Hey, I thought of something to do with Lonely Mechanic #1: build a Rube Goldberg device.

Get a piece of paper and pencil and assign them to a player. Figure out what you want to do (eg turn on a light switch) and find something that loosely corresponds to that goal in the NAICS list (eg 3351101 5, “Electric lamp bulbs and tubes (including sealed beam lamp bulbs)”). Generate another extant ID number, this time at random (315191W 5, “Knit outerwear, nsk, total”), and have your device triggered by some event involving that product.

When you’ve come up with a good use, have someone draw that step, write a quick description as (1) at the bottom, and pass to the left. Then either increment or decrement one digit of the generated ID number by two, OR roll a ten-sided die to replace that digit, trying to get closer to your ultimate goal (in our example, we could do it in one increment, four decrements and a reroll for the W). Obviously, the player holding the paper for any given step would have to draw and describe the use case the group came up with. This might work better with players who can’t draw.

Okay, premise: card games are small-scale economies driven by the consistent input of random values and the idea that certain of these values are worth more than face in specific contexts (eg as a sum of 21, in a set of four, or in response to a Jack). I’m talking about trump (playing) card games, here, not CCGs.

Now, a question: are all board games essentially set dressing on top of a mildly complex graph with a simple economy, driven by consistent random inputs?

I imagine that Reiner Knizia would say yes, and with good reason. There’s certainly evidence for it–Risk, Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Catan, Sorry. Heck, Candyland. Monopoly and its thousand licensed knockoffs demonstrate the viability (economically, anyway) of separating setting from rules.

Then again, chess, checkers, Stratego and Terrace have no economy and no randomness. If we accept that my description of board games above is accurate some significant percentage of the time, these obviously need their own category–but is that because they’re nonrandom, or because they have no economy? (Or do we accept that description at all?)