Game Mechanic Compendium
A research catalog of game mechanics across video games, tabletop role-playing games, and board and card games. Every entry is coded against the same vocabulary of categories, design properties, and player-experience effects, with examples, provenance, and sources, so mechanics can be compared, filtered, graphed, and exported.
Read the methodology before interpreting codings. Download the data as JSON or CSV.
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Families
Resource management
Acquiring, holding, converting, and spending finite quantities that constrain what a player can do.
Chance & risk
A randomiser (dice, decks, tables, generators) or a deliberate wager against known odds is the identity of the mechanic.
Progression & capability
What a player or avatar is able to do and how that capability set changes within or across sessions, including asymmetric starting capability.
Space & position
Position, adjacency, territory, or line of sight on a spatial representation is the operative state.
Information & hidden state
Who knows what: concealment, revelation, and asymmetry of game state between players or between player and system.
Interaction & exchange
The core act is a transaction or contest between players over shared or transferable things: trading, bidding, drafting, voting.
Time & action structure
Partitioning play into units (turns, phases, real time) and rationing how many or which actions may be taken within them.
Action resolution
Adjudicating whether an attempted action succeeds and how the result is graded and interpreted, independent of which randomiser (if any) is used.
Narrative & choice
Structuring authored or emergent story: branching, consequence, reputation, and persistence of decisions across sessions.
Puzzle & pattern
The central challenge is recognising, assembling, or deducing patterns under constraints, where a solution is in principle determinable.
Ways in
Abilities
Ability archetypes such as Fireball, Blink, and Heal: the games that have each, how it behaves there, and what gates it.
Crafting
Crafting archetypes such as salvage, rerolling an affix, and tiered upgrades: the games that have each, how the operation works there, and what it requires.
Scaling
Vertical, horizontal, and normalizing scaling: how capability grows in magnitude, broadens at roughly constant power, or is held level across players, enemies, and releases, and what it is keyed to in each game.
Synergies
Set bonuses, elemental reactions, tribal payoffs, team attacks, and other ways two or more parts are worth more together than apart, by how they combine and what connects them in each game.
Weapons
Charge shots, returning throws, shotguns, reloading, weapon durability, reach, and other weapon behaviours, classes, rules, and properties, by how they reach the target and what limits their use in each game.
Game systems
Day-night cycles, dynamic weather, nemesis systems, NPC schedules, wanted levels, survival loops, AI directors, and other composite systems, by what they simulate and the mechanics each game combines in them.
Browse table
Every entry in one sortable, filterable table of structured fields.
Relationship graph
Parent, child, and related links between mechanics, coloured by family.
Timeline
Every mechanic on one time axis, from its earliest documented use through its dated examples.
Patterns
Cross-tabulations of the coded properties and effects, with association strength and lift.
Maps
The coding space in two dimensions, effects that occur together, media combinations, and earliest documented uses over time.
Design properties
Distribution of each coded property and the entries behind each value.
Experience effects
Which mechanics tend to produce tension, mastery, negotiation, downtime, and more.
Bibliography
Every work cited across the compendium, with the entries that cite it.
Methodology
How entries are chosen, coded, and sourced, and how to add one.
Recently updated (feed)
Crowd Blending
A player's figure looks the same as computer-controlled figures around it, so the player survives by acting like them while an opponent watching the crowd must pick that figure out by its behaviour
Difficulty Settings
A rule-level parameter, chosen before play or adjusted by the system during it, scales enemy strength, resources, or margins for error so that the same content can be played at several levels of challenge.
Equipment and Loadouts
Before or between engagements the player selects a limited set of items, weapons, or abilities from a larger pool into fixed slots or under a budget, and that selection defines what the character can do until it is changed.
Experience Levels
Characters accumulate experience points from play and, on crossing fixed thresholds, gain a discrete level that grants a bundle of improvements such as more hit points, better odds, and new abilities.
Hunt Games
Two sides on one board are unequal in number, movement and goal, so that one or a few strong pieces try to capture the others or escape while many weaker pieces, unable to take them, try to hem them in
One Versus Many
One player runs the opposition against all the other players, who cooperate to defeat them; the two sides play by different rules, the solo player is a competitor rather than a facilitator, and their position is not secretly logged.