Stolen Board Game Mechanic: Add Value to the Unpicked Choice

Spots is a push-your-luck dice game. Players take turns choosing action cards, which dictate how they roll dice that turn. After they take their turn, the action card they chose is exhausted for the round. When all but one action card has been chosen, all actions are refreshed and the process begins again. This is arguably a form of Dutch auction, although with accruing value instead of decreasing price.

Pretty straightforward, right? But there’s a small rule that is secretly important to the game. The final action card that was left unselected gains a token that allows for a one-time reroll of the dice. Whoever picks that action card next will get to keep any tokens that have accumulated on the card, and can spend those tokens later. So if the players favor certain cards over others (and most players will), the unpopular card(s) will gradually accrue additional value as more tokens accumulate.

This mechanic is great because it automatically "balances" the perceived power level of the options available to the players. It doesn't matter if that’s an actual play design imbalance, where some choices are better than others, or simply a preference among the players for a certain style of play. The imbalances between the choices are self-correcting over time, as some quantity of tokens will eventually bring a less-popular choice into competition with the more popular ones.

Consider applying this mechanic to discrete, mutually exclusive choices in an RPG. For example, consider downtime for a party of three PCs in a fantasy adventure game like D&D. Each time they return to town, each PC can choose one of the following (in addition to resting): level up, gather information, carouse, research, or shop. Only one player may choose each action, and each player only gets one choice.

Player A chooses leveling, player B chooses research, and player C chooses shopping. Gather information and carouse go unchosen, so they each get a token that allows for one in-session reroll of the dice. Whoever chooses these options in the future gets to keep any tokens associated with that choice. Even if carousing or gathering information goes several downtimes without being chosen, the accumulation of tokens will eventually compel someone to take them.