A large amount of game ideas I get revolve around a cool action selection mechanism (CASM, for short), which is a pretty popular subset of Euro games. However, when it comes to building out the actions for your CASM, there’s a pretty difficult line to toe: if they’re too similar, the CASM’s interesting decision space becomes a non-decision, but if they’re too different, you have too many subsystems to teach. Too simple, and the game becomes rote, but too complex, and they take the focus away from your CASM. You need to add variety without adding headaches. It’s quite a tricky tightrope, and it can quickly lead you astray.

This series looks at CASM-focused games with an original system that gives you actions to add meaning to your core CASM and opens up the design space for more content, without adding too much rules overhead. It’s sort of a sub-series of SISIGIP (Stuff I’d Steal in Games I Play).

As a disclaimer, I want to point out that a game is not just a pile of mechanisms of systems. A game tells a story out of interesting moments, which come out of interwoven mechanisms. You can’t just take your CASM, plug in all these actions and call it a game. This is meant to be praising and analyzing excellent design, which can hopefully serve as inspiration.

Knarr’s Bracelets

Knarr is centered around a really cool card play mechanism, where Viking cards have a colour and an action. When you play a Viking card, you activate its action, and that of all Vikings of that colour in your tableau. There are also Exploration cards, which give you a bunch of stuff, but to get those, you spend cards from your tableau. It leads to this push and pull where you want to keep your Vikings in your tableau for super turns, but you also want to spend them for the Exploration cards. Great central tension. First to 40 points wins. Simple, clean, elegant.

The actions you get are pretty straightforward: getting one VP, going up on a track (which eventually will give you VPs), gaining helmets (which are spent for Exploration cards)… and finally, bracelets. Thematically, bracelets are a sort of currency, and exploring opens up new trade routes. Mechanically, they do something quite interesting.

Each Exploration card has those three lines at the bottom, with some of them associated with effects. Bracelets are used to activate these: spend one bracelet to activate the leftmost column; spend two to activate the first two; spend three to activate all three.

At first sight, you could say this is just a second level of engine building in an engine building game, which it is. However, that simple mechanism (it can be taught in one sentence) opens up a tremendous amount of design space. Not only does it give you a fourth action at very little complexity cost, but adding that third variable on Exploration cards increases the variety of those cards exponentially, and makes the decision of when to explore much more interesting. Two birds with one mechanism!

Some CASM-focused games have a “travel” action as a filler, which usually has you move around a board to gain resources. They’ll give you 3 actions, and a fourth, which will be “move around to gain one of the other actions”. I, by en large, find those lazy and uninspired. Knarr takes this same concept and makes an action out of giving you stuff, but it feels so much more interesting. By combining it with the Exploration cards, which are an existing part of the CASM, it feels less like “gain a bunch of stuff”, and more like “activate these things I’ve fought for”. And then, the three columns give you an interesting decision: do I wait for a third, or send these 2 right now? Should I spend all 3, or spend 1 at a time for three turns?

So I have a few ideas for subsequent posts in this series, but let me know in the comments if you think of other mechanisms that fill this concept you’d like me to talk about!