Jamey, just wanted to say that your videos have been so incredibly helpful for me as a budding game designer. I always learn a bunch of new concepts and every once in a while, like today with asymmetric pairings, you mention some specific mechanic that I'd been working on and hadn't realized was a fully explored topic! Thanks for all that you do; I'll be buying and enjoying Stonemaier games for many years to come :)
Rebuilding Seattle has benefit pairing with 3 "paired" benefits. You purchase buildings using cards (usually) which combine 1) a building tile which can convey both short and long-term benefits depending on how/where you place it in your neighborhood, 2) either a bump up on an amenity track or some other benefit when triggered by a later event, and 3) a bump up on a quality track or a benefit during either a later (profit) phase or end-of-game scoring. There's a large market of building cards with very different pairings which makes for very interesting decisions, especially when considering how/when the various benefits will trigger depending on other cards you've previously acquired.
Ku Ka King is a nice set collection game for kids where you simultaneously draft stacks of three cards. This seems to be a pretty pure benefit pairing game. Zooloretto, Coloretto and Triqueta are games where sets of 3 or more cards/tokens are created by the players and players can chose to add more or take and leave the round.
Small Islands has the goal and point selection at the start of each round. You also get to reserve scoring targets/goals for possible use in a future round. There is also the option to play with cards that have preset combos of goals and rewards, or the advanced mode where you have separate decks for goals and rewards and get to pair them together yourself.
Drafting at the start of a game is always a fun mechanism, though it does give experienced players an advantage. Garphill does this in 2 of their games. In Viscounts of the West Kingdom, "hero" cards (which are more powerful than your starting deck and usually buff a major action in the game) are laid out paired with a card that lists your starting resources. These are drafted in reverse turn order. In Scholars of the South Tigris, resource cards are paired with "translators" which are cards that give the owner little benefits as other players use them; again these are drafted as pairs in reverse turn order. Not only is this a fun mechanism, it has 2 other benefits: 1) all of your starting resources are listed on the resource card you drafted, so you don't have to look up in the rule book what players get based on player count and turn order - you just draft the card. 2) it gives the last player in turn order the first decision of the game, which is a great way to overcome the sometimes bad feeling when you learn you are going last. This is such a fun mechanism that I sometimes use it as a variant in other games where this is possible but not a BTB rule. Scythe for example (faction/player board combos).
I've heard the Castles of Mad King Ludwig mechanism called "incentivization". It's sometimes passive like in Castles and sometimes active (e.g., if you want a card in Century Spice Road deeper in the line you add cubes to the early cards; in Architects of the West Kingdom it's a coin). Great way to keep a card market from getting static.
First game I thought of is Harrow County, where one of your four actions is paired with a random token where the first person to take the action gets the benefit.
I see Azul on the honorable mention list, but the only thing I can think of in that game that would be benefit pairing is getting the first player token.
Azul's asymmetric pairings are the randomized pools of tiles from which you select. I agree that it's a looser connection than most of the other games on this list.
Jamey, just wanted to say that your videos have been so incredibly helpful for me as a budding game designer. I always learn a bunch of new concepts and every once in a while, like today with asymmetric pairings, you mention some specific mechanic that I'd been working on and hadn't realized was a fully explored topic! Thanks for all that you do; I'll be buying and enjoying Stonemaier games for many years to come :)
Thanks for your comment, Eric! I hope you create something special with benefit pairings--it's a great mechanism.
Rebuilding Seattle has benefit pairing with 3 "paired" benefits. You purchase buildings using cards (usually) which combine 1) a building tile which can convey both short and long-term benefits depending on how/where you place it in your neighborhood, 2) either a bump up on an amenity track or some other benefit when triggered by a later event, and 3) a bump up on a quality track or a benefit during either a later (profit) phase or end-of-game scoring. There's a large market of building cards with very different pairings which makes for very interesting decisions, especially when considering how/when the various benefits will trigger depending on other cards you've previously acquired.
Nice! That's a lot of entangled benefits--very clever.
Ku Ka King is a nice set collection game for kids where you simultaneously draft stacks of three cards. This seems to be a pretty pure benefit pairing game.
Zooloretto, Coloretto and Triqueta are games where sets of 3 or more cards/tokens are created by the players and players can chose to add more or take and leave the round.
Great list today with a lot of games that I really enjoy. Not a mechanism that I’ve given a lot of thought to. Good job.
Small Islands has the goal and point selection at the start of each round. You also get to reserve scoring targets/goals for possible use in a future round.
There is also the option to play with cards that have preset combos of goals and rewards, or the advanced mode where you have separate decks for goals and rewards and get to pair them together yourself.
That's a great example! It's been too long since I last played Small Islands.
Drafting at the start of a game is always a fun mechanism, though it does give experienced players an advantage. Garphill does this in 2 of their games. In Viscounts of the West Kingdom, "hero" cards (which are more powerful than your starting deck and usually buff a major action in the game) are laid out paired with a card that lists your starting resources. These are drafted in reverse turn order. In Scholars of the South Tigris, resource cards are paired with "translators" which are cards that give the owner little benefits as other players use them; again these are drafted as pairs in reverse turn order. Not only is this a fun mechanism, it has 2 other benefits: 1) all of your starting resources are listed on the resource card you drafted, so you don't have to look up in the rule book what players get based on player count and turn order - you just draft the card. 2) it gives the last player in turn order the first decision of the game, which is a great way to overcome the sometimes bad feeling when you learn you are going last.
This is such a fun mechanism that I sometimes use it as a variant in other games where this is possible but not a BTB rule. Scythe for example (faction/player board combos).
I've heard the Castles of Mad King Ludwig mechanism called "incentivization". It's sometimes passive like in Castles and sometimes active (e.g., if you want a card in Century Spice Road deeper in the line you add cubes to the early cards; in Architects of the West Kingdom it's a coin). Great way to keep a card market from getting static.
I do really like that system for determining your starting resources!
The list of the games at the end of the video seems to be flipped in order; Ra is at number 10 and Cascadia at 1.
First game I thought of is Harrow County, where one of your four actions is paired with a random token where the first person to take the action gets the benefit.
That's one of my favorite action mechanisms from this year, and I totally forgot about it for this list--thank you for the reminder!
I would put Men Nefer and Nova Roma on this list for their central board pairings
I'd check out UMATAKA, a worker placement and rondel game where how many workers you place equal how many spaces you move on the rondel.
That sounds great! Thanks for the recommendation.
I see Azul on the honorable mention list, but the only thing I can think of in that game that would be benefit pairing is getting the first player token.
Azul's asymmetric pairings are the randomized pools of tiles from which you select. I agree that it's a looser connection than most of the other games on this list.