Three mechanics for players to draw tokens from bags, either to gain resources at the expense of possible future harm, determine combat results, or pick a winner.
Drawing tokens from bags is always fun, and it is a relatively untapped way to introduce chance into your game. Plus, this form of luck also can be modified over the game by the players’ actions, chiefly by adding certain tokens to the bag. Read more about how to use bags and token in your game.
Ah, the old Bag of Honor
The bag is initially filled with currency tokens of the same value. Players may choose to draw 3 tokens from the bag, but the cost is first dropping in one of their kingdom’s Honor tokens. If a player draws 3 currency tokens, he or she gets to keep all three. However, for every Honor token that is drawn belonging to their kingdom, they must drop in one currency token. Therefore, the net reward for drawing one of your own Honor tokens is a single currency token. The reward becomes a net loss of 1 currency token if you draw two of your own Honor tokens.
If you draw another player’s Honor token from the bag, you can to steal a currency token from them and return their Honor token back to the bag, or you can keep the Honor token for later use. Perhaps these kept Honor tokens grant extra VP, or can be used to power attacks against that factions.
This type of mechanic varies in profitability from player to player, depending on how many Honor tokens they have put in relative to each other. Knowing that your opponent has a very high number of Honor tokens sunk in the bag would make it very easy for you to grab one of his tokens, making him vulnerable to some sort of negative effect.
“If I risk just one Honor token, I could probably gain a third Honor token for my opponent, which would allow me to cast a powerful curse on him. However, I haven’t put any Honor in yet, and I’m not prepared to defend against any attacks if my Honor tokens were to be drawn.”
The currency within the bag could also increase in average value by having the bag initially filled with low-value currency, and then steadily replenished with higher value currency. This has the effect of making trips to the bag more lucrative as time goes on.
Thematically, a gamble like drawing from the bag could be seen as a modern corporation resorting to less-than-honorable methods to produce resources, like unsafe working conditions or illegal trade practices.
The Dreaded Bag of Maiming
A bag doesn’t have to be filled with currency or resources. What if it contained combat results instead? Picture a game that involves some sort of combat. Imagine now that each player has a bag filled with tokens representing different casualties. As the players’ armies enter the fray and start poking each other with swords and spears, the players have to draw from their bag to determine what losses occur, if any.
Some of the results will likely be total loss of a soldier or squad, while others might be a temporary malus, like unable to change location or unable to counterattack. After each round of combat, all the used tokens go back into the bag to cause more mayhem and destruction. However, players can improve their chances over time by investing in better armor or field hospitals, which have the effect of replacing grievous injuries with less permanent ones. The actual in-game process might be “draw 4 result tokens, and discard 2” or “draw 1 result token and replace it with a less severe one from the bank”.
The Bag of Winning (the Pooh)
If you haven’t heard of it, Credit-Card Roulette is a way to enjoy dinner with people and possibly get either a free meal or a bunch of very grateful buddies. Best of all, the concept can be used in board games. The gist of it: each diner puts a credit card in a hat, and the waiter or waitress randomly chooses on. The “lucky” owner of that credit card gets to pay the entire bill.
Here’s how it works for boardgames: Over the course of the game, players have to put one of their tokens into a bag as either a penalty or cost. Thematically, maybe they lose Honor by contributing the least Knights to the defense of Catan, or they have to pay an Honor tax once a season unless resources are used to pay a bribe. The win condition for the game is to be the last person to get their Honor token drawn from the bag.
After the last player’s turn, players take turns drawing tokens out of the bag – as players’ tokens are drawn, they lose. Winning, therefore, is simply just a matter of not getting your token drawn. The way you do that? Try to have the least amount in there.
Alternatively, the Credit-Card Roulette path can be inverted by having the last token drawn be the winner. This method benefits from a longer, more exciting resolution phase as the tokens are dramatically revealed from the bag. For maximum tension, players shouldn’t be able to easily have an exact number of tokens they placed in the bag, thereby giving everyone some shred of hope that they just might have one last token way at the bottom.
“Did I put in 4 or 5 tokens? They pulled out 4 of mine already, but there can’t be more than a couple left to draw from the bag – I might still have a chance to win this!”
Obviously, such a chance-depended victory condition may not work for all games. However, a thrilling finish sure beats a dry, “wait, its over?” conclusion for many people. Give it a try.