The Mechanics of Gaming

Does knowing what’s going on behind the scenes help or hinder your enjoyment of something? Do you really care how many steps went into making the dish you just ate at the restaurant, or do you just enjoy it as a thing unto itself? I’ve always been surprised, both in my own cooking and watching or reading about others, how much work, and how many steps, go into making something that tastes really good. How about movies? Do the “Making Of” shorts often included on disks these days help or hinder your enjoyment of the movie? I have to say that sometimes knowing the tricks that go into film making make the movie a bit less enjoyable, at least the second time around.  That said, I heard a lot about how they made Gravity, the recent Academy Award-nominated space thriller, and that didn’t keep me from enjoying the movie one bit.

It can be the same for board games. Did you know game designers have a stable of common rule types, called game mechanics, that they combine in unique ways to make the games you like? Our Mackinac Island Treasure Hunt uses a wide variety of mechanics in its various games.

• Match Me If You Can is a variant of Authors Cards type games, and uses interrogation (asking questions of other players) and set collection (making groups of similar things).
• The Nature Hike combines roll and move (rolling a die and moving a number of spaces, typical of American games) and hand management (collecting and playing cards at an appropriate time).
• The Scavenger Hunt uses cooperation (all players are working together toward a common goal), trading (exchange of game resources between players) and roll and move.
• Hide and Seek includes memory (remembering where certain game elements are located after they’re revealed) and point to point movement (you can only travel along specific paths a distance indicated by your movement option).
• The Treasure Hunt has many mechanics, among them interrogation, hand management, memory, point to point movement, and set collection.

There are a wide variety of game mechanics in use, some more easily noticed than others. You can’t just throw them together, sometimes you have make sure to clarify the player’s motivation (something we’re still looking into with Mackinac Island Treasure Hunt), and the way luck plays a role in the game matters, too.

But in the end, it’s how the mechanics are combined to support the game’s theme that makes the game unique and fun. Can you identify any of the mechanics in your favorite games?