Good Follow Actions Keep the Leader in the Spotlight

The biggest advantage of turn-based games is the spotlight. When it is your turn, you can show off your clever plays to other players. Everybody loves an audience. But this also causes the biggest disadvantage: downtime. One solution is follow actions, which give other players something to do during your turn. For follow actions to work, they must preserve the spotlight. This means two things:

1. They must be inferior copies of the main action
2. They must be simultaneous and non-interactive

When you meet these conditions, following keeps other players engaged while maintaining the active player's spotlight.

Following should be weaker than leading

Players want their actions to give them a unique advantage. It feels unfair when you put in the effort, but others get the same reward. The common solution is to make follow actions weaker versions of the main action. For example, in my game Sprocketforge, on your turn, you choose between three actions: Produce, Plan, and Petition. Whichever action you take, every other player does a weaker version:

• Produce: All of your gears produce resources. Others get to produce one resource.
• Plan: You gain three cards and remove two exhaust. Others gain one card or remove one exhaust.
• Petition: You gain the text effect and points on a petition card. Others can only gain points on that card.

Weaker follow actions work because you still get an edge over the others. Some people think the main action only needs to be stronger in context. For example, if you need gold more than anyone else, giving everyone the same amount of gold should still feel like an advantage for you. But in reality, players focus more on their own situation than on others, so these small differences don’t really change how fair the game feels.

One exception is games like Tiny Towns, where the resource everyone receives can be a liability because you must use it. A resource is a liability only if its use is mandatory; otherwise, the worst case is simply declining to use it. Follow actions that create liabilities are inferior to the leader's action due to loss of control, rather than having a weaker effect.

Another exception is games where follow actions may be as strong or stronger than the lead action, but followers face risks the leader does not. For example, Roll for the Galaxy asks players to assign dice to actions while selecting one action to lead. The strength of each action depends on the number of dice assigned, but you can only do an action if a player led it, regardless of your dice. I might benefit more from the Settle action than the leader, but if nobody leads it, my dice go to waste. Adding uncertainty and risk to following restores fairness by reframing it as speculation rather than freeloading.

Following should be simultaneous and non-interactive

If players must follow in turn order, they create several problems:

1. If following requires taking turns, you reintroduce downtime because players must wait for each other to finish.
2. Coordinating turn order steals the spotlight from the active player because everyone must watch whoever is currently following.
3. Since turn-based follow actions mimic normal turn order, they risk confusing players about whose turn it is.

Interactivity is almost always incompatible with simultaneity. To interact with another player, you must communicate your intent, which affects their choices. An interaction that does not affect decisions is not an interaction. Therefore, the order of follower interactions matters, so they cannot follow simultaneously. Interaction also steals the spotlight because it forces the target to focus on the interacting player, not the active player.

Follow actions can still interact indirectly by setting up future interactions. In Space Base, the active player rolls two dice, and all passive players gain rewards for their deployed ships that match the results. Some ships have an interactive ability that their owner can only use on their turn. These abilities require spending charge cubes that you can gain passively. By accumulating the resources needed for interaction through a simultaneous, non-interactive follow action, the game links following to interaction indirectly enough that it does not steal the spotlight from the leader.

Conclusion

It takes little to keep players engaged during downtime. They do not need to make choices; receiving resources is enough. Follow actions are not the only solution to downtime, but they are among the easiest to implement. As long as your follow actions are weaker than the main action and resolved simultaneously, you can enjoy the benefits of a turn-based game structure while minimizing the downsides.