Every Unsolicited Resource is a Goal

Players need goals. Without them, gameplay loses its meaning. But they also prefer to choose their own objectives. Telling players what to do next robs them of agency and makes games feel like chores. One easy way to create self-directed goals for players is to give them resources they did not ask for. Because players hate wasting opportunities, this creates an immediate goal: find a use for them.

Input randomness is the classic way to give players unsolicited resources. In Carcassonne, the first thing players do on their turn is to draw a tile to place. The tile may not always align with their current goals: it might have a road when they are building a city, or not fit with the cloister they are trying to complete. So they recalibrate and find the best way to use it. In doing so, they may also create a longer-term goal, like joining a farmer into a larger field later.

While input randomness works, it can feel like players are just reacting to random events. A more deliberate approach is through externalities: opportunities or threats created as a side effect of actions taken to pursue another goal. For example, in Catan, if you want to increase your wood production to build more roads, you might build at the intersection of two wood tiles and one ore tile. Now, in addition to receiving wood, you also gain a trickle of ore and must choose how to use it. But the use you find for the ore may also have externalities that create additional goals. As long as every goal in a game has externalities, players will never run out of things to do.

The trick with unsolicited resources is that they cannot be too flexible, or else they assimilate into existing goals. In Ticket to Ride, you can take face-up cards from the market or face-down ones from the deck. Face-down cards might create goals if they have unwanted colors, but they might also yield a valuable locomotive, a wildcard that counts as anything. As exciting as drawing a locomotive is, it is too useful to create new goals: it substitutes for anything, so there is no risk it will go to waste. The narrower a resource's utility, the more urgent the challenge to use it becomes.

When players gain the resources they set out to obtain, it closes an old goal. When they receive resources they don't already have a use for, it opens a new one. To ensure your players always have a goal to pursue, find ways to give them something new that doesn't slot perfectly into their existing plans.