The evolution of board game mechanics fascinates me. That’s the main reason that I’ve written a long series on deckbuilding games: to assess new ideas and tropes as they enter the design space of a genre. With 25 such articles under my belt, I should really write a summary some time!

This week (and over a few more weeks in the future), I’m going to be examining another genre of games — one that’s much smaller. In the main, it contains just four games, plus a number of supplements and spin-offs. However, those games constitute a strong design style that’s full of innovation.

The releases that I call “role civilization” games started with San Juan (2004), but are actually part of a rich stream of game design that’s produced many of the most notable games of the 21st century.

An Partial History of Role Selection: 1998-Present

The story begins with Verrater (1998) by Marcel-André Casasola Merkle. Verrater is one of the Adlung Spiele series of games that puts complex, dense card games into small card boxes. It’s a game of conflict over landscapes, but it also introduces the mechanic of drafting roles. Players sequentially choose from a set of role cards that provide them with special powers — one of which, the eponymous Traitor, can change sides in the conflict.

The idea of special powers that are tactically and exclusively selected each round was an innovative one, and it created a whole new genre of games: role selection.

Merkle’s Meuterer (2000) used the same mechanic for a game about shipping goods, but Bruno Faidutti’s Citadels (2000) was what really caught the attention of the gaming field. By introducing roles like the thief and the assassin, Faidutti gave role selection a whole new level of importance; even moreso than Verrater, Citadels became about figuring out what roles the other players had taken and how their actions might integrate with yours.

Puerto Rico (2002) was the other game that helped role selection to hit the big time. It also changed up the based mechanic. Sort of. Instead of requiring players to secretly draft roles, Puerto Rico puts its roles on the table and let players openly take them on their turns. This did away with the idea of second guessing what roles players had taken. However, the exclusivity of the roles maintained the question of what roles players would take — because access to a specific role could make or break a strategy.

Puerto Rico also offered another innovation.The earlier role selection games just gave the active player a special power when he took the role. Puerto Rico instead let all of the players take the role action, but the active player got it in a more powerful form. This dramatically changed the shape of role selection games, because it turned it from power selection into phase selection: a player wasn’t just choosing what he got to do, but what sorts of play occurred in the game.

The role selection genre never became one of the ubiquitous eurogame mechanics, but every year a few new games appeared, and they tended to show a lot of innovation. Martin Wallace’s Age of Steam (2002) completed the trinity of the most popular role selection games using the same open selection methodology as Puerto Rico (but not the phase selection).

Stefan Dorra’s Kreta (2005) and Cathala & Faidutti’s Mission: Red Planet (2005) introduced a variant of role selection where players played roles from their own hand of cards, expending the roles until they picked up their entire hand, creating the mechanic of hand selection. Witch’s Brew (2008) also used individual hands but trended toward Puerto Rico’s idea of phase selection: other players who had selected the same role card might get to activate the phase power in a substantially lesser form. The result actually punished the selection of the same phase, which is a lesser form of the role exclusivity common to the genre.

Rattus (2010) turned the exclusivity of roles on its head: even after another player has selected a role, others can take it from him. The general mechanic is a sort of role acquisition, but this variant of it encouraged the use of less popular roles, which players could keep longer.

Dice games increased in popularity in the ’00s and ’10s, and so dice mechanics were naturally combined with role selection. Chiarvesio & Tenneco’s Kingsburg (2007) and its successor Kingsport Festival (2014) are the most obvious examples of the dice selection subgenre, because players choose roles by selecting them with appropriate rolled dice. Thomas Lehmann’s To Court the King (2006) and Andreas Seyfarth’s Airships (2007) are a bit further off the beaten path, because players use dice to acquire special-power cards. This obviously moves the genre away from the idea of roles being exclusive, but it’s still clearly in the same ballpark. Call it dice-based role acquisition. 

Meanwhile, William Attia’s Caylus  (2005) and Uwe Rosenberg’s Agricola (2007) opened up a subgenre so large that the student has surpassed the master. Though worker placement looks very different from role selection, the core of the two mechanics is almost identical. In role selection you take a card (or tile) to mark your exclusive use of the special power of that a card. In worker placement you instead place a worker on a card (or board space) to mark your exclusive use of the special power. The only difference in the meeple — but what a difference it can make. The worker placement genre is so big nowadays, that it’s worth a series of articles on its own.

That brings us to Andreas Seyfarth’s other major contribution to the genre, a game by the name of San Juan (2004). In its own way it’s every bit as revolutionary as Puerto Rico and of course it’s the foundation of the role civilization genre.

A Look at San Juan: 2004-2014

When San Juan (2004) was created, the main purpose was to create a card-based version of the hit Puerto Rico (2002). However, it doing so it created a whole new sort of game.

The games in the role civilization genre tend to have four characteristics, all of which originated with San Juan.

1. Role Selection. The main mechanic of these games is the selection of actions through role cards. To be more specific, they all use Puerto Rico’s methodology of phase selection, where one person selections an action that can be repeated by the other players.

San Juan’s role selection is almost identical to Puerto Rico’s. A limited number of role cards are placed out in the middle of the table, then the players exclusively pick one each in order. As with Puerto Rico, players are both trying to grab the roles most important to them and guessing what the other players will do, with the hope of taking advantage of that.

The Events mini-expansion (2009) offered a neat variant on San Juan’s role selection play: events appear in the regular play deck and are then laid out as one-time roles. This introduces some neat variety to the game at some cost to its tight mechanics (which is probably why the mini-expansion wasn’t reprinted).

2. Card Building. Players also tend to receive handfuls of cards, separate from the roles that are selected. These cards are buildings (or planets or technologies) that can be constructed and they tend to each unlock a unique special power. These cards give the games much of their color, tactics, and strategy. When they’re built, they’re laid out in a tableau in front of the building player, creating the civilization of the genre’s name.

In San Juan players either build production buildings or violet buildings. The production buildings simplistically feed into the game’s card economy, while the violet buildings introduce the evocative and colorful elements of a civilization; they also provide special powers that can be leveraged into strategies and card combos. However, because the number of different violet buildings is pretty limited in San Juan, the opportunities for strategies and combos are more limited too.

The new buildings expansion (2009) improved this with almost a dozen new purple buildings. This mini-expansion was reprinted when the second edition of San Juan (2014) appeared.

3. Multipurpose Cards. Cards don’t have a single purpose. Though each one can be used to create its unique building, each one can also be used for another purpose. This creates unique dynamics in the games. First, the games feel more variable, because players only see a small portion of the cards used for their special-ability purpose in any game. Second, randomness is reduced, because players choose just a few cards  for their special ability purpose among many. Third, choice is also increased.

In San Juan, cards are money. You construct a building by discarding a number of additional cards from your hand equal to the size of the building. This makes the card management of the game very important, as players have to build up large card resources to build important buildings.

4. Card Economies. Economies are created where players gain and spend cards as a core part of the gameplay.

In San Juan players gain cards largely through roles. In fact, 4 of the 5 roles allow players to gain cards in different ways. Two of those roles create the production cycle, which is the core of the game’s economics (just like Puerto Rico). The Production role puts goods under production buildings (which is actually another use of the multipurpose cards), then the Trader role allows for the sale of those goods.

The tactics of this production cycle is similar to the tactics of Puerto Rico: players want to build production machinery, then benefit from the synergy of other players also taking production roles. As with Puerto Rico, there’s also some option for variation in strategy. If a player feels like the production cycle isn’t being used well, he might improve on his use of Councillor or Prospector instead. (Generally, though, the production cycle is extremely important in San Juan — which isn’t the case with some of his successors, which offered more variant strategies.)

Eleven years later it’s a little tough to remember how spectacularly innovative San Juan was. But, it was definitely a big deal in the world of eurogames. Part of this was its very successful abstraction of Puerto Rico’s gameplay to a card game that was much simpler and played in perhaps a third of the time.

However, San Juan also improved on some great mechanics: it moved the quickly maturing role selection mechanic into a new venue and it pushed hard on the idea of multipurpose cards, which has produced some great games since — perhaps most notably Carl Chudyk designs like Innovation (2010) and Red7 (2014).

San Juan’s biggest innovation though was the creation of a new category of game: the dense filler. Prior to its release, most games that played under an hour were quite light. San Juan proved that they could be dense and strategic despite their length. 

At the time, I felt like this would be a turning point for game design — that more dense fillers would evolve from the gameplay of San Juan and would soon fill the game store shelves. A few did, but never a lot. Ultimately the role civilization genre never caught on like I thought it might. It could be that it was too narrowly defined to have space for more than a few games, it might be that worker placement took all of the air out of the hobby just a year later and moved design away from dense fillers, or it could be that deckbuilders filled the niche a few years later with the release of Dominion (2008) — which was definitely another dense filler, even if some of its descendants weren’t. 

Nonetheless, I’m going to be happily talking about the three families of games that followed on after San Juan in the next few articles in this series.

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