When is a game mechanic just too much work?

A mechanism in my opinion is too much work if you need to introduce multiple other mechanisms to allow it to work. For example, I once created a travel game with days and nights. In the nights people would (among other things) choose cards they needed for the days. This idea needed a bidding system, a starting player's pawn, twenty-five extra coins and 40 new cards.

When you notice creating all this extra stuff takes too much time and makes the game too complicated, come up with a new idea or change the old one.

In your type, maybe you could force players to place the tiles in a way that all tiles of a color are near eachother and can be replaced together?
Or you could force the players to replace eachother's tiles, in that way not all tiles are replaced and it brings more tactic/strategy in the game.

Good luck

Michiel

Drakon is an example of a tile-based game where players move, rotate, remove, and switch already-placed tiles fairly often. It seems to work out all right at that frequency -- no more than one tile every few turns. More than that, and I think it would get too fiddly.

One alternative would be to use tokens (beads, poker chips, counters) to denote control of the tiles.

A mechanism is too much if the players feel that the down time is to long.
If the mechanism involves all the players to change the game, then the mechanism is probably not the problem (number of components or complexity can be).
You should always concentrate to limit the:
- The number of actions a player will do (not the number of possibilities) when it is his turn.
- The number of action that has to be done between the turns.

// Johan

There are ways around this. The most obvious is to specify that the tiles should not touch, but instead should be spaced a bit apart. This won't work in a Carcassonne-type game where the edges have to match and would look odd if spaced apart, but perhaps Pt's game isn't like that.

Depending on what the game requires, you could use circular tiles with an arrow pointing outward; rotate the tile to point at the player who owns it. Or (as someone suggested earlier) place tokens on the tiles to indicate ownership.

If tiles must actually be flipped or removed, circular tiles will be easier to grab because there will always be a suitable gap for a fingernail. If rotation is not needed, you could use octagonal tiles as a compromise between square and circular: edges could touch but there will still be "fingernail gaps" at the corners.

None of this addresses the issue of whether your rules are too "fiddly," of course. These suggestions are just aimed at making any necessary manipulations easier to accomplish.