I have been play testing my game that consists of players having 3-4 actions during the action phase.
One player takes an action, the following player in clockwise order takes an action and so on until all players have spent all of their actions.
To help players keep track of how many actions they have spent so far, each player has three or four action counters that have a picture on one side of the counter. To indicate they are spending an action, a player simply turns the counter over. By so doing, a player at a glance can easily see how many actions they have left.
Star Trek Ascendancy uses a similar idea with Command Tokens.
During play testing I noticed almost every single player forgot to go ahead and flip their action counter in order to take an action. I was teaching the game, and I had to do it repeatedly for them. This happened with multiple play test groups.
I am thinking of an alternative way to keep track of actions a player has spent to see if it works better.
Here are some ways I have seen in other board games:
- Each player has little action cubes that they must place on their player board and move it off to indicate that have performed an action.
- Each player has an action counter or other type of cube which they move from a section of the board (available) to another section of a board (exhausted).
Besides these methods, are there any other ones? Does anyone have experience on which method works better?
--DarkDream
I ask because I'm wondering if there's a way of making the placing of a counter somehow integral to the actions themselves so they can't be so easily overlooked.
The idea of placing the counter on the board where the fleet moves to makes sense, but I don't know how one would place an action token, for example, to build a fleet. Also players research and get tech cards. In theory they could place an action token on the card they just researched but I don't know, it starts to feel fiddly.
What I am thinking right now is to have some kind of player board that has a small area specific to that type of action. For example, if they spend an action to build, they must move the action token to the build box on the board.
--DarkDream