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Mechanic Monday: Pass-Through Action Tiles

Happy Monday fam! Sorry about missing a post last week, it’s been busy at the theatre company, and those issues came first.  Streak broken, but time to start a new one!
Not gonna do the long rambling “my earliest memories of my grandmother were of flour-dusted fingerprints showing stark against the dark wrought iron of her teapot” intro today, just gonna dive right into this floating mechanic.

Jumping Across Action Tiles
In GREEM, a grid of Action tiles is laid out in the center of the play space.  Each player starts in a different corner, their pawn covering up that corner’s tile.  On a player’s turn, they move across as many tiles as they choose, provided they pay the energy cost on each tile.  That can either be a fixed starting amount, or it can be accumulated, or it could come from an Action Wheel.  But to move over a tile, you pay its cost and take its action.  The tile you land on does not require energy, nor does it grant its action.  Only tiles completely moved through are activated.

So basically, I envision this grid of action tiles, and each turn, a player carves out their own path through them, perhaps gaining new temporary energy for future turns, building up their base energy, drawing scoring cards, rearranging tiles, repelling other players’ pawns or dropping mines, removing tiles entirely, scoring points, whatever.  Now, there are a lot of ways to mess around with this - as I mentioned, you could have energy, or you could use Action Beads on an Action Wheel to pay.  You could also just use coins or VP or any other currency.  You can restrict each turn to tiles that are in a straight line, or you can allow paths to turn.  It could be square tiles, or hexes.Tiles could have edges that act as walls, stopping further movement in that direction; you could have every tile that a pawn starts from disappear for a gradually crumbling board, or you could layer tiles on top of tiles for an ever-changing stacked/overlapping board.  Pawn interaction is wide open, and you could make some tiles straight up enemies that require some other currency to pass/defeat.  Instead of merely interacting with tiles, perhaps players can buy them and add them to a player-powers or scoring tableau.
Anyway, with all the possibilities, what this really boils down to is a movement mechanic.  But it feels fun and different.  Ooh, I just thought of another possible twist - instead of activating the tiles you pass through, at the end of your turn you activate every tile that your pawn’s tile touches.  Anyway, something fun to consider, a nice combine-and-subvert of a roll-and-move and a worker-placement.  Take it to your lab and tinker away!
Alright, til next week! When I’ll probably start digging more into Fantasy Fantasy GM GM.  Cheers all.

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