Game turn principles

Hi,

Ehm, first, let me get this straight. You haven't designed a game in which you would want to build in a turn mechanism... you're merely comparising. If I'm wrong, correct me, cause that's important. If you are looking for a system or mechanism for your specific game (of which you have, at least, a pretty good idea), you're doing this thing backwards. You should know at the beginning (or in one of the earliest fases) which mechanism (or which sort of mechanism, at least) you want to use.

I'll give a quick summary (just some basic ideas):

The Allowance Points
Players have a number of points, represented usually by chips, with which they can 'buy' actions. You can have a fixed number of AP per turn, you could also allow the players to collect them to be used in later turns, or you could let people earn them (like in Fiese Freunde Fette Fete). It's all up to you.

One (ore X) thing(s) per turn
Looks obvious to me...

Depending on a bidding mechanism
(Used to increase tactics skills in a game)

etc. etc.

The beautiful thing about this is that whether you want to increase or decrease the presence of luck, tactics, strategy or communicative elements in a game, choose whichever you want and/or modify some. Totally dependent on your imagination
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Hi Tomi, and welcome to the forum!

There isn't "best solution", probably. No matter how you design it, your final game will have certain advantages and disadvantages. With that in mind, here are a couple of random thoughts.

If players have a lot of units, you might want to break the turn up into "phases". Players move in order each phase. In other words:

Phase I: production -- each player picks new units and places them on the board.

Phase II: movement -- everyone moves his units. Here you can let a player move all his units before passing his turn to the next person, OR you can have each person move one unit, then pass the turn, and continue around the table over and over until everyone is done moving. If you go for the latter, you could even borrow from Settlers of Catan and go around the table first clockwise, then counterclockwise, then clockwise, etc.

Phase III: combat -- everyone resolves combat. Here again, you can let players resolve all their combat in one go or have them resolve one fight at a time.

If players have relatively few units, or if the attacker is likely to interact with multiple defenders in a single turn, it's probably fine to let one person resolve all his combat actions at once, since his move will involve the other players.

Personally, games like Axis & Allies and Risk (toward the end when people are getting ridiculous numbers of armies) don't appeal to me because one person's turn usually takes a long time and involves only one or two other people. That's something you might want to avoid. German board games usually do a great job of keeping everyone involved on every player's turn, even if it's just in small ways. So you might want to research games like Settlers or El Grande even though they aren't combat games.

Good luck.

Mark

Turn order and phase order can have an influence on the game. In one of my games I used phase order to give a feeling of slower movement. So, it can have an effect.

From a mechanics and balance view point, having flexable phase orders can chang ethe game. Immagine Magic the Gathering wher you could swap phase orders around. You could attack with all your creatures, then have an untap phase and attack with all your creatures again.

So wheather or not ytou have a specific phase order will be, mostly, determined by the style and balance that you want for your game.

It would depend on the style of the game. A game more like Diplomacy (where you need to negotiate with others to defeat opponents) then allowing B to act first would be best. However if B has no impact on the combat, then it is not as important (but could still make a difference through indirect effects).

You could also allow this to be a game choice. If you has a standard phase order but allow them to change it with a cost (resources, etc), then you open up more choice for the player.

Another Idea: If you had (for example) 4 phases, but the player can only choose 3 phases that they can perform that turn then it also opens up the choices that the player can make (they could also choose what order to do them in as well - see above).