As has become common on this blog, I came across an issue and want to write out my thoughts to try and come up with a solution. In this case, I want to talk about stale markets.

Market mechanics are very popular in board gaming. The most common is a simple spread of a few cards drawn from a deck that players then get to pick from. Sometimes they have to pay for them, other times you just pick it out. But, assuming you have to pay for them, what do you do when the selection is poor? Perhaps they cost too much, or maybe none of them are what players need at this point in the game. When you’re drawing randomly from a deck there’s only so much you can do to mitigate these issues. So what can you do?

Automatic Rotation

This is a pretty common one, and one of the easiest. At the end of a round, or maybe after the market goes a turn without someone buying something, one of the cards is discarded. Usually it’s the oldest card drawn (easy to determine if cards are moved left to right) or the card that costs the most (if they have a single price). This is super simple to write into the rules and can even be worked into strategies. Some games disguise it by telling players to pick a card to not buy, then discard it for some effect. This is common especially in games where the deck is used as a timer. When players get to choose which card gets discarded, it bleeds a bit into the next category

Player-Activated Refresh

In a way, this feels even more straightforward than the last. If a player doesn’t like anything for sale, then why not let them do something about it? Often this costs some sort of resource, but afterwards players get to discard the entire market and get a whole new swath of cards. This is really dangerous, though, for players and by extension designers. If a player doesn’t like the market because it’s too costly for them, asking them to lose resources could make the situation worse. In addition, if it takes the place of their “buy” action, then they will be benefitting the other players more than themselves. In fact, the market may become stale again by the time they take their next turn, meaning they spent resources for nothing. This means that this move is far more costly than they resources it costs on the surface, so players may avoid it even when it would solve a lot of their problems. Designers need to make sure they keep these downsides in mind when designing the refresh action. The most obvious patch is to let players make a purchase after the refresh, or at least get to reserve a card. Maybe instead of costing resources it generates them. In any case, the fact that so much attention needs to be payed to the cost-benefit of it means that this is often a very complex solution.

Increasing Value

This is a mechanic that’s gotten pretty popular lately (I attribute it to smallworld). This mostly only works with markets that don’t refresh quickly. The idea is that at the end of each round, when the market is mostly empty, you put a coin or a resource or whatever on each item that didn’t get bought. If you buy it, you also get what’s on it. This means that if anything stays for too long, eventually it will accrue value until it’s worth buying. This is a really clever, but has some issues. First, It can undercut balancing issues too strongly. If a card wasn’t bought for other reasons, it may end up becoming incredibly powerful basically by chance. Second, sometimes the resource given doesn’t matter. If it gives you money, but it costs money, then it isn’t really making it more accessible: it’s just making it better when you do get it. So, strangely, the thing that players are low on needs to NOT line up with what the card is gaining. It makes cards more desirable, but not more easily obtained, meaning it’s only good in games where the market stalls for reasons other than costs.

Patience

Sometimes it’s fine if the market stalls up so long as your game allows ways to fix that. In some games, players are allowed to skip their turns or make a purchase of an always-available item that has a one-time use or soemthing. These let players wait out the stall better. If you’re two dollars short of everything in the market, then if skipping the market phase nets you three dollars, then you’ve got something to do next turn! Or, if you can spend two dollars to get make something four dollars cheaper next turn, that works, too! This is why a lot of games have that cheap but not optimal always available object. Players never seem to like it much (if they did, they’d end up buying them too much, which is not intended), and it can sometimes cause in issue during setup or cleanup, since those cards might accidentally get shuffled into the primary deck.

Ticket to ride actually does a clever combination of both of the above categories. In it, you need cards of matching colors in order to play the game, and while the color of those cards often matters, half the time they don’t. So, if the market is all cards of a color that nobody needs, that often means there’s multiple of the same color. That means that you can grab multiple matching colors easily, without other players getting in your way. That’s so clever! The unpopular colors gain value because there are many of them, which is how they started clogging the market in the first place. It just requires that a player take a few turns collecting them, and maybe adjusting their plans around them.

Conclusion

Markets are an awesome and simple mechanic to add to any game, but there’s a lot of nuance needed to make sure players can keep interacting with them. Try oout some of these tactics next time your game ends up at a standstill.