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A game mechanic is a rule or set of rules intended to produce an enjoyable set of outcomes in a game. Complex games, such as role-playing games, are built using a large number of interlocking game mechanisms. The entirety of the game experience or set of game mechanics is called game play. This article is about a recreational activity. ...
A role-playing game (RPG) is a type of game in which players assume the roles of characters and collaboratively create narratives. ...
Game play (or gameplay) includes all player experiences during the interaction with game systems, especially formal games. ...
The interaction of the various game mechanics in a game determines the complexity and level of player interaction in the game. Designing a system of mechanics that interact well to produce a satisfying game is a challenging task, even for professional game designers. Some forms of game mechanic have been used in games for centuries, while others are relatively new, some having been invented within the past decade. The creation of new game mechanics, and ways in which existing ones can interact, is the ongoing goal of game designers. Game design is the process of designing the content, background and rules of a game. ...
Game mechanics fall into several more or less well-defined categories.
Game play mechanics
These are mechanics that control how the players play the game.
Action points These control what players may do on their turns in the game by allocating each player a budget of action points each turn. These points may be spent performing various actions according to the game rules, such as moving pieces, drawing cards, collecting money, etc. This type of mechanic is common in many German-style board games. An example of Money. ...
German-style board games, also known as Euro games, designer games, family strategy games or hobby board games, are family games designed to appeal simultaneously to older children and adults. ...
Auction or bidding Some games use an auction or bidding system in which the players make competitive bids to determine which player gets the right to perform particular actions. Such an auction can be based on different forms of "payment": - The winning bidder must pay for the won privilege with some form of game resource (game money, points, etc) (e.g.: RA).
- The winning bidder does not pay upon winning the auction, but the auction is a form of promise that the winner will achieve some outcome in the near future. If this outcome is not achieved, the bidder pays some form of penalty. Such a system is used in many trick-taking games, such as contract bridge.
In some games the auction determines a unique player who gains the privilege; in others the auction orders all players into a sequence, often the sequence in which they take turns during the current round of game play. RA is a board game for three to five players designed by Reiner Knizia based on ancient Egyptian culture. ...
Trick-taking games are card games with a distinct and common play structure: Each round of play is divided into units called tricks, during which each player selects one card from his or her hand. ...
Contract bridge, usually known simply as bridge, is a trick-taking card game of skill for four players, usually sitting around a table, who form two partnerships, or sides. The partners on each side sit opposite one another. ...
Cards These involve the use of cards similar to playing cards to act as a randomiser and/or to act as tokens to keep track of states in the game. Set of 52 playing cards Some typical Anglo-American playing cards. ...
The word random is used to express apparent lack of purpose, cause, or order. ...
Token can mean one of several things: In computer science, specifically lexical analysis, a token is usually a word or an atomic element within a string. ...
A common use is for a deck of cards to be shuffled and placed face down on or near the game playing area. When a random result is called for, a player draws a card and what is printed on the card determines the outcome of the result.
Another use of cards occurs when players draw cards and retain them for later use in the game, without revealing them to other players. When used in this fashion, cards form a game resource. Resources comprise the base material for an activity or industry: factors of production, the economics term human capital, human resources (HR) and innovation natural resources resource (computer science) resource (Web) resource (Windows) resource (Macintosh) resource (political) resource (project management) Resource Distribution, human influence and the effects of trade. ...
Capture In some games, the number of tokens a player has on the playing surface is related to his current strength in the game. In such games, it can be an important goal to capture opponent's tokens, meaning to remove them from the playing surface.
Captures can be achieved in a number of ways:
- Moving one of one's own tokens into a space occupied by an opposing token (e.g. chess).
- Jumping a token over the space occupied by an opposing token (e.g. draughts).
- Declaring an "attack" on an opposing token, and then determining the outcome of the attack, either in a deterministic way by the game rules, or by using a randomising method.
- Surrounding a token with one's own tokens in some manner (e.g. go).
- Playing cards or other resources that the game allows to be used to capture tokens.
In some games, captured tokens are simply removed and play no further part in the game (e.g. chess). In others, captured tokens are removed but can return to play later in the game under various rules (e.g. backgammon). Less common is the case in which the capturing player takes possession of the captured tokens and can use them himself later in the game (e.g. shogi). Chess is an abstract strategy board game for two players. ...
Checkers or draughts (drafts or /dɹɑfʦ/ (UK)), is a group of abstract strategy board games between two players which involve diagonal moves of uniform pieces and mandatory captures by jumping over the enemys pieces. ...
Go, also known as Wéiqà in Mandarin Chinese (Traditional Chinese: åœæ£‹; Simplified Chinese: 围棋), is a strategic, deterministic Chinese board game played by alternately placing stones on a grid. ...
Close-up of modern backgammon set. ...
Shogi (将棋 shÅgi), or Japanese chess, is the most popular of a family of chess variants native to Japan. ...
Catch-up Some games include a mechanic designed to make progress towards victory more difficult the closer a player gets to it. The idea behind this is to allow trailing players a chance to catch up and potentially still win the game, rather than suffer an inevitable loss once they fall behind.
An example is from Settlers of Catan. This game contains a neutral piece (the robber), which slows the progress of players whose pieces it is near. Players occasionally get to move the robber, and frequently choose to position it where it will cause maximal disruption to the player currently winning the game. Settlers of Catan is a multiplayer board game invented by Klaus Teuber, first published in 1995 in Germany by Franckh-Kosmos Verlags-GmbH & Co. ...
Catch-up mechanics are desirable in game design terms, as they keep all players interested in the game until the end. A game which offers little or no hope to losing players once another player establishes a lead can produce frustration rather than a fun experience.
Dice These involve the use of dice, usually as randomisers. Most dice used in games are the standard cubical dice numbered from 1 to 6, but increasing numbers of games make use of polyhedral dice or dice marked with symbols other than numbers. Typical role-playing dice, showing a variety of colors and styles. ...
A cube (or regular hexahedron) is a three-dimensional Platonic solid composed of six square faces, with three meeting at each vertex. ...
This article is about the geometric shape. ...
The most common use of dice is to randomly determine the outcome of an interection in a game. An example is a player rolling dice to determine how many board spaces to move a game token.
Dice also often determine the outcomes of in-game conflict between players, with different outcomes of the dice roll of different benefit (or adverse effect) to each player involved. This is useful in games that simulate direct conflicts of interest.
Movement Many board games involve the movement of playing tokens. How these tokens are allowed to move, and when, is governed by movement mechanics. A board game is any game played on a board (that is, a premarked surface) with counters or pieces that are moved across the board. ...
Some game boards are divided into more or less equally-sized areas, each of which can be occupied by one or more game tokens. (Often such areas are called squares, even if not strictly square in shape.) Movement rules will specify how and when a token can be moved to another area. For example, a player may be allowed to move a token to an adjacent area, but not one further away. Dice are sometimes used to randomise the allowable movements. In plane geometry, a square is a polygon with four equal sides and equal angles. ...
Other games, particularly miniatures games are played on surfaces with no marked areas. A common movement mechanic in this case is to measure the distance which the miniatures are allowed to move with a ruler. Sometimes, generally in naval war games, the direction of movement is restricted by use of a turning key. Three Warhammer 40,000 Miniatures. ...
A miniature figure—also known as a miniature or just a mini—is a small figurine commonly used in role playing games (RPGs) such as Dungeons & Dragons. ...
A ruler is an instrument used in geometry and technical drawing to measure short distances and/or to rule straight lines. ...
Navy is also:- shorthand for Navy Blue the nickname of the United States Naval Academy A navy is the branch of the armed forces of a nation that operates primarily on water. ...
War Games may refer to: WarGames, a 1983 film by John Badham WarGames (game), a Colecovision video game War Game, Childrens book and animated short film The War Game, a 1965 BBC film for television Wargaming, games that simulate battle or conflict situations War Games (comics), Batman crossover dealing...
Resource management Many games involve the management of resources. Examples of game resources include game tokens, game money, and game points. Resource management involves the players establishing relative values for various types of available resources, in the context of the current state of the game and the desired outcome (i.e. winning the game). The game will have rules that determine how players can increase, spend, or exchange their various resources. The skilful management of resources under such rules allows players to influence the outcome of the game. Point can refer to: Look up Point in Wiktionary, the free dictionary // Mathematics In mathematics: Point (geometry), an entity that has a location in space but no extent Fixed point (mathematics), a point that is mapped to itself by a mathematical function Point at infinity Point group Point charge, an...
Role-playing Role-playing games often rely on mechanics that determine the effectiveness of in-game actions by how well the player acts out the role of a fictional character. While early role-playing games such as the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons relied heavily on randomisers such as dice to determine the outcomes of role-playing actions such as diplomatic negotiations, later generations of games often use the standard of "good role-playing" as a modifier or even the sole determinant of whether such an action is successful. A fictional character is any person who appears in a work of fiction. ...
For other uses, see Dungeons & Dragons (disambiguation). ...
Tile-laying Many games use tiles - flat, rigid pieces of a regular shape - that can be laid down on a flat surface to form a tessellation. Usually such tiles have patterns or symbols on their surfaces, that combine when tessellated to form game-mechanically significant combinations. Physical games Tile-based games use small tiles as playing pieces for gambling or entertainment game. ...
A tessellated plane. ...
The tiles themselves are often drawn at random by the players, either immediately before placing them on the playing surface, or in groups to form a pool or hand of tiles from which the player may select one to play.
Tiles can be used in two distinct ways:
- The playing of a tile itself is directly significant to the outcome of the game, in that where and when it is played contributes points or resources to the player.
- Tiles are used to build a board upon which other game tokens are placed, and the interaction of those tokens with the tiles provides game points or resources.
Examples of tile mechanics include: Scrabble, in which tiles are letters and players lay them down to form words and score points; and Tikal, in which players lay tiles representing newly explored areas of jungle, through which archaeologists (represented by tokens) must move to score game points. Scrabble is a popular word board game, in which two to four players score points by forming words from individual lettered tiles on a 15×15 game board. ...
Tikal is a German-style board game designed by Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling and published in 1999 by Ravensburger in German and by Rio Grande Games in English. ...
Archaeology, archeology, or archæology (from the Greek words αÏχαίος = ancient and λόγος = word/speech/discourse) is the study of human cultures through the recovery, documentation and analysis of material remains and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, biofacts, human remains, and landscapes. ...
Victory condition mechanics These mechanics control how a player wins the game.
Goals This is the most general sort of victory condition, which can be broad enough to encompass any method of winning, but here refers to game-specific goals that are usually not duplicated in other games. An example is the checkmate of a king in chess.
Piece elimination Some games with capture mechanics are won by the player who removes all, or a given number of, the opponents' playing pieces.
Puzzle guessing Some games end when a player guesses (or solves by logic) the answer to a puzzle or riddle posed by the game. The player who guesses successfully wins. Examples include hangman and zendo. Hangman is a paper and pencil guessing game for two players. ...
Zendo is a game of inductive logic designed by Kory Heath, in which the Master creates a rule and the Students attempt to discover it by building and studying arrangements of pyramids. ...
Races Many simple games (and some complex ones) are effectively races. The first player to advance one or more tokens to or beyond a certain point on the board wins. Examples: backgammon, ludo. A race is a competition of speed. ...
Close-up of modern backgammon set. ...
Ludo (from Latin ludus, game) is a simple board game played mainly by children, in which each player must move their four tokens from their starting positions round the board to their final allocated position. ...
Structure building The goal of a structure building game is to acquire and assemble a set of game resources into either a defined winning structure, or into a structure that is somehow better than those of other players. In some games, the acquisition is of primary importance (e.g. concentration), while in others the resources are readily available and the interactions between them form more or less useful structures (e.g. poker). Variously themed cards are available for children of all age groups. ...
This article is about the card game. ...
Territory control A winner may be decided by which player controls the most "territory" on the playing surface, or a specific piece of territory. This is common in wargames, but is also used in more abstract games such as go. Wargaming is the play of simulated military operations in the form of games known as war games. ...
Victory points These are points that a player accumulates over the course of a game. The winner can be decided either by: - The first player to reach a set number of points.
- The player with the most points at a predetermined finishing time or state of the game.
This mechanic is often used explicitly in German-style board games, but many other games are played for points that form a winning condition. Victory points may be partially disguised in the role of game resources, with play money being a common example.
Gameplay vs. game mechanics in video games Generally, the term "gameplay" in video game terminology is used to describe the overall experience of playing the game excluding the factors of graphics, sound, and the storyline. This is the very essence of a game. The term "Game mechanics" refers to sub elements of the gameplay, but particularly the primary control and movement features of the game (thus excluding things like level design or AI). See gameplay. Gameplay includes all player experiences during the interaction with game systems, especially formal games. ...
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