Hobby Game Trends 2000-2014 Round 11: Mechanics

Categories Focus: Mechanics

We have already looked at the Roll/Spin and Move mechanic extensively in the Traditional Games round and Deduction and Bluffing in the Social Deduction games round, but what other mechanics are rising or declining in interest from publishers?

At a Glance

A glance is all we are really going to take in this round. I’ll provide the basic chart showing releases of games of a particular mechanic as a percent of Study Games for each mechanic and leave the interpretation to you. There are probably other mechanics of interest, but I searched the ones most interesting to me. Some are not as useful as you would hope, e.g. Card Drafting means drawing cards in any way. Others appear to have been added to the categories fairly recently and older games have not been updated with them; particularly Player Elimination (which would have been interesting to me) and Take That. I’ve kept these in, but tread lightly around these. (At least that is the best reason I can find for their wonkiness). If there is one you particularly want to know, just comment and ask. Remembe, Study Games are all titles in the BGG database excluding: Children's Games, Mature/Adult Games, Fan Expansions, Books, and the Roll/Spin and Move Mechanic.

The Data

Conclusions

Hopefully, this data is helpful to you and gives insight into a mechanic that interests you. In all cases, consider this data to be a starting space for your discovery on a particular topic.