Through the Lens: Board Games - Game Design Theory - page 141

Tr aitor Murderer Peasant Paladin

1

Kill 1
Puppy

Kill 3
Puppies

Kill 1
Puppy

Resurrect
2 Puppies

Figure 24 . An example of how role selection works. Depending on the game,
players select role cards by either placing a token on a card or simply taking the
card.

role-selection games allow you to temporarily (often, just for the current
turn) choose a role. Usually others can't choose the role that you took for
the duration of that turn, so there's often a bit of a race to pick a certain
role. The role you choose allows you to perform a certain action or gain
a special power ( Figure 24 ) .
Worker-placement games are somewhat similar, but sometimes al-
low players to place more than one worker in a given “role� (for lack of
a better word). For instance, suppose a game has a mining box and each
token a player places in that box means that the player will get one more
gold piece at the end of the turn. Sometimes worker-placement games
allow multiple players to place their workers in a given box, but in other
games a box may be considered off limits to all but the player with work-
ers in it.
These two mechanisms are extremely flexible and can be (and are)
used as core mechanisms for thousands of different types of games. Cit-
adels , Puerto Rico , and Age of Steam are all very different games, each
with a different theme and different mechanisms, yet they all use a role-
selection mechanism to express their basic gameplay.

Consider Dynamic Roles and Actions
There's not much that I have to complain about with these “genres,� but I
do have one possible suggestion for those looking to create such a game:
consider making the roles themselves change dynamically throughout
the game. I've seen examples of games that sort of do this (like card
games in which certain cards are designated as available each round,
but the specific cards that are available change from round to round— El
Grande is one example), but I've never seen something that exactly fits