always other options.
Terra Prime is a game I haven't played. It looks like fun, and I'd like to try it to see how it feels. As Seth notes, the traveling mechanic (or system :) is a major part of the game, but there is much more going on: exploration, ship upgrades, freight shipments, market management.
Hot and Fresh is exactly what I've been talking about, but I'll wait for Seth to actually build it and play it before I offer any opinions. ;)
I haven't played Hansa, but I watched it once. If I recall, the only moving token is a ship that is moved in turn by each player, which is not quite the same as each player moving his own token. (The ship does carry some kind of freight that belongs to the players, I think, but the freight only moves when the ship carries it.) Contention over the ship's route is an important part of the game.
In my original post I mentioned Fury of Dracula, a "pretty good" traveling game that I think has flaws. I should mention that Fantasy Flight is bringing out a new version that is intended to be an improvement on the original. Early reports about it are promising, but I haven't seen it myself. I am still thinking about whether the flaws in the original are closely tied to the movement mechanic, or incidental. The new version may help answer that question.
These are all good examples of ways in which a traveling mechanic can be used in a good game. Most of them take liberties with the very restricted definition of traveling that I started with, so maybe that's a clue: traveling works better if it isn't as simple and restricted as each-player-moves-his-own-token.
Or maybe the lesson to learn is that creative twists on standard mechanics make for better games!