Rules Discussion: Using One Token to Track Multiple Game Elements

There is an intriguing little (for lack of a better word) mechanic I have observed in Eclipse and Glass Road. Honestly, it's neither a mechanic nor a rule, per se, but a nifty way of accounting for gained resources, and this design element is becoming more popular, as far as I can tell. In those two games, removing chits or tokens reveals new abilities or income. In Eclipse, as far as I have observed, if you deploy one of your cubes onto another part of the board, a higher income level is revealed, as if by deploying a worker you make more money. Something similar happens in Glass Road; by removing or "spending" certain resources, a glass piece or a brick piece is revealed, enabling you to building something or accumulate items. In both cases, what is happening is simple to understand: you are tracking income or accumulation in a clever way.

Let me explicitly state my point: as time has passed and modern games have been created on the backs of games before them, newer and more elegant ways of tracking your stuff have been introduced. In the past, tracking accumulation was fiddly: you had to maintain piles of tokens or you slid a dedicated counter down a scoring track of some kind. If you look back 10 or 15 years ago, you may notice that these "older" board games were like accounting spreadsheets in which had to balance every column by retaining piles of chits. This is apparent in Uwe Rosenberg's earlier games, such as Le Havre and Agricola; in both games, you tracked your stuff by keeping piles of... well, stuff.

However, a few years ago, Rosenberg created Glass Road, which is, in many ways, a huge refinement of those past games in one regard: instead of maintaining piles of junk, you simply turn a dial and slide one token representing each resource along the dial to indicate how much you had of each resource. This was a genius move and worthy of distinction because Rosenberg succeeded in instilling that beloved complexity into a game, yet streamlining the bookkeeping to a few deft moves of tokens and a dial. Brilliant!

There are numerous reasons why fiddly bookkeeping has given way to elegant tracking through subtraction. One reason is because, by moving a piece or a dial, you track two trends -- resource accumulation and revelation of a new level of play -- which is expeditious for gameplay. Another reason is because with game designers interweaving more systems, tracking those systems must also be more streamlined lest a game night devolve into so much cube-pushing and chit-moving that turns take twice as long as it takes to make decisions. Yet another reason to consider is that, frankly, including more material in a game makes it more expensive to manufacture and buy; by limiting the tokens and the chits, game costs stay relatively low without sacrificing complexity.

The odd irony is that even elegant tracking mechanisms can feel fiddly, which is why Eclipse indeed seems like an old game. Interestingly, Eclipse is not an "old" game, per se, though it did come out in 2011, which is kind of long in the tooth for board games. Eclipse was ahead of its time, though Eclipse represents that awkward period of transition when popular trends shift, early adopters struggle with those new trends, and then those trends become publicized to the extent that people understand them better. On the shoulders of such games as Eclipse, game designers may have discovered those novel ways of tracking resources, improving on the old designs.

Nowadays, I see more games using a method of tracking two or more items by simply moving one piece or one dial. Great Western Trail and Mombasa, which are both Alexander Pfister games, employ this approach to accumulation. In Mombasa, for example, when you explore a region of the board, you deploy a house piece representing a company's interest in that region; at the same time, if a coin space is revealed, then an end-game scoring bonus is definitely forthcoming. All it took to account for this was the game designer using the removal of that house piece as the bookkeeper for that end-game bonus instead of using a dedicated tracking dial or slider.

This is the bright future of board gaming with more complex games mitigating all that fiddliness with more elegant ways of keeping your books balanced by tracking two or more items with one element. In that way, even the bookkeeping itself is a game mechanic because you are moving pieces from one space to another whilst revealing a higher level of income, a new resource, or even a bonus to end-game scoring (see Mombasa). Any thoughts on that?