Designing Turn Order Selection Around Tangible Rewards

The first decision players are confronted with in many games is "who goes first?". But the value of going first differs wildly depending on the game, with few common heuristics to guide players. As arbitrary as initial order is, when you ask players to compete over turn order during the game, you force new players to choose without understanding what they are choosing. New players need a basis for decision making. You can provide this by linking choice of turn order to concrete resources, which provides a heuristic scaffolding they can later ignore once they understand how to value order properly.

An easy way to do this is to attach small rewards to different positions on a track. In Alchemists, players start each round by choosing a place on the play order track, each with a different bonus. Spaces earlier in turn order give fewer bonuses. The top space on the track even costs a coin. New players can ignore the implications of turn order and just go for the bonuses they want, while experienced players can weigh the pros and cons of going earlier. The resources are helpful but not strategy defining, allowing them to fade into the background once players understand the value of turn order.

When choosing turn order is essential to a game, asking players to pay compounds an already difficult choice. The Great Zimbabwe is a game notorious for strategy that is incomprehensible to new players due to the highly interconnected and interactive nature of its mechanics. Turn order is interwoven with victory requirements, use of resources, ability to react to opponents, and god choices. Going first is hard to evaluate because the benefits are highly abstract and contextual, and on top of that players must decide how much to pay. It makes the default of passing on the bid appealing, which delays engagement with the turn order subgame entirely.

Not all games need turn order selection. But when turn order matters it can be nice to give players more control over it, rather than assuring them it will all balance out. Whenever you need new players to engage with complex systems, giving them something concrete to focus on lets them interact before acquiring mastery. Simple resource bonuses are the training wheels that give your players the confidence to engage with any subgame, no matter how difficult. Once players have more experience, this heuristic scaffolding fades into the background, leaving the complex systems that truly define the game.