Entangled Decisions

 A while ago (gosh, I think it's been over a year now!) I was mentioning how enamored I was with a particular game mechanism. I had mentioned using it in Keeping up with the Joneses (and even kind of promised a blog post on them), and I brought it up on Twitter as well.

I've always named multi-use cards as my favorite game mechanism (the Rondel is up there as well), but lately a new challenger has arisen... I'm starting to think Entangled Decisions are making a run at my favorite mechanism.

Multi-use cards are great because of the inherent opportunity cost every time you play one. They're compact and versatile, and can do almost anything! Entangling two unrelated decisions though-that's a compact way to ratchet up tension, agony, and decision space without adding content.

Entangling decisions is where you take 2 things a player might want (or not want), and connect them such that choosing one necessarily means choosing the other. This is sort of the opposite of an opportunity cost, if you think about it. When you play a multi-use card for one effect, then by definition you are giving up access to its other effects. When you make an entangled decision, it's like playing a multi-use card and being forced to take all of its effects, like it or not.

Cascadia is a great, pure example of what I'm referring to as an entangled decision. First you pair independent tiles and tokens, then choose which tile-token pair you want. "I like THIS tile, but I want THAT token!" makes for an agonizing decision with very little design effort.

Kingdomino does this a little bit as well by having you draft a tile plus turn order, which sometimes means you're drafting this turns tile and next turn's tile. You might take a less good tile this turn in order to go first next turn to get an even better tile.

Coimbra's dice draft counts too. You might want a die because it's a 5, or you might want the die because it's green.

Concordia's cards appear to have a similar feel: you might want the card for the action, or you might want the scoring condition... though to be honest, I've always felt like those scoring conditions are a little same-y, so I don't usually feel like I'm buying a sub-par card just for the scoring condition. Also, in that game if you have a bad card, you can just choose to not play it, so you don't lose much by taking a card for the scoring condition.

In Keeping Up With The Joneses, I entangled the effect of the tile you draft with the amount you'll move on the rondel (and therefore the effect of the rondel space you'll get). If both of those things are compelling, then it should create agonizing decisions between 3 pairs of effects, while still being a fairly simple game: just choose one of these 3 options. 

What games have you played that make good use of entangling two (or more) disparate, independent decisions?