Mechanic to Show Strategic Exploration

I know this is a major change, but what if the goals are hidden in addition to being random? (upside down tiles or two tiles stacked together,with hidden text or graphics). Now you have to decide whether to spend a turn searching/excavating an existing tile, or exploring/placing the next tile.

Certain resources can only be found in certain terrain types, such as construction materials, camels/horses, supplies/villagers, etc. Assume that some clue tells you that Gold can only be found in parched or desert terrain, but you give up the opportunity to find the other types of resources if you concentrate on finding the gold. Or you could decide to be methodical and search every tile, but you would uncover a lot less of the map that way.

This even adds tension. Do you turn over that jungle tile to see if it contains a resource? Or do you draw the next tile on the stack hoping for desert? Beware, your opponent can now take advantage of your hasty exploration by searching behind you...

Personally I like this idea. Instead maybe at the beginning of each game, each player choose three (3) tile (not randomly) and a determines that this is the "correct" path to find the hidden treasure.

Next step each player is responsible for being the GM for one (1) of the other players. The trick is to balance out the different tiles, having enough variety and sufficient mix of each tile.

Then you can divide your world into different "regions": mountains, desert, plains, ocean, swamp, hills, etc... Six (6) seems a little low. Perhaps you can split each one into three (3) categories like:

Mountains: Volcano, Sedimentary, Snowy Peaks.

And in AROUND the board you could have different regions you must travel along your JOURNEY to discover the secret of the treasure...

Granted I see one problem with this: how to "share" hidden information from the player. Perhaps you can "buy" information about the tiles and reveal this information gradually. To be honest, I'm not really sure how to do this...

Best of luck with your game!

One of the questions I always ask is what kind of emotion my game is trying to generate. This comes from my fiction writing background, where generating emotion is the ultimate goal, but I find it translates really well into games and mechanics, because if I have an answer to that question it helps me stay focused on the mechanics that help evoke that emotion.

Applying that here, from your OP it sounds like the feeling (emotion) of exploration is one of your goals for the game.

My first thought was that if the ultimate goal is to get gold, then that's a little at odds with the feel of exploration. If you want the game to encourage players to explore, you need to make the win conditions for the game in line with exploration, not making money. So maybe instead of the goal being to make money, the goal should be to find X hidden/lost treasures, or a number of hidden/lost treasures totaling X value in gold? You could even push this further to say players can sell any treasures they find, but they can only win based on the treasures they still have, giving players low on cash the choice of either selling the treasures they have to generate money or holding onto them and scraping by so they can use them for the win.

Second, without tweaking things too much, one way you could encourage more exploration would be to require a build up to the tiles that matter the most. For example, if someone just turns over a tile with the lost city that holds a great treasure, even that player probably won't be that excited (at least not for long) - it didn't take enough effort. But if each tile could only be played if it matched several conditions (such as a string of other tiles) then it takes more work to build up to laying the best tiles. That means that by the time a player lays the lost city tile and claims the treasure, they know they've earned it. It might also provide some opportunities for other players to spoil the party by playing tiles that interfere (depending on your mechanics).

For example, what if, in addition to each tile being a terrain or feature it also has a strength or value, and you can only place it next to another tile of a certain terrain type and value. As a more specific example, perhaps that lost city tile is a value 3 tile, and you can only place it next to a Desert tile with value of at least 2 or a wilderness tile with a value of at least 3. So there's no way to find a lost city next to another city - you have to venture out at least 2-3 tiles into the desert or wilderness to have any chance of finding it. Up the value to 5 and the player has to go that much further to find it; make the tiles with the greatest treasures the tiles with the highest value so they take the most work to find.

How you might make something like that works depends on your other mechanics. If players are randomly drawing every tile they lay down, then they might have to discard any tile that they can't place next to the current tile they're on (which could be a major bummer). But if characters hold a few tiles in their "hand", they might have a tile and have to hold it and keep playing other tiles until they can get the other tiles that will allow them to place that lost city tile (consider this like drawing the lost city tile gives them a clue where to find the lost city, but until they find enough other clues to figure out the whole path they need to take to get there).

If you can share more of your current mechanics we can probably come of with some more ideas of ways to bring out more of an exploration feel.

While I'm not familiar with Aktiron JDevey, I think the concept that QuestCCG lays out is on-point for what you're looking for: we want players to be able to strategically decide which piece is placed next. There have been a few different games where hex-based tiles are added to the board (the sea expansion for Catan, Twilight Emperium 3rd Edition, etc.), so these are informing my thoughts on this, but a few thoughts for you:

1) In Twilight Emperium (a space exploration game), players have some preference on where they place planets, wormholes, asteroid fields, a supernova, etc. Every player is dealt a certain number of tiles to start the game, and they place them in sequence. This gives players a chance to throw something dangerous on the other side of the board (so they don't have to deal with it), place a wormhole near someone to provide ease of access to their primary base, etc.

What this does is it gives the players limited knowledge of what _can_ be on the board, but doesn't show them what the surrounding area looks like until the players reveal more of the world. What this would do for you is it would open up strategies for players to explore "defensible regions" with high mountains, volcanoes, etc., as well as "resource-rich" areas (lush regions), high-camouflage regions, etc. based on what players put down in different parts of the board. Still not complete foreknowledge, but it gives them a way to prepare in advance for what might come without making it either fully scripted or fully random.

2) If we were to go with a random way of assigning tiles, part of the strategy could be found in the, "what's in the hex you just revealed" part of the game. Perhaps the volcano tile that was just revealed is not just a volcano tile, but a dormant volcano, or alternatively it could be fully active, each changing the way the tile works. This gives players a random occurrence that they can react to, and different tiles that may look alike act differently. This gives players the excitement of "not knowing anything about where they are exploring," but also makes it so that the game isn't a hex-based version of rummy, either.

Just a few thoughts - hope the game goes well!

1) I believe the game you want to look at is Tobago, it sounds exactly like what you trying to do with your design. In the game the location of treasure is determined by the players playing map cards down. It's an interesting logic puzzle since what you are doing is narrowing down all the possible locations the treasure can and can not be at until you pin-point the exact location.

2) Nope, not over thinking. Giving players the experience you want can never be over thought ;)