Why should only designers and developers work? Let the players take some of the workload! We labor day in and night out to make games balanced, playtest and fix, sand out all the rough edges and make the gaming experience as smooth as possible. But can we make the players work for us? YES.
Throughout the gaming world many mechanisms exist that allow the transfer of responsibility from the designer to the player.
Auctions
The simplest way to tell the players: "Do you really want this item? Pay more for it!"
That way the players have to balance each other and raise the price for good cards/tiles. The problem starts when there's a big difference in game experience. In that case an inexperienced player can really benefit another player on the table. It can be fixed by putting a starting bid that does not allow for a powerful item to be sold for cheap. So many games use auctions, so don't be lazy and look them up yourself (See? Transfer of work!)
What types of auctions are there? How many are there? check it out HERE.
Drafting
You have different items of different value and/or strength and let the players choose the ones they wish to grab. You can have your simple pick-and-pass style draft, or you can tweak it like in Inis where you can return a card and then choose 2 other cards. You can have a Solomon draft (I divide you choose), Winston draft (three piles draft) and more. You know what? Even placing your start positions in Catan is a draft with the locations being the items.
Fair Division
In here a player takes a portion of what they think they should get, the other players can take it from them and remove some items, saying: "Hold a minute, that's too much. I will take what you took but remove this item. Now this is fair." Read more about it HERE.
Thief's Market that I played recently uses this type of game-theory-based balancing act.
Descending Price
This is the simplest of the bunch. You have a row of items where the newest item is the most expensive and the oldest is the cheapest, then cards slide down and become cheaper with time. You can see it in famous games, like Small World or The Manhattan Project. The major difference is that in TMP there are "weaker" starting cards that disable the chance of a starting player getting a majorly strong card right at the get go for very little money. Small World on the other hand also has the next item on the list...
The "Let-them-fight-it-out"
Rob Daviau was asked about Risk Legacy why the winner always got the benefit for the next game and he said (rephrasing here...) that the benefits put a target on that player's back. This means that a leader in the game will get "ambushed" by the other players. You get this quite automatically in any game in which conflict is a major part.
Take these mechanisms and make those players work!
Have fun, Pini!
In the picture, a mech fighter making the players work.
