Okay, I know I just had a ramble recently, but this is something I came across when brainstorming. It’s entirely a personal belief, or at least something akin to it. I realized that most of the games I work on are one of two genres, and my favorite kinds of games are those and another. And then I started thinking what sort of games weren’t included in that. And the answer was: not many.

The Three Mechanics

I think that most games or game mechanics can be defined as one of three mechanics: engine building, push your luck, and deduction. Engine building is about building things up over time. Push you luck is about building things up but not too far. Deduction is about finding something out. Most mechanics tend to be one of these three things.

Engine Building

Engine building is a very difficult to define. Most people describe it as something whose outputs feed into its inputs in a way that gets stronger or more efficient over time. I like to describe it as anything that gets closer to winning you the game as the game goes on. Any sort of production feels like that. Increasing your worker count? That’s letting you get more actions, which gets you more output, so its an engine. Set collection? That’s getting things that make the next things you get even better, scaling up like an engine being built. Even if the output doesn’t feed back in, but instead gets you points or something, well, that’s still an output that leads to the same end as everything else: winning. If it improves your chances of winning over time and there’s no reason to stop, then it feels like engine building.

Push Your Luck

But what about things that don’t go up forever? Well, that’s push your luck. If you’re ever doing something that either A) punishes you for going too far or B) doesn’t give you anything until you reach a certain point, that’s push your luck. For example, I described set collection as engine building earlier, but that was under the assumption it used triangular scoring. If, instead, it only gives you points once you hit a threshold, then it’s push your luck. If you get one tempura, you’re going to need to get that second one before you get any points. Do you feel lucky? Some people consider it push your luck only if luck is involved, but I don’t agree with that. In Broom Service, you can play a card in such a way that it gives you a bonus, but doing so will only get you that benefit if nobody else secretly played that same card. There’s no randomness, it’s all up to players, but I’d still call it push your luck. If you are collecting resources in order to buy something in a shared market, that’s a risky move, and is therefore push your luck. If you have it in your hand, then it’s engine building, since you’re going to eventually get it built and gain its benefit.

Deduction

There’s one last part I can’t fit into these, and its deduction. I play and design a lot of social deduction games, and even some non-social deduction games. Deduction doesn’t scale. It doesn’t go up or down, not really. When you learn something, you’re always learning something new, but you never quite know how valuable it is. Games that are solely deduction are usually solo or team games, and you could argue that a jigsaw puzzle is a deduction game, but that’s reductive. Basically, if you take an action that isn’t doing anything but telling you something or telling other people something, then that’s a deduction mechanic.

Analyzing Myself

So why do I feel this way? I know I’m being reductive, but what about this dichotomy appeals to me? I think because it helps define choices. Why is a player taking an action? Most of the time, they are doing it to gain something, even if its just momentum to do something more directly beneficial later. But then why stop, or why do something else? Well, if there’s a reason to. Therefor everything is either going forward or stopping. But there are games without any sort of things to go up or down. Perhaps one reason I love hidden role games is because they don’t have any way to do either of those things. You can’t work towards a goal if you don’t even know what the goal is.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading my ramble. I know this probably isn’t super useful, but I felt like writing it out. I like this framework, though I don’t know when I’m going to use it.