Qualitative Terrain in Board Games Reduces Upkeep

In games with different terrain types, you can distinguish them by making some more expensive to traverse. This works well for video games like The Battle for Wesnoth that have range UI elements. It is much less ergonomic for tabletop games. Counting is already a chore when all spaces cost the same; different costs make it even worse.

One of my favorite mechanics in Heroscape is how water terrain works. Water terrain slows you down, but it does so by causing you to stop when you enter it. Players don't need to count anything; their mental model terminates at the water. The broader principle is that qualitative terrain rules cost less upkeep than quantitative ones.

Terrain doesn't always have to be an obstacle. In Heroscape, roads let your armies move faster. Unfortunately, they do this by adding 3 to your movement as long as all moves stay on the road. This introduces an arbitrary number for players to remember and increases the spaces they must count.

The Great Zimbabwe has a much cleaner approach to making beneficial terrain. It counts range by spaces, which are normally a single square. A contiguous body of water, however, counts as one space no matter how large it is. All ranges in the game are 3, small enough that you can eyeball them without manually counting spaces.

Board games handle upkeep poorly, so we always want to minimize what players must deal with. Qualitative terrain movement rules free players from doing extra arithmetic.