Through this site and the Tabletop Miniature Hobby Podcast, I’ve had the privilege to interview some of the industry’s household names. During these interviews, I’ve used some recurring questions, one of which was:
Tell me about a particularly satisfying mechanic you’ve either created yourself, or came across whilst playing someone else’s game.
As you can imagine, it’s thrown up some interesting replies. This post is intended to document them all in one place. It features responses from Gav Thorpe, Andy Chambers, Tuomas Pirinen, Jervis Johnson, Alessio Cavatore, and Joe McCullough.
Alessio Cavatore
In terms of somebody else’s, it was Massimo Toriani who showed this game that he designed, and he was using D10 as scatter dice. All the other polyhedrons are platonic, so they are symmetrical. There is no direction in any way. There’s no arrow, no verse this way or that way. But the D10 is not a platonic solid; it’s artificially made to be ten-faced, but it is not. It definitely has an arrow shape. Each face of the ten faces is an arrow and has a number in it. So it was just like, well, you don’t need scatter dice and distance, et cetera. You just roll a D10, and that tells you distance and range in the same roll. And I was like, oh, my God. Yes, of course. Why didn’t we think of this? So, since then, I have done that as well in games I design, and, yeah, it just works. It’s so obvious.
As for my mechanics, the drawing of the action dice from the bag in Bolt Action, because of the dynamic that creates for the game on the other end. Of course, I hesitate to say that’s a mechanic I created, because drawing chits has been done before. I kind of added the fact that the dice actually have the orders, and therefore, you can then use the same thing you use for the drawing as the marker on the unit. So that kind of does a few jobs together. But, yeah, writing the game and sticking to that logic was cool.
But again, I don’t think it’s as original as perhaps when I invented the rattling gun. The mechanic for the rattling gun, which, as far as my mentors tell me, they hadn’t seen it before. That’s a good thing because, normally, I go, “I have this great idea. It’s completely new”. And Rick goes, “Well, that was done in 1976 in this game.” I was like, oh, it’s not new, right? But this one, now, they went, oh, wow, that’s a cute little mechanic that we never seen. It’s fun.
Basically. Is it like a minigun – a Gatling gun. It’s a rattling gun because it’s a Skaven weapon. But it is the mechanic where you roll a dice, and that’s the number of shots, and then you can stop safely, just basically cranking, doing one turn to the crank. Or you can go, no, let’s have two turns. And so you roll two dice, adding them together, so more hits. However, if you ever roll a double, then something goes wrong, and there’s a chart of wacky nastiness that happens. So basically you can roll maybe up to six dice. If you’re incredibly lucky, you don’t get any doubles, but there is a point where you go, “Statistically, I should stop, but maybe I need one more crank, one turn to this.” That is fun because it kind of challenges your greed towards the potential punishment if you go wrong.
Full interview with Alessio Cavatore
Gav Thorpe
My favourite mechanic is when Jervis created the blocking dice for Blood Bowl. It took a really complicated game with lots of sets of tables and looking things up and modifiers and stuff, and turned it into a really simple roll, one, two, or three of these dice, and then depending on how you roll, something happens. And it was so streamlined and so simple and made the game so much more playable. Yeah, it was just genius. That’s been one of my favourite mechanics, I think, of anything.
And because it was a physical thing as well, it was the idea that we can do stuff with dice. They don’t have to just be D6s. They don’t have to have equal weighting between the six roll results, and actually rolling multiple dice and picking one, not necessarily having to add them all together or all that kind of stuff. Third Edition Blood Bowl is just a beautiful piece of games engineering based around those very simple mechanics. And I loved it when it came out. I loved playing it
in terms of mechanics myself, I suppose when I did Inquisitor. It’s very narrative, and what you do is you nominate what your character is going to do, what you want them to do. You, rather than having a set of action points to spend, then you just go through and do them, you say, “Oh, well, they want to run over here. They’re going to hide behind a barrel, and then they’re going to shoot at that sort of like cultist over there.” And then you roll a bunch of dice, depending on their speed. And each four plus actually allows you to have part of that action. So what you’re doing is you’re never quite sure exactly how much of your intended actions you get to actually resolve. So there’s always a tension between trying to do stuff and playing it cautious. People have spoken to me and said that – that it’s kind of quite core to the game, and that’s one of the things that makes it fun. Again, that plays back into the Blood Bowl idea of the turnover, the idea of the failure.
I think, for me, narrative comes from unpredictability. Sometimes, the things we remember most about the games are the things that we didn’t expect to happen. When units charge in and crush that goblin unit and run them down, you go, “Well, that’s what they were supposed to do.” But when the goblins charge in and crush the knights and run them down, that’s a story. And the same time when your dwarf general flees, or the thing goes bad (or particularly well), that will be remembered.
Full interview with Gav Thorpe
Jervis Johnson
One mechanic I came across recently and really like is used in a series of games called Table Battles, published by a small company called Hollandspiele. The games recreate various famous battles from history and use cards to represent the major formations of each army.
In your turn, you roll six dice, and then allocate them out to cards in your army; each card needs certain combination of dice to be able to carry out an action. So one card might need a pair of 5s to attack, while another might need you to place a 4, a 5 and a 6 on the card, and so on. Any dice that are placed on a card can’t be rolled again until they are used, so the dice are a limited resource, and you need to think hard about where to place them. At the start of your turn, before you roll the dice, you can carry out an action you have set up with your earlier dice rolls.
What I especially like about this mechanic is that sometimes, when you attack, you will force your opponent to make a reaction, and this will stop them from carrying out their action in their next turn (they are reacting to your attack rather than unleashing their own). These simple mechanics do a lot to represent command and control issues, and they also capture the idea of one side gaining the momentum in a battle, which is something I have read about in lots of historical accounts but very rarely seen recreated in a game.
Full interview with Jervis Johnson
Andy Chambers
I’m going to nominate myself for this one, actually. The blast marker mechanic that we introduced in Epic initially, I think. There’s just something about having little explosion markers next to a unit. It’s another stage of damage at its heart, but it’s not removing models; it’s just showing that they’re kind of being suppressed under fire, that sort of a thing. And it’s been used in quite a few different game systems since then. I’ve used it a few times myself, and it’s a good mechanic. It’s a useful tool to have when you’re designing a game, to have that other stage of damage which isn’t actually killing things or knocking off hit points per se, basically like a temporary damage source which suppresses them or whatever. So, conceptually, I think that’s a good one.
The other one I’d nominate is the system that I use in Blood Red Skies for doing three-dimensional combat because that’s a World War II fighter combat game which doesn’t use altitude or anything like that. It uses what I call the advantage system, meaning we don’t care about how high up you are. Basically, it’s like, are you at an advantage relative to the fight? Are you neutral relative to the fight? Or are you disadvantaged relative to the fight?
Being advantaged means that you have more options. Basically, being disadvantaged means you have less, and it’s only if you’re disadvantaged, you’re actually in danger of being shot down. Until that point, you’re just ducking and diving along with everybody else. But in a disadvantaged state, that’s where you’re most vulnerable as well. So again, it’s a way of almost combining damage with other factors at the same time, without it actually being damaged to the unit. So I think that’s another particularly kind of interesting example of almost the same again, if you go on a very meta-level conceptual design mechanic applied in a different way.
Full interview with Andy Chambers
Tuomas Pirinen
There are a ton of great game mechanics I admire, but I’m going to use my own – Mordheim‘s exploration roll. This gives you your income, the ability to modify through the metagame, and helps you to find unusual places. You only need to get a handful of dice, roll that, and all of that happens from there.
Full interview with Tuomas Pirinen
Rick Priestley
I thought the turn over mechanic in Blood Bowl was an interesting way to sequence a game, and I took the idea and adapted it to my Warmaster system. So, to activate a unit you rolled dice to give an order; if successful you continued to move and order units, but if you failed, it’s turn over. It’s interesting because you have to decide which things to move first and which to leave until last and risk not being able to move at all. I later adapted the same mechanic to Black Powder and Hail Caesar for Warlord Games, so it’s had a good run!
Another mechanic that I’ve always thought would be interesting to adapt is the combat mechanism in a game called Warlord. Warlord is a game of nuclear warfare published in the 70s and later re-boxed and marketed by Games Workshop as Apocalypse. Anyway, it works like this:
When making an attack you take a dice and secretly select a number by hiding it behind your palm, you can only choose a number up to the total number of pieces you are attacking with. Your opponent guesses what number you have chosen, and if correct, you lose that number of pieces, if incorrect, your opponent loses one of their own pieces.
The attacker can stop at any point if things are not going well. Assuming things do go well, once an attacker removes the opponent’s last piece, you get to move into the space and take it over, but the number of pieces you move in has to be the number you last selected. Thus, the initial attacks can be random, although choosing a high value risks losing a high number of pieces, which encourages you to choose a low value… but your opponent knows this… and you know that they know… and so on.
When it comes to your last attack, the fact that you take the space with the number of pieces nominated means you want to choose as high a value as possible… but your opponent knows this… and you know that they know… and so on. I just like the element of double guessing and the potential for a lucky guess to unravel an attack.
Full interview with Rick Priestley
Joe McCullough
There are so many, as far as I’m concerned, because, for me, every aspect of a game can have unique and elegant mechanics.
So, like, movement. In most games, movement is a very set kind of thing. You can move your guy six inches. If you are doing a unit, you can move it, and you can make one manoeuvre with it; that’s absolutely fine, but there’s nothing amazing or elegant about it. And then you see something like X-Wing, the miniatures game that has this incredible movement mechanic where you have the secret little spinner, where you decide what move your ship is going to make, and everyone does that for all their ships. And then you reveal it, and they all just go everywhere in a way that fantastically recaptures the look and feel of the movies. And that’s just movement.
My all-time favourite game mechanic is the combat mechanic in a game called Silent Death, which it’s about space fighters shooting it out. Every gun system in the game rolls three dice, and two of those dice are determined by what that gun system is, and one of those dice is determined by the gunner. Like the gunner’s skill, you might have a gun skill, but a gunner with a D8. So you roll two D6 and a D8. And what’s really beautiful about it is you roll those three dice and add them together to see if you hit. But then you look at the dice a different way to determine how much damage is done. So a gun might have a damage level of medium. So you’d roll the three dice, and you’d find the medium die, and that would be the damage done.
And that idea of one die roll serving multiple functions has been hugely influential to me. Obviously, you see it in basically all my games. So Frostgrave has that same idea of making one die roll determine who wins and how much damage is done. And Silver Bayonet has that as well.
So, yeah, that’s a biggie. But there are just so many. I love the way power works in Marvel Crisis Protocol. I love how, as things happen through the game and as a figure gets hit, it can actually gain power. And thus, by having something bad happen to it, it is also given the potential to do more things. And that’s just a beautifully elegant balancing mechanism within the game. But also, again, it really captures the flavour of what they were trying to mimic in that game of superheroes beating each other up. And in all honesty, I could just go on and on. These things are like little bits of art to me, so I do collect them.
Full interview with Joe McCullough
What’s your favourite miniature gaming mechanic? Leave a voicemail and let me know. It might make it onto a future episode of the podcast!