I really like Maracaibo for this aspect. Whether you are unlocking more ports the further you go on the explorer track or adding assistants which allow you private actions at certain villages.

Le Havre also has increasing action options as more buildings are built or bought by the players & town.

Terraforming Mars includes a very clear example of this mechanism. And gaining new private actions has an interesting strategic advantage because you can use them to steal your turn and make your opponents take certain moves first.

I kept thinking "where's Lords of Waterdeep?" as the count went higher and higher and then I realized that it would be #1 and rightly so. I particularly love how players have to purchase these and they confer a benefit onto both the owner of the new spaces and the player that uses it, making for some interesting decisions that need to be made at times.

When I saw the theme of this list the first game I thought of was Gizmos, which revolves around building up powers so that taking one of the basic starter actions lets you trigger additional supplemental actions from the machines you’ve built

Great video Mr. Stegmaier! The big one that came to mind for me was Caverna, but you mentioned that one. I also thought of Imperial Settlers and IS: Empires of the North, Everdell (you can play cards that are worker placement spots, including some your opponents can use as well) and Dominations: Road to Civilization through a tech tree that you're building that provide various things that you can do. I think those all fit here, and I hadn't really thought too much about this mechanic but it is definitely an interesting one! Hope all is going well for you and yours, look forward to the next Sunday Sitdown!

*Chimera Station, in case anyone goes looking into this one. It's a really good worker placement game where players are all constructing a central space station, adding more and more action spaces. As the station grows, combos emerge between the new available actions. No two games are the same as different combos/engines appear depending on tile availability (the action spaces). Added bonus mechanism: your workers can be genetically modified to have special abilities, like bumping other workers or scoring VP when placed.

From what I’ve played, Imperial Settlers seems like a good fit for this list.

As a dice game fan, Under falling skies have a mecanism to dig in your city to have access to different increasing powerful options. Very impress by this 30$ game.

Some of my favorite games show up in this video (Viticulture, Lords of Waterdeep, Parks, Dominion, Concordia & I've been learning & playing Euphoria a lot this week). Dale of Merchants is one I thought of where you get a river of ever changing action cards (actually multiple use cards) showing up. I like the challenge of finding ways to gain new actions that combo well & how the card you gain goes directly into your hand (rather than into the discard pile). Great video!

Great list! Have not played LoW but Concordia does this so seamlessly as you mentioned and entertained multiple.mechisms to the cards like actions and scoring. It's just impressively beautiful. I'd love to see this reimagined in a stonemaier game

Great list, Jamey. Thanks for sharing. Another fun game for this mechanic is Oath of the Brotherhood. Similar to this mechanic is a game like Nemesis or Vindication where players discover or explore an area throughout the game revealing additional areas that players can utilize.

Cool list. Endangered does this really well, too. I think it's an outstanding co-op game.

Interesting list. We played Lost Ruins yesterday for the first time and had a blast. It's a fun game. Off the top of my head, I don't recall Raiders of the North Sea having action spaces in the upper part of the board, only randomly seeded spaces to plunder and collect resources (wood, iron, Valkyries ect).

Nusfjord does this really nicely with the Elders that you can hire to your company :) and I like how it’s so optional, you don’t have to hire elders. love that game. Obsession does this as well with how you purchase new buildings that give you new options for activities. great list!

Sidreal Confluence!!! The way you talked about cubes and the economy makes me think of Sidereal Confluence and how you can research new tech that gives you new 'machines' in order to convert resources into ships/planets/more tech as the game plays out. It definitely fits the context of "Increasing Action Options"

Thanks for the vids Jamie!

Hey Jamey, Great list and very interesting mechanism in focus. Especially because it is very often not recognized as a game mechanism because it is tied into the overall gameplay. One game you missed is “Robinson Crusoe”. The unique way of increasing your options is the thematic background: You invent items to get further options. You discover Island tiles to generate more opportunities and different actions. So you start with almost nothing at the beach and you work your way through until you have enough options to complete the scenario. Another one I really like is Le Havre. Another Rosenberg, but in this one players choose to build buildings to generate new worker placement options. Differentiator: Other players can use your building as well if they pay you. So you can extend actively and passively your options in the game. Love it 😁

having played some of the games you designed I’m actually gobsmacked you’ve played Anachrony only once... I would have thought that that’s something right up your alley... the increasing action options are represented by the buildings you are able to build on your faction board... and I love the idea of an end game where everything is collapsing around you on the main board.... great concepts and smart mechanics in the box and I guess the only game where time travel actually makes sense and thematically works well...since I’m considering designing my own board game I’d love to hear your thoughts on anachrony after a few games one day... and thanks for your honest, detailed and enthusiastic reviews on mechanics used in games designed by others... a bit of a fresh air really :)

Discoveries: The Journals of Lewis and Clark does this well. Dice are workers in this game and they do different jobs depending on the face, in teamwork with other dice. At the beginning of the game, every player has the same action spaces. and they can only be used once per turn. One of the actions is to contact some of the native tribes Lewis and Clark did, and each tribe grants some new private advantage (in addition to end of game alliance points). Often these are new action spaces that are more powerful or more efficient than the public ones.

Great list, and some games I totally agree with, but such a shame that Anachrony was a mere honourable mention, and that you've only played it once. For me, it's an exemplar of this mechanism, along with Waterdeep, Arnak and Concordia.

Asking For Trobils could be on this list for the way you can male choices that enhance certain action spots to give you more rewards. So you might make it so that every time you visit the "collect a crystal" spot, that you collect TWO Crystal's, and then you add that you also get a SMALL TRAP. And suddenly other players might be very interested in using that space because they know you are going to bump them! Game changer!

I think the game that stands out in my mind is Steam Works. Through out the game you're building these little machines with action spaces on them that trade one resource for another. You're always trying to upgrade your own machines to run better to entice others to play on them, and you're constantly fighting to use that one machine that someone else has built perfectly.

Lots of great games on this list! One game I didn't hear mentioned that I enjoy is Le Havre.

Lords of Waterdeep is one of those games I don't own and I don't think I ever will, however I will always be down to play it! It is a great game, mechanically. For me D&D theme does nothing, but it doesn't get in the way of a great game :)

Have you seen the upcoming Kickstarter from AEG “Meeples and Monsters”? (Rahdo did a run-through yesterday). Drawing a lot of comparisons to Lords of Waterdeep and personally looks much more up my alley theme-wise. Great list Jamey!

Thanks Jamey! I really like this mechanism. Caylus would have made my top 5, and I wouldn't have paired Agricola and Caverna, I would have made it a triple and include Caverna Cave vs Cave as well, a great 2 player game!

Great list, it's a mechanic that doesn't get highlighted often, but one I quite like in games, especially ones with a theme of building or expansion, like Anachrony or Caverna. One game I'm very excited about is the upcoming Perseverance, by the same people who made Anachrony. It features 2 very distinct ways of play, one of which involves exploring a jungle and building outposts to increase available actions. It also has a lot of other very clever mechanisms, actions are very tight like in Waterdeep, and the way the whole thing interacts with their worker draft results in a very interesting puzzle. Two other games that might tangentially fit this list that I love, are Sentinels of the Multiverse, and Too Many Bones. In Sentinels players build up their available powers by playing permanent cards to their board, and in Too Many Bones it's more like a traditional RPG with skill trees unlocking new options, and lots of possible paths to take. While your list focused mostly on games with a central board of actions that expands for all players, I feel like players increasing their own options in interesting ways is also a very exciting thing to do, especially for coop. You get to develop your own unique action pool compared to other players, and it creates lots of exciting "wait you can do WHAT?" moments, giving every player their own chance to shine.

I love lords of waterdeep

Akrotiri is an older one but still great for exploration too.

I'm not sure about this mechanism with Dominion or Concordia type of games. Technically true, if playing an Action Card is performing an action, and you get new action cards during the game, you get more action options. But, that sort of would include almost any and all games with purchasable/obtainable action cards, which dilutes this mechanism to almost meaningless. Getting a card you don't already have in a deck-builder seems to me like a drastically different thing compared to the way this works in almost anything else on the list. Maybe it fits something like Quest for El Dorado, with the occasional ability to control which of the potential cards will actually make their way to the market... I the difference hangs on what does increasing "Action Options" means. In something like Lord of Waterdeep your Action is placing a worker, and adding new buildings gives different options for what to do with this Action. When there are building added, you still do the exact same action of playing one of your worker meeple to an action space, but you have more action spaces to choose from. But in something like Dominion your Action is to play card from you hand for whatever is written on the card. New cards you get will do different things because they have different stuff written on them, but your choice of action is still "which card from my hand will I play for what is written on it?", rather than a "where I place one of my worker meeple, what will I do with it?". There's of course a lot of overlap there, it's mostly semantic, but it doesn't feel (to me) like the same thing. Other than that, generally good list with good examples, and something interesting to explicitly talk about. Thanks.

I think Century Spice Road would also fit in this list, linked to Concordia and Dominion in that regard.

Hi Jamey. Will we ever get a list of Megan's top 10 games? It would be interesting to hear what her favorites are, even if she passed the list through you.

Gonna throw out my homie Not Alone again. Increasing actions is, in some ways, the core of the game. The survivors need to get more action cards so they can spread out and be harder to catch, but the Creature really tries to keep them hemmed in by preventing them from gaining new actions. Also fun is that getting a new action is done by taking a "Rover" action.

Manhattan Project: Energy empire is the first game that comes to mind. Over the course of the game you will acquire structures which will open up more options for you. Another one is Marco Polo 2. Both really good games!

Hey Jamey, I have a question related to game design and testing during the pandemic: while working on bigger games I recently designed a smaller card game, which I would like people to play and give me feedback on. Now in the current situation it's not really possible to play the game with other players do too lock down and contact restriction (I hope that this is the english term). Is there a “smooth” way to implement a game on a website like board game arena or tabletopia to make it accessible for people to test? Or is there some kind of software that functions as a “board game editor”, which would suit this purpose? Also: Inspired by your video on the social deduction game: Is there a social deduction game, which is “action card play”-driven (Maybe the one you talked about is). Something more strategic and more meaningful, than games like human punishment or coup. This is something I've been loosely working on, but I haven't found an Idol-game to learn from yet. PS: Yesterday I played Trismegistus (a T-Game) by Daniele Tascini and Frederico Pierlorenzi for the first time and aside from all the elegant interconnected mechanisms the game created a very interesting feel: it's kind of an engine building game in which you get stronger over the course of the game, but at the same time the requirements of the experiments you have to perform increase at the same rate. So usually in an engine building game you feel like you are kind of overpowered at the end, but in this game it kinda stays on the same power level relative to the things you have to do, while the puzzles you have to solve get more complex. It feels quite similar to spirit island, in the sense that the “sense of pressure” is quite constant over the course of the game. Kind regards! 😉

Based upon Magic's inclusion almost any tableau builder with action cards would qualify -- Terraforming Mars, Last Will, Underwater Cities, Aquatica. Also any card where you draw additional action cards into your hand (Inis?). I do think there is something distinct about the Lords of Waterdeep and Arnak way of creating public spots. I haven't played Keyflower yet but doesn't it do this as well?

I was going to burn my computer down if Waterdeep wasn't on the list. :) You're right IMO, it's the archetype of this idea, even if not the first. Some I would add: Terraforming Mars (the blue action cards), Paladins of the West Kingdom (the King's Favor cards, one revealed each round in rounds 3-7, the only public worker placement spaces in the game), One Deck Dungeon (as you add "skills" to your character, you have new options for how to use your dice), The Voyages of Marco Polo (and MP II - the cities you place trading huts in give you a new place to activate your dice). I am not as familiar with these games, but don't Machi Koro and Space Base have a similar thing where you gain cards to be activated by dice rolls? I feel like you mentally walled off dice games that might apply (MP, One Deck Dungeon, these). Raiders of the North Sea's Hall of Heroes expansion even extends this mechanism. After a raid, the space is filled with a randomly drawn "quest" card which represents a new competitive reason to "visit" the space. (It's more like filling a contract, which is maybe a different mechanism, but really the raids themselves have a contract filling like feel.)

It is go great that Lords of Waterdeep still holds such high place.

I'm trying to listen, but all I can do is wonder about what map it is on his back wall :D

Is there anyone better than Jamey at explaining mechanisms and gameplay concepts? because I haven't found them

#Yedo