Variations on a rondel mechanic

Yes. You're right, so apologies on that score. At this point the game is very much at the idea stage, and I'm using it to get a handle on all sort f mechanics with a view to understanding them better. At this stage, I've tried uniting a dice drafting type mechanic with the rondel. We've had no play testing as yet, but the idea is this: Each player has a number of Skill Cubes which they place on the various buildings connected to the allotment - Compost Heap; Tool Shed; Greenhouse (or glasshouse); Garden Centre; Pub. The amount of cubes you place on each building determines the amount of dice you can roll. More of that in a second. This placement of cubes last for a season (3 months) and determines the number of dice you can roll. You cannpot place more than 3 cubes on any one location and no more than 6 cubes in total can be present on one location. You will have between 5 and 7 cubes to use each season depending on how you invested in seeds (we can leave that out here for our purpose). Having placed your cubes, you then roll a number of dice equal to the number of cubes placed for each location. Each players dice are in a different colour. If you placed 2 on the compost heap, 2 on the tool shed and 1 on the pub, you'd roll 2 dice twice and i dice once. The dice, pips face up, are then placed on the locations as marked on the game board. Now, this is where the rondel comes in. Where you placed you cubes & dice determines what cards you can take. For example, placing cubes on the greenhouse allows you to draw from that deck (all cards are face up for the season in play). In order to draw cards, though, you have to move your pawn through the rondel. Moving one segment costs nothing, but each additional segment costs 1 pip from any of your dice. Simply turn the face of the dice to keep track of this. Once on your desired location you can spend the pips on the dice which you placed on that location to buy cards. The cards have different costs and different game effects.

What I was thinking of toying with was the possibility of changing or in some way altering the layout and/or the contents of the rondel, principally to allow those with poor dice rolls or those lower in the turn order some additional leverage but also just to see what effects this would have in general game play.

I hope this makes sense....

Just physical mechanics speaking, you could have wedge shaped cards that you insert into the rondel. They might overlap the older cards (which could have multiple copies so that complexity could increase), but two problems are: A) how to you keep them from flying out of the rondel when it spins and B) how do you make it so many seasons can all stack (or do you really want players picking the cards back out)?

I'd thought about wedges as well, but as a straight swap rather than an overlay. The new wedges available would be tied to the season. Maybe I've misunderstood rondels, but the way I've done it is that it doesn't spin or move (as in Ora et Labora).

One note regarding actions... keep in mind that in general, its probably better to have the rondel affect player actions, rather than dictate them. Obviously its your game and you maybe have some cool mechanism that works in this manner, but rule of thumb is to leave the decisions to the players, and work to make those decisions more interesting.