What game mechanic can be used for evenly selecting other players but not yourself?

Question

I am looking for a game mechanic for a game I am designing, that would let players randomly select other players, but that by the end of the game all the players were selected equally.

My first instinct was the destiny deck from Cosmic Encounters. In that game there is a deck with a few cards representing each player. On their turn the player draws a card, and interacts with the selected opponent. The limitation of this solution is that sometimes players select themselves. Cosmic encounters solves this by having rules for how to interact with yourself, but my game lacks this. Even if i was to simply put the card on the bottom of the deck and draw a new one, there is a chance with the last card being left of the last player who must take the last turn. At this point selecting another player randomly would unbalance the game, giving them an extra time they are selected. Is there any other mechanic that can be used to solve this? (I am in no way set on using cards. Any mechanic would be OK)

Answer 1

If it is acceptable that the order of the players turns is different every round, you could have a deck with a card for each player, then draw the top card and let that player have the next card as target, and then the next player takes the third card as target. Finally the last player uses the first one as target. This way each player is the target exactly once in every round.

Answer 2

Use decks to indicate relative seating position instead of particular players.

So, for a four-player game, the deck would have cards saying:

• The player to your left.
• The player two seats to your left.
• The player three seats to your left.

Since you want each player to get drawn the same number of times, you'll need a copy of this deck for each player.

The advantages of this method over a deck of absolute positions are:

• You don't need to assign each player a number or color identity. For example, deep into a game of Puerto Rico, you don't want players to have to remember who was Player 3.
• You don't need to make a custom deck for each player, which slightly simplifies manufacturing and setup.

Answer 3

Sounds like a good use for a bag of items - pawns colored per player, tokens, whatever you prefer. When you need to randomly select an opponent, draw one. If it's yourself, set it aside so you won't draw it again, then add it back in after you finish drawing.

...but of course, the situation you're trying to create isn't exactly ideal. If you reach the last player, and the only option left is that player, you're stuck. If you're okay with creating a little bit of inequality in player selection in this somewhat rare case, you could with it in an approximate way - if you do get stuck, just refill the bag and draw again. Otherwise, if you can handle a tiny bit of extra information (which is theoretically public to players with good memories), you could just draw the last two on the second-to-last turn, and swap the order if necessary. This isn't foolproof; the last two could both be for one of the last two players... but it might be good enough - and you could fall back to refilling the bag.

Edit: One other way to deal with potentially getting stuck: if you're okay with this kind of information, just leave the pieces out after being drawn in stacks/rows, so that you know how many are left of each in the bag. This is again something that an observant player could already know. You can then figure out if you need to do something besides draw randomly at the end.

If you don't like any of this, I'm afraid there's not much you can do besides carefully constructing a deck at the beginning of the game.

Answer 4

If you're happy with the way everything is working except for this edge case, you could just make it so the last 2 cards are drawn simultaneously. The second to last player gets the first card drawn unless the last player would end up with him/herself, in which case they switch.

Answer 5

One possibility is a separate destiny deck for each player. If you make the game for 6 players, then each player would have a "destiny deck" that includes the other 5 players. In games with fewer than 6 players, then the player colors not used are removed from all the destiny decks (though even if they forget, they can be discarded when drawn during the game).

To facilitate faster game starts, it would be nice to color code each destiny deck. So the red player would have a red on the back, color of another player on the front.

Answer 6

Have one deck, with X cards for each player. When you need to select a random player draw a card from the deck. If you draw yourself, draw again. Shuffle any cards drawn for yourself back in and discard the card you drew for another player. Since each player draws from the same deck, in general everyone will get picked the same amount. The exception would be if one player is drawing from the deck more than other players the deck may eventually be JUST their cards. So you'll need to make sure that X is large enough to avoid a reshuffle unless a) everyone chooses other players evenly, or a small amount of unevenness is acceptable.