Heather Newton

A player receives a number of Action Points on their turn. They may spend them on a variety of Actions.

The earliest example of a game listed on Boardgamegeek that uses AP's is Special Train (1948).

Multiple players may occupy a space and gain benefits based on their proportional presence in the space.

In El Grande, for instance, players earn their score in a region by having the most caballeros in that region.

This mechanic requires you to place a bid, usually monetary, on items in an auction of goods in order to enhance your position in the game. These goods allow players future actions or improve a position. The auction consists of taking turns placing bids on a given item until one winner is established, allowing the winner to take control of the item being bid on.

Bluffing games encourage players to use deception to achieve their aims. All Bluffing games have an element of hidden information in them.

Players play cards out of individual decks, seeking to acquire new cards and to play through their decks iteratively, improving them over time through card acquisition.

This category also covers Bag Building, Pool Building, and related mechanisms.

Dominion pioneered this mechanism.

Drafting is a means of distributing cards or other game elements to players through an ordered selection process.

A typical implementation involves each player being dealt the same number of cards. Players then select one card to keep, and pass the rest to their left. This continues until all cards are taken. 7 Wonders implements this type of draft.

An alternative is that only one player is dealt cards, and they take one and pass it until all players have cards. This obviously is strongly biased towards the first player, and needs to be supported thematically and balance-wise. Citadels has this type of draft.

Another type is the open draft, where all options are shown to the players, and they take turns selecting. This is akin to Action Selection or Worker Placement.

Hand management games are games with cards in them that reward players for playing the cards in certain sequences or groups. The optimal sequence/grouping may vary, depending on board position, cards held and cards played by opponents. Managing your hand means gaining the most value out of available cards under given circumstances. Cards often have multiple uses in the game, further obfuscating an "optimal" sequence.

Movement occurs that is not visible to all players.

Scotland Yard is a classic game implementing this mechanism.

One or more players are assigned differing roles that are not publicly revealed at the start of the game.

This mechanism usually requires players to pick up an item or good at one location on the playing board and bring it to another location on the playing board. Initial placement of the item can be either predetermined or random. The delivery of the good usually gives the player money to do more actions with. In most cases, there is a game rule or another mechanic that determines where the item needs to go.

Players must decide between settling for existing gains, or risking them all for further rewards. Push-Your-Luck is also known as press-your-luck.

Players simultaneously program their movement, and then reveal and execute it. This mechanism tends to promote chaos in a game, and benefits those with good spatial relations.

Typically this is expressed as the winner being the first player to reach the end of a track.

However, if there is any type of fixed goal, this also qualifies as a Race mechanism. Catan is an example, where players are racing to reach 10 points.

The game is developed using paper and pen to mark and save responses or attributes that, at the end of the game, are used to score points and determine the winner.

A game that merely keeps track of score on a sheet of paper does not use a paper-and-pencil mechanism.

The available Actions are represented as pie wedges in a circle. Each player has one or more tokens on Rondel’s wedges. On their turn, they may move their token around the Rondel and perform the Action indicated by the wedge where they stop. It is typically more costly to move further around the Rondel.

The primary goal of a set collection mechanism is to encourage a player to collect a set of items. For example, players collect and harvest different types of beans in Bohnanza, and they collect Monuments in Ra.

Commodity Speculation is a subcategory of Betting and Bluffing, in which in-game money is bet on different commodities in hope that that particular commodity will become the most valuable as the game progresses. Often the values of the commodities are continually changing throughout the game, and the players buy and sell the commodities to make money off of their investment.

Commodity Speculation includes both Investment games in which players have some indirect control over asset values, but have a hard time hurting others without hurting themselves; and Collusion games, in which players have huge direct control in manipulating asset values, forcing players to help others and manage shifting alliances.

In Tableau Building games, each player has a visible personal array or tableau of components (cards, tiles, player boards, etc.) which they purposefully build or manipulate throughout the game by spending actions and/or resources (including opportunity costs) and which determines the quality, quantity, and/or variety of actions to which they have access throughout the game.

The array is not merely a place to store resources, to plan out actions, to store a puzzle which must be manipulated, or something that impacts VP's. It impacts the quality, quantity, and/or variety of actions which are accessible to a player. This means that some games may include an array or a tableau but not really be a tableau building game.

Tile Placement games feature placing a piece to score VPs or trigger abilities, often based on adjacent pieces or pieces in the same group/cluster, and keying off non-spatial properties like color, "feature completion", cluster size etc.

A classic example is Carcassonne, where a player randomly draws a tile and place it next to other tiles and has a chance to place a meeple on the tile just played.

Players play cards from their hand to the table in a series of rounds, or “tricks” which are each evaluated separately to determine a winner and to apply other potential effects.

The most common way to win a trick is by having the card with highest value of the suit that was led, but many classical card games use the "trump" system (where the certain cards, usually those of a designated suit, will win the trick if they are played.) Occasionally there is a round of bidding to determine this trump suit.

In many trick taking games (though not all), players are required to "follow suit", i.e. play a card of the same suit as was led if they have one. If they do not have a matching card, they must play another card from their hand.

Any mechanic you haven't seen a lot of in the market -- or possibly a common mechanic mixed with additional mechanics(s) not usually paired together.

More precisely referred to as "action drafting", this mechanism requires players to select individual actions from a set of actions available to all players. Players generally select actions one-at-a-time and in turn order. There is usually a limit on the number of times a single action may be taken. Once that limit for an action is reached, it typically either becomes more expensive to take again or can no longer be taken for the remainder of the round. As such, not all actions can be taken by all players in a given round, and action "blocking" occurs. If the game is structured in rounds, then all actions are usually refreshed at the start or end of each round so that they become available again.