Threaten Me with a Bad Time

This was prompted by hearing a discussion about tracking torches in a dungeon crawling game. This is something that I find that adds work, rarely becomes impactful, and the threatened impact is a scary but eventually uninteresting event.

It reminds me of a boardgame I've been playing.

Gazebo is a fantastic game by Reiner Knizia. It's a redesign of his 2012 release... actually, none of that matters.

A simplified explanation of the game: You place tiles to build areas of the same colour, bigger areas being more desirable. If you connect an area to a smaller area of the same colour then it absorbs that area. In essence I can connect my area of 4 red blocks to your area of 3 red blocks and steal it. This is very powerful, and can act as a big swing with lots of beneficial side effects on my progress to victory.

It's also one of the more complex rules. The rulebook notes five main mechanics that are the ways to progress towards victory. The first four each take half a page of explanation, but absorbing another area takes a whole two page spread, with several examples given. It's noticeably more fiddly than the other entries.

After playing the game three or four times we noticed that this absorption rule hadn't come up. Setting up the move is tricky and usually easy for the opponent to spot it and block your efforts.

We played some more, maybe up to ten games now, and I think it's happened once? Maybe twice? The only time I remember was following a very stupid move on my part, leaving a clear opening for my opponent to absorb one of my areas.

So you remove that rule, right?

(psst, don't let boardgame people hear you talking about changing a Reiner Knizia rule)

No, I think the threat of a mechanic can be just as impactful as seeing it come into play. It limits where I place my tiles, teases me with a potentially huge swing when I'm way behind, and I can waste an opponent's turn by making them respond with a purely defensive play.

Of course, this relies on the players being aware of the rule. I wouldn't teach Gazebo and tell the other player "you can absorb each others' areas but don't worry it never happens". They need to know the rule to have the fear and have that fear affect their play.

Threaten them with a bad time and let the good times roll.

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