Any article you read on proper story telling is going to tell you that stories ramp up. Stories are better if they get more intense or engaging as they go on. Games are no different. However, making a game ramp up in intensity is easier said than done. The mechanical, rigid nature of games makes them hard to adjust as the game goes on. So here’s my analysis

Declining Resources

The most common way by far to increase intensity is declining resources. In Monopoly, there are only so many houses, so the later the game goes, the more important it is to get those last houses before they’re gone. In Ticket to Ride, each player has their own collection of trains, so while players aren’t competing for those final resources, the fact that you only have so many left to use by the end of the game really pushes you to maximize what you can.

Resources aren’t always resources, though. Often it’s spaces on the board the run out. In Monopoly it’s properties, in Ticket to Ride it’s routes on the board. Again, this increases the intensity just by limiting options and forcing players to play more aggressively. In Tsuro, The last few tiles can only go in so many spaces, and it can lead to a chain reaction of effects the longer you’ve been playing. Which leads us to…

Increasing Resources

If you want players to do more later in the game, then give them more. Seems pretty straightforward, right? This is what engine builders are, well, built on. Worker placement and other action-point centric games also usually have a way to increase the amount you can do on a single turn. As individual turns become more powerful, the game starts to feel more and more powerful, and players end up doing so much more later in the game than they could earlier. You can also more artificially increase resources, such as by giving players a bonus in the last turn, or by letting resources count for double. You see that a lot in game shows, for example.

Information

Any game that gets to the end will, by definition, have an entire game have happened before it. While that of course allows players to do and access things that could ramp up the game, it also just tells them what happened. In hidden role games, where there usually aren’t any resources to mess with, the only thing you have is information. However, as anyone who’s played one will attest to, they are one of the most intense types of games you can play by the end of one. Merely knowing what has happened can lead to more and more intense moments.

Winning

And of course, all games must have a winner. Well, not really, but most games. Sometimes, the mere act of winning can ramp up the game. This is mostly true in games with a “race” style victory condition, as in, you win by being the first player to do a certain thing. Sometimes it’s a literal race, such as with Cubitos or Formula D, whereas other times is reaching a certain score or defeating a particular monster. In all of these, while the early parts of the game are important, the end is what matters. Everything you’ve been saving up for or planning needs to come to fruition. I think this is one reason why these types of games are so popular on the mass market; they really do get people engaged.

Conclusion

This is what I could come up with for ways to improve your game’s ramp. Try and keep some of these in mind for you game. Some are practically automatic, but still worth knowing about. If your players start to lose interest, or come out of a game not really caring about the result, you may need to implement something here.