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Mechanic Monday: Elegant Turn Order Cards

I kind of wanted to write about some mechanics from BURN today (a 2p asymmetric coop set in the world of ROOT) but I ran out of time.  Time is a funny thing in this quarantined world we abruptly find ourselves in.  Elastic and brittle all at once, stretching out and snapping without warning into unlikely instants.  I wanted to write about BURN, a game about someone inside a city trying to help someone trapped inside a city to escape.  Instead I’m going to touch real quick on a mechanic from the reserve pile.  Let’s take a look.

Elegant Turn Order Cards
In GREEM, a 4p game, each player (Red, Green, Blue, Yellow) has 4 initiative cards (numbered 1-4) for the 4 turns that comprise the game, with each number having a different player colour tiebreaker sequence.  At the start of each turn, each player will secretly select an initiative card to play face-down.  Once all players have selected a card, reveal them all simultaneously; turn order will be based on the lowest card played, with each number having a different tie-breaker (All ‘One’ cards break ties in the order of Red>Yellow>Green>Blue, whereas all ‘Two’ cards break ties in the order of Yellow>Green>Blue>Red, etc).

This mechanic is particularly utilitarian.  Very little attached to it, though it can scale up and down a bit, and probably be expanded upon a little bit before it loses its nice clean elegance.  You could also replace/conjoin numbers with roles for role selection.  Just a practical little widget for trying out in a design where you need to determine order but wish to bake in some choice and player agency.
Tune in next week.

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