Exploration mechanics - revisited

 A few months ago I posted some thoughts I was having about exploration mechanics, specifically for the new deity I was adding to Deities & Demigods. In the end, I decided for that game to go with the higher level action allowing you to explore more than once at a time, rather than drawing multiple tiles from which to choose (representing better preparedness, luck, or more time searching).

Back to the drawing board?

More recently I have been asked to consult on a game, and this game has a different exploration mechanism. In the first version I saw (which I understand was far from the designer's first version) had face down tiles, and player's avatars had some movement allowance, and you'd move however many spaces (skipping over face down tiles if you like), then flip up the tile you ended up on. I commented on this s it's a personal pet peeve of mine: I hate when a game asks me to make a choice without giving me any way to pick between the different options.

The latest version of the game is structurally pretty different, but still has the same exploration mechanism, and it really gets my goat! So the other day I racked my brain and posted on Twitter and a couple of Discord channels looking for various exploration mechanics people had seen and liked, hoping to find something that I felt worked better than having to randomly pick between a few different face down things every turn (even if it's only really in the early game, until the map is mostly face up).

Crowdsourcing mechanisms

Most of the replies I got were not that helpful (and I wasn't particularly specific about the game, so I expected that), but in the end I think my crowdsourcing bore fruit, as somebody mentioned the way resources get revealed in Gold West. I had never thought of that as an exploration mechanism before, but I think in this case it would really work well. 

Gold West style exploration

The way Gold West works is that you have a board full of face-down tiles, with a few of them face-up. On each player's turn, they will claim one of the face-up tiles, which confer resources (in that game it's important that you get resources every turn, so that's mandated by rule). When you claim a tile, you then turn face up each tile adjacent to that one, making more resource options available. This easily works well with an exploration theme, imagine walking through a dark dungeon or cavern, where the surrounding area (1 tile radius) is illuminated by your torch - it's just like that! So you can see what's nearby (not just where you're standing), but the information horizon is still limited. Starcraft and Warcraft do this same thing as well.

This solves all the problems I was having with the exploration in the game I'm consulting on: It allows a player to go to the tile they want (given a subset to choose from), and it maintains a feeling of exploration. In addition, it works to kind of gate the mind- and late-game tiles, because currently you're allowed to just walk past face down tiles and skip them, and that feels anticlimactic to me.

Keep this one in the back pocket

I have not yet pitched this idea to the designer, and it's possible he prefers the feel of the current mechanism better. I will admit that I might not be in line with the target audience for that particular type of thing, and some players might prefer the feeling of discovery when you flip the tile and find out what you'll get for the turn. If that's the case, I'm going to be sure to keep this mechanism in my back pocket for the next time I'm looking for an exploration mechanism in a game!