Turns

What is a turn? Why can't you just take three turns at once, or even all of them? What should a turn contain, and how much of it?

The horizon

A turn forces you to come up with a new plan. Planning is fun. Planning is the game. Planning creates tension. Will my plan succeed...?

Making plans that are longer than one turn is great, but these plans can't be too solid.

If a player can make a solid plan that will last longer than one turn, things become boring. There's nothing more to think about between now and their next turn, and their next turn is already decided — they just have to wait, and then they execute the next step of the plan.

If your players are wanting to skip ahead, that's a sign of this problem.

Stop players making solid plans, by making the future uncertain. This forces them to re-evaluate their plans constantly.

Change the game state, either through:

• The actions of the player. Something random happens, like a die roll or card draw.
• The opponents. They attack the player, or compete with them for resources.
• The game. It automatically creates uncertainty. This is part of what makes drawing a card every turn such a useful and common feature of games.

In Bärenpark, you take tiles to add to your zoo. However, there's no hidden information, and it's easy to see ahead a few turns. Also, the opponents will usually not take the tile you want, or beat you to an objective. I often find myself just waiting for my next turn, not doing anything.

Ticket to Ride is sometimes very cutthroat. At other times, the players are just drawing cards. However, they're drawing the cards from a very small and changing pool of 5 cards. There's constant new information from that system alone. You don't know what's going to still be there next turn.

In my gangster game, players move to locations in a city, to get bonuses, and/or roll dice. However, I decided that locations cannot just give bonuses. They must also roll at least one die. Why? Because the bonuses give no new information. The die gives you new information, that you can't plan beyond.

Single and multi-action turns

In most cases, turns should contain a single action. The game just flows so much faster.

Some game types inherently have multi-action turns. That's fine. Card battling games are a common example, where you do multiple actions, to spend all your mana/energy etc.

If you give multiple actions, the game will be significantly about the actions, and finding ways to use them together. It will be a combo-finding, small-picture game. It will be tactical, and focussed mostly on getting the most out of the current turn, not planning ahead.

Many actions, and tracking them

If you're using multi-action turns, two actions isn't really enough, to find interesting and diverse combos. You'll usually want to give the player 3 or more (or a variable number) per turn, for maximum combo potential. However, many people (myself included) find it difficult to track 3 actions. They'll often be unsure whether they've done 2 or 3 actions.

This means you'll likely need some kind of a memory system, which physically tracks actions, but necessitates physical work.

Radlands had a card that you'd rotate, to keep track of your three actions. Roxley later introduced the water tokens, which you placed as you spent them.

My pirate game settled on three actions, but I also felt that two was often enough. I settled on a system where the player would get two actions. That was easy to remember. However, each turn, they'd get some fish. They could spend three fish to buy one more action. This added work, but it created a reminder for the third action. Also, tweaking the number of fish allowed me to precisely calibrate the number of two- or three-action turns, until it felt right.

Different action types in a turn

Another option to avoid action tracking can be to just cut the turn back up into phases, which allows you to have a "movement" action, and then two other actions. Do this only if you have to. I'm not a fan of spatial "movement" in games anyway.

These multi-action turns really are complicated. Some types of action don't generate new information, and can therefore be boring. Turns can also feel unsatisfactory without certain kinds of actions. Outside games where there's guaranteed card draw each turn, this is a quagmire. Steer clear of it.