Area Impulse, our next mechanic, is the more-complicated younger brother of yesterday's mechanic, Area Movement. So go back and read that entry, and we'll proceed from there. Back yet? Ok ( Read more... )

Area Movement is our next mechanic - one of several ways to solve a classic game-design problem: There are figures (usually soldiers) on a map/board/table, and you need to move them from location A to location B. Where on the continuum of movement-precision to movement-abstraction do you want to land? On the overly-precise side, the answer ( Read more... )

Next up, we have one of the less-common board game mechanics, Area Enclosure. Read: building a fence around things, and getting points for how many spaces on the board you fenced off. This comes in two basic flavors: a) building a fence (c.f. Go, Through the Desert, Domaine, and arguably Reef Encounter), or b) removing pieces of the board until ( Read more... )

Area Control is one of the most ubiquitous of modern (and not-so-modern) game mechanics, and features heavily in many of my favorite games. It almost always is encountered as follows: you have a map, which is divided into regions of some sort. On your turn, you may dump resources, usually pawns or cubes representing “people” into that region, and ( Read more... )

Almost all games are, on some level, about resource management. All the players are competitively (either against each other or against the game itself) working toward some goal, and they have only finite resources to spend toward this goal ( Read more... )

Starting our mechanical exploration with a generally inappropriate one seems somehow right to me. “Acting” on on boardgamegeek seems to refer to any class of board game that requires you to get up from our chair and move around or talk creatively. In other words, “board” games that don't have/need boards or cards. These generally fall into two ( Read more... )

Ok, so I haven't written anything in a while, and though I seem incapable of writing anything particularly personal in this forum, I rather miss writing about various games and mechanics. So, new project. I realized not all that long ago that a game's appeal to me lies far more in its mechanics than its theme. I was also thinking that my game ( Read more... )

Let's just skip the typical year-long build-up, shall we?  Here's every game I've ever played at least twice, and remember well enough to rate, in a handy ranked list, as of April 1, 2011.  I've included shifts in rankings vis-a-vis last year (for the top 100)..  Feel free, if you're bored, to troll through entries in years previous to look at how ( Read more... )

As with the “played once, for the first time ever” list of last time, so with the “played for a 2nd+ time ever” list today: 2 or 3-sentence reviews of every game in that category. All 24 of them. In alphabetical order.

( Stuff played 2+ times )

So this week I supposedly had jury duty.  This basically meant that I sat around the courthouse twiddling my thumbs so that I could get interviewed and then kicked off juries.  Eventually, after serving only 2 days of my 5, and getting kicked off 4 juries, the jury commissioner gave up and sent me home.  Or, I should say, back to work.

Anyway, I had ( Read more... )