Unboxed the Board Game Blog

Territory Building games have the players establish and/or amass control over a specific area. Often, these games employ Area Majority / Influence or Enclosure mechanics; the latter in which the areas are not delineated at the beginning of the game but are instead created as the game progresses.

Position and movement of pieces is in three dimensions. This can either be represented by a multi-level play surface, or some token or indicator of the height above or below a two-dimensional play surface.

Tile Placement games feature placing a piece to score VPs or trigger actions, often based on adjacent pieces or pieces in the same group/cluster, or keying off non-spatial properties like color, "feature completion", cluster size etc.

Pieces are moved along a linear track (not necessarily straight - it may turn, curve or loop).

Players may Trade assets directly with each other, rather than via a Market.

Players play cards from their hand to the table in a series of rounds, or “tricks” which are each evaluated separately to determine a winner and to apply other potential effects. The most common way to win a trick is by having the card with highest value of the suit that was led, but many classical card games use the "trump" system (where the certain cards, usually those of a designated suit, will win the trick if they are played.) Occasionally there is a round of bidding to determine this trump suit. In many trick taking games (though not all), players are required to "follow suit", i.e. play a card of the same suit as was led if they have one. If they do not have a matching card, they must play another card from their hand.

In each round there is a First Player, and turns are taken clockwise from the first player. There is an action that may be taken to claim a place in the turn order (typically, but not always, first) for the next round, with play proceeding clockwise from the First Player. If no one takes the action, turn order remains unchanged.

One player has the First Player token. At the end of the round, the token passes to the player to the left, who becomes the new First Player for that round. During the round, players take turns clockwise around the table.

Players secretly and simultaneously select an action, role, or priority. Then they are revealed, and the actions/roles revealed determine the order in which players act.

The turn order within each Round is set by some statistic relating to the players’ resources or position in the game. A typical case is when turn order is performed in order of current score (as a catch-up mechanism).

In this Turn Order mechanism, there is a linear “Time Track” with many spaces. Each player has a marker on the track, which indicates where they are “in time.” Markers farther on the track are further forward in time. The player with the marker lowest on the track (furthest “back in time”) takes the next action. Different actions have different costs in time. The player’s marker is advanced a number of spaces according to the cost of the selected action. Then, the next lowest marker on the track takes an action. It is possible that the same player takes multiple turns in a row.

Variable Phase Order implies that turns may not be played the same way as before and / or after.

Variable Player Powers is a mechanic that grants different abilities and/or paths to victory to the players.

The starting game state varies from game to game, through changes to shared game components like the map, and/or changes to starting player set-ups, resources, objectives, etc.

Victory Points (VPs) may be spent as a currency to impact the game state.

Players vote on whether a proposed action will occur or not.

Players take turns placing workers on action spaces to claim actions or cards in the game.

Workers are represented by dice whose pip values impact play.