I just played Clans of Caledonia for the first time and although the concensus was that it was a good game, it didn't appear to innovate as much as other new games. Afterwards I found this really good blog post by the designer showing the mechanics/themes/components he took from other games, how he modified them and why:
https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/223665/clans-caledonia-designer-diary
I love the humility of the designer in detailing his inspiratioins. So many designeers spend effort to claim their ideas don't come from existing games.
Some notes on his inspirations
- I really like how his fundemental cost of actions is just money. Contrasting this with Terra Mystica where actions are a combination of money, workers and magic makes this decisions much less head breaking. It is not uncommon in TM to be short of just one good type to prevent you from doing a necessary action. In CoC this is simplified where the main decision is: do I need more money for actions or is it time to focus on VP? I think this reduces accounting without losing strategy.
- I've always wanted to love a market mechanic where players can both buy and sell goods. The problem is that supply and demand are usually equal so the market never reaches interesting extremes. In CoC there is a special limited action that allows players to buy goods at a significant discount. This can drive the cost up greatly which encourages sales and thus good production. Since the resulting money can be converted to actions, it's not uncommon to change your strategy mid-stride to sell goods you were saving in order to gain more actions. I really should play Navegador to see how it's market works.
- I'm a bit conflicted in the area control mechanisms in both TM and CoC they are not bad ways to get interaction but the jostling for first or second place has a good chance of increasing the positions of other players. It feels political.
- I'm not a big fan of contracts. Ever since I first saw them in Lords of Waterdeep and then later in The Voyages of Marco Polo, they just felt too random to me. You never knew much ones were going to come up and some people just got lucky with their current resources / prodution. Maybe I'm just not a skilled enough player.
- Like TM and VoMP each player has a special power that lasts the whole game. I like that CoC and VoMP have a small selection of clans that are chosen from instead of the huge selection in TM. The AP is bad and having all powers available discourages experimentation. I suppose TM is more strategic in that you have the power to perfectly react to the other power choices.
- Port tiles are nice and like Settlers of Catan, mitigates the weak edge of board positions.
- Both CoC and Hansa Teutonica (and Indonesia) give players the open choice of upgrading abilities every turn. This has huge strategic potential. I think I like Indonesia even more because each player can upgrade only once every turn at zero cost. This gives players temporary monopolies on abilities which is fun.
I feel like I'm most stuck on the basic board interaction mechanic. The sprawl and area control is something I'd like to avoid. Let me go through past games and see how they handled this.
- 7 Wonders has no board but all cards are built off of previous cards plus trading
- Acquire utilizes scrabble like tiles which are permanently placed. I think this mechanic is the worst part of this game.
- Age of Industry uses cards to restrict placements. Seems like a less severe version of Acquire.
- Carcasonne really it's own mechanic. The simplicity of one tile placement and the luck of the draw.
- Catan is another legendary mechanic. Starting placement (with severe rewards/penalties) and slow growth from those positions. Growth is dice based on current state which is exponential, and trading which restricts growth due to politics. Both exponential growth and trading seem like bad mechanics unless the game is very short.
- Caylus has such as simple geometry. Just a single winding road and a castle. It's interesting how the focus is usually on the tip of the road but the early weak buildings are still there. It's a nice way to limit the board.
- Dead of Winter is another minmal board, just 6 locations with rules for travelling between them. Maybe that's what I should do? My game is minimal so why not abstract the map?
- Tigris and Euphrates Oh man, maybe I should look for a full analysis of this. Some aspects
- two tile turns makes devastating attacks difficult. Disaster tiles help.
- destruction is awesome way to both get your limit in a suit (color) as well as reseting the game for others
- there's too much to say on this one
- Mombasa does an interesting thing where it decouples map mechanics from playrs by making the companies position on the map and players own shares of the companies. The game needs to justify this complexity.
- Power Grid has map sprawl but limits it by allowing players to double and tripple up at certain phases of the game. This gives nice waves of intense competition.
- Space Alert is an example of an interesting map with reduced geometry
- Taj Majal uses the map to create a pre-set walk for a series of auctioins. The map positions affect scoring.
Many games have incidental boards, that is boards that just show relative values of areas but the main mechanic is an auction, set collection or other. This includes Aladdin's Dragons, Amun-Re
I suppose one way to constraing things early is to make burroughs, areas that may have a common purpose (production, manufacture, consumption) that are distinct. This can lessen the complexity of the networking. Burroughs can also come with some pre-built buildings in order to start the economy.