Building Mechanics in Board Games

One of the first board games I was ever introduced to was Scrabble.  My mother, sister, and grandmother all played it from when I was just a baby, so when I was finally old enough to string letters together I was eager to play with them.  When I was initially learning the strategy, like using S-tiles to make a plural word and building off of it, my sole goal was to get as high a score as I possibly could.  Once I had acquired a few wins under my belt, my attitude towards the game changed from getting as high a score as I possibly could to playing unique words that hadn't been played before.  I would revel at getting the opportunity to play words I had just learned like "jaunt" or "bovine" on the field, usually prompting a skeptical look or even a challenge from my family.  Sure, playing "DRY" might get me a Triple-Word score and net me more points, but why not play "ERUDITE" instead?  It's a better word, and it opens the board up.  A habit we later developed was taking a picture of particularly impressive Scrabble boards at the end, usually when we spread out to every corner, or had some monster words serving as the central pillar of our board.

This is one of the qualities I believe makes a truly amazing game: a player's ability to enjoy that game regardless of whether they are winning or losing.  Your game could have the tightest rules, the best resource allocation, and cool meeples for worker placement to boot, but if I ever feel like I'm just a glorified spectator of someone else churning cubes into victory points, I'm going to lose interest.  I think most players share this view to some extent.  If you've ever played Magic: the Gathering, you'll know that being on the wrong end of a double mulligan or mana-flood is ten times more frustrating than losing a game where your deck still got to do what it was supposed to do, especially if it's close.

Cooperative building is one such a mechanic that gives me the ability to enjoy a game even if I'm losing. Scrabble is probably the first game many people are introduced to where cooperative building takes place, even on a very rudimentary level--it certainly was for me.  You and the other players are working with each other to build a shared board of letter tiles that influences future play.  Yes, there are points, and scoring, and a winner at the end, but the ability to feel as if you are contributing to the board and are influencing your opponent's plays by opening up a Triple-Letter Score or blocking the last U while the poor sap to your right has the Q stranded in his hand always gives you some feeling of investment, that what you do matters in the grand scheme of things.   

Cooperative building also the central mechanic (and often overlooked mechanic) of the popular "gateway" games Ticket to Ride and Settlers of Catan.  In each game you are trying to build something on a shared, central board: in Ticket to Ride you are building a US railroad and in Settlers of Catan you're building your own little roads and settlements.  Unlike in Scrabble however, your railroad and settlements are your own, and must coexist alongside those of your opponent.  As such, the prime space for realizing your grand railway system of mountainside city is limited, which can cause conflict with your neighbors!  Despite this, at the end of the game you can see an island or map of the continental US that you have left your mark on, and the merges together to form something new.

The other spin on cooperative building are games where what you are building is separated from the other players: your own personal building board.  There can still be shared space where you interact with your opponents, often for the limited resources required to build whatever unit will accrue you as many points as possible.  But often times, even if you lose by a few points, you can still look down at game's end to marvel at what you had managed to accomplish; whether you're building a farm, a railroad, or even your own nation!  Below are some of my personal favorite examples of games that incorporate these building mechanics.

Carcassonne

Carcassonne is the quintessential Cooperative Building game.  Players take turns drawing tiles and attaching them to preexisting tiles to form a collective map of sorts.  In addition to tiles, players can place meeples on their tile that represent thieves if placed on a road, knights if placed in a city, monks if placed in a monastery, or farmers if laid down on a field (lazy farmers).  These meeples will score you points when the city or road is completed, or when the monastery is fully surrounded and return to you so that you can play them again; otherwise they will remain on that space until the end of the game with their value diminished (farmers aren't scored until the very end of the game... lazy, lazy farmers).  Carcassonne is great in this way, as it rewards the completion of roads and cities and monasteries, along with other types of buildings in the many expansions.  Even though players are competing and scoring points, they are also invested in growing the overall board.  There have been many games of Carcassonne I've played where your score became second to "how long can we make this road" or "how big can we make this city?"  It's also an incredibly enjoyable family game since the rules are very simple, and everyone can freely discuss where best to place a certain tile since there's never any hidden information.  Carcassonne supports two to five players.

Alhambra

Picture from Gary James on BoardGameGeek

Alhambra is a game where you use various types of currency to purchase building tiles that you must arrange as you acquire them into your own personal Alhambra complex.  There are three scoring phases where players that have the most of a certain type of building tile will receive points.  Additionally, there are walls on some tiles that will influence where you can place them, or if you can place them at all, since you must always be able to reach your starting tile, the fountain, from any other tile in your Alhambra.  There are numerous expansions for the game since its debut over a decade ago, the most recent of which introduces falcons that can be placed on spaces where four tiles meet if among those tiles are certain building types.  Alhambra is a game I have played multiple times where the score is generally very close, even up to the very end.  While there is a fair bit of randomness involved in what tiles and currency are up for grabs each turn, you're rarely shut out from buying a tile and adding to your Alhambra in the way you can be from Settlers of Catan, where a few bad dice rolls can set you far behind.  At the end you can smile with pride if you manage to collect five or a single type of Falcon (with the expansion), or if you manage to wall off your entire Alhambra at the end, as I did on one playthrough.  Though the game can support up to six players, I recommend it for three or four as the number of tiles is limited, so the more players you have means a more sparse Alhambra for everyone.

Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer

Ascension is unique in that each player starts with their own identical deck of ten cards, but will often end the game with wildly different ones.  Each turn you draw five cards which you will use to either purchase new, stronger cards to add to your deck or to defeat monsters that will occasionally appear alongside the purchasable cards.  As the game progresses and you add more cards to your deck, it will become more powerful, capable of defeating the strongest monsters that could appear.  The purchasable cards fall under one of four factions: The Enlightened, The Void, The Mechana, and The Lifebound.  Focusing on one or more of the factions will often give you an advantage as certain cards will create powerful combos with one another.  Burrower Mark II allows you to draw cards whenever you play another Mechana Construct, which requires you to focus on a single card type, while Avatar Golem rewards you for diversifying.  The game has a limited number of victory points which are acquired from defeating monsters and from certain card effects.  Once they are depleted, the game ends and players go back through their deck to count up the points they get from the cards they added to their deck.  They add the number of points from cards in their deck to the number of physical victory points and compare them to determine the winner.  Deckbuilding games are an entire subgenre of board games where you build your deck as you play, which combines the deckbuilding and strategy-crafting fun of Trading Card Games without the randomness of booster packs.  If you enjoy Ascension, also consider its predecessor Dominion, along with the relatively new space-themed Star Realms.  Ascension supports two to four players.

Betrayal at House on the Hill

Picture from Chris Barnard on BoardGameGeek

Betrayal is a psuedo-cooperative horror-themed game where players explore a haunted house by drawing and placing tiles with different rooms on them and getting encounters, items, or omens as they do.  Because the tiles are drawn at random, and placed only after a player opens a door to an unexplored place, the layout of the house is completely different each time you play, as is the final twist at the end: one of your party will become the titular "betrayer," working against the rest of the party once a certain number of omens have been drawn.  Sometimes the betrayer is summoning demons from hell to kill the party members.  In other scenarios they are trying to reunite a mummy with his long dead bride.  In my personal favorite scenario, I Was a Teenage Lycanthrope, the betrayer turns into a werewolf and will attack the party, slowly turning them into werewolves to join your pack.  If you manage to turn them all before they can make enough silver bullets and put an end to your "alternative lifestyle," you all win and can hunt for new victims together (you're the Alpha, of course).  Win, Lose, or Howl, you get a cool story and a labyrinthine house to create as you play.  An excellent and relatively quick game for up to six players.  Also be sure to check out the Tabletop play-through of Betrayal as well.

Caverna: The Cave Farmers

In Caverna you play as the head of a dwarf family who lives in a small cave near a forest.  With just you and your spouse to start with, you can choose various actions for your dwarves that involve digging deeper into the cave, developing ore and ruby mines, and furnishing new rooms from the freshly carved stone.  Alternately you can chop down the trees in the forest, set up pastures for animals or plow fields for you to grow crops.  You can even use the ore that you mine to furnish weapons for yourself and go on adventures, bringing back whatever plunder you happen to come across.  While a winning strategy tends to involve a little of everything, the fact that you can specialize your strategy means you could be a Ruby King, Queen of the Harvest, or Master Shepherd across a number of different playthroughs.  The end of game scoring will often be overshadowed by the layout of the little home you made for yourself, or how many cattle you were able to "appropriate" from your adventures.  Caverna, and its sister game Agricola (which I will spare you from for the time being) are both excellent games for building your own personal little homestead.  Caverna can support up to seven players, making it the largest game of this list, though dependent on the length of time individual players take on their turn, you may prefer to play with less to cut down on the time between turns.

Hope you enjoy these games as much as I do.  Until next time...