I have heard some dicussion lately about making the game more strategic. This post is an example of a non-strategic mechanic transformed in a strategic one.

I have been working for a long time on a board game remake attempt of master of magic. The example I will use explains a problem I had with expansion and cololonization.

What I want to illustrate is that in a game like MOM or elemental, there is a lot of actions that needs to be fulfilled in order to achive the decision you took. All theses action are actually blinding the game design which could create a game with no strategy without anybody knows it.

When I designed my board game, I had to abstract a lot of concept which simplifies the game so much that you could see if there are actually strategic choices to make.

In MOM, to create a new city, you need to build a settler, find a good area, move the settler to destination and create a new city. In my game, you just place a city token in an adjacent hex.

When I playtested my game, I got in a situation where it was boring since what-ever you did, the results were the same.

Here is a picture of the board

http://ariel.bdeb.qc.ca/~ericp/cgi-bin/boardgame/uploads/Mainsite/GameIdea/GameIdea201003240528PM/SpellCraft_PA_2.jpg

In the original rules, at the beginning of your turn, you could expand to an adjacent hex. If you take the red player to the left, starting from his covenant, that player can occupy 4 adjacent hex. Which mean that in 4 turns, he should be able to colonize his continent. Now, what ever the order in which he colonise these hex, in 4 turns, he will get the same results. Which mean that the cololonization system had actually 0 strategy in it. And this is why it was boring.

If you look at MOM, it does not exactly work like this. There are 2 different things in mom, the production of new cities is not fixed by the game like in my demo (1 city per turn) and the player must find a good location for his city. These elements adds a bit of strategy to the game.

Now, for the first things, I designed an action system which allowed you to colonize more or less each turn. Players could decide to colonize less to spend more action on other stuff they find more interesting. So here there is a strategy between expanding fast or not.

For the best spot location, in MOM there is not always strategy because most of the time you will try to find the optimal spot that gives you the best production, population and that touch a shore, forest and mountain to get access to all upgrades. There is realy a strategy if you must make a choice between for example: having access to a shore VS having access to a mountain. Mountains allow buildings that will increase your production while the shore will give you ships and the merchants guild which will double your gold. Now there is a strategy, because you are selecting 2 different growth path which are both good.

So in my game, since there is so few hex and all of them can be occupied, I decided to let the player chose which ressources in the hex they want. Each hex have 3 square, eventually, they will each have a icon. A square can have special ressources, or a terrain feature like river, shore, mountain, etc. Players will have to place their city token on one of the 3 square in the hex. That square's ressources will be blocked. So players choseswhich 2 of the 3 ressources do they to have acess.

So the way you settled you cities will influence greatly the evolution of the game since cities cannot move or be destroyed after beign placed. Some player might focus most of special ressources while another player could ignore them. Now in this situation, there is a strategy in colonization since the same 5 hex can be colonized by the red player differently according to a set of priorities.

So when I was talking about making a strategic decision plan, I think you would need to eliminate all the management and working actions in the game and try to determine why a player does that. Or see what it gives in the end. They by looking at the game design from a high level point of view, you can actually see if players are taking meaningful decisions or if they are simply working the best way they can to make their cities productive.