As long as players can continue to encounter meaningfully different game states, they will enjoy making decisions on the fly. If they decide that they have seen everything your game has to offer, this is the moment when it transforms from chess to tic-tac-toe.
Quotes about decisions
I’m not sure I have a favourite mechanic, as generally I try not to think in those terms. A lot of my games employ a simple two-action per turn format. I think it is important to present players with simple choices that have complex consequences.
These are not just complex decisions; these are interesting ones. Interesting decisions make for interesting games.
Gaming is both about freedom and constraints—it’s about making free decisions under strictly constraining rules, while real life is about making decisions of which we don’t know if they are really free, under extremely mysterious rules.
In every case, however, wargames are helping their creators and participants to learn something useful and important about the decision-making environments they represent.
