![]() ![]() Games where you roll dice and then have to decide how exactly to use them, where the randomness is maybe mitigated by the fact that high rolls aren't necessarily better and low rolls worse, but where different die-faces give you different options. Some folks call this "Worker Placement with Dice Workers", but I never found this really convincing, because many of the most interesting games in this category aren't really worker placement games. And if you then manage to do so, to turn this into something efficient and maybe even victorious, then there's hardly anything better, is there? A puzzle that you need to solve and that maybe doesn't have a perfect solution, but which challenges you to go on and try anyway. A game where managing the contents of your hand, not necessarily playing cards all the time, but "using" them in different ways, like in The Bloody Inn. A game where cards can be used in different ways and using the hand you've been dealt (or drafted or whatever) in the most beneficial way possible, like in Radlands. A hand of cards where the order in which you play them really matters, like in Twilight Struggle. But maybe that - a small number of instances where play-order matters - is already enough to make it a hand-management-game to some? Probably. is Star Realms a hand-management-game? I would say no, because you play all of your cards each turn and there's only very few instances where the order in which you play them makes a difference. I feel like this isn't necessarily the best defined mechanism out there, because hand management can (and does) mean a lot of different things to different people. ![]() That seems to be a running theme in this list of mine, don't you think? Another one of those is my third favorite mechanism, hand management. Seems to be one of the older mechanisms, judging by that picture, huh? Speaking of "chaos into order". Set collection is all about bringing turning chaos into order and I enjoy that a lot in board games. Maybe there's a certain OCD at work here, but there's hardly anything more fulfilling than managing to put together a perfect hand in Fantasy Realms or creating that perfect storm of getting the right resources to the right people and then putting them into the right rooms in Grand Austria Hotel. But I just find it endlessly satisfying to efficiently collect sets of matching or disparate things. ![]() Very rarely (if ever) does set collection stand on its own. Or you place workers on the correct card-spots in Stone Age to assemble a high-scoring set of cultural objects. You collect the correct adventurers in Lords of Waterdeep to turn them in for a quest. Set collection is often a means to an end or a result of your actions. Set collection is one of those mechanisms that don't get a lot of time in the limelight, mostly because I feel like a lot of people think of it as more of a "supportive" mechanism, instead of a "defining" one. It's more a case of "this mechanism fascinates me on an instinctual level, even though I have yet to see it implemented in a really successful way". Also some of them might surprise you a bit, because not necessarily are my favorite mechanisms found in my favorite games. And if they don't, all of us have to learn to live with that. who knows anything at this point? I'm just gonna throw a bunch of words out there and with a bit of luck, they are gonna make sense. do you remember that point in time three years or so ago when suddenly the BGG-folks decided to add a bunch of new mechanisms to the page based on some book that one of the Engelstein's wrote? Was that an April Fool's Joke? A shared fever-dream? I mean, we're still kind of living with the repercussions of that, because the mechanisms-tab of most games has grown absolutely monstrous and some of them are kind of ridiculous ("Lose a turn" is a mechanism?) and other important-feeling ones are still missing, so. And I'm gonna use my very own terminology to describe them, because. But yeah, for now, I thought that I'd get introspective for a second and find out what I personally think are the best general mechanisms that there are. Don't worry, I'll be back to wacky shit at some point in time. Yes, I know, kind of boring when compared to other topics that I wrote about in the past. Top Five Thursday: Best board game mechanisms, period!
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