Properties › Interaction
Interaction: mixed
Canonical implementations routinely span two or more modes.
27 mechanics are coded this way.
Alliances
Players agree among themselves, outside any rules enforcement, to coordinate future actions against other players, with the understanding that the agreement can be broken whenever breaking it pays.
Area Control
Players place or move pieces into regions of a map and are rewarded for holding regions, by sole occupation or by having more presence there than any opponent, when control is checked.
Aspects and Tags
Short free-text phrases written on a character, item, or scene, such as Ex-Cop or On Fire, carry mechanical weight: invoking one that fits the situation adds dice or a bonus, and some can be turned against their holder.
Ball Possession
One side at a time holds the right to advance and score with a single contested object, and that right transfers by turnover, by scoring, or by a rule such as a boundary or a violation, so play alternates between attack and defence.
Base Building
Players spend gathered resources to place persistent structures at a home site, each of which unlocks units, production, storage, or defence, so the layout and growth of the base is the player's capability over the session.
Clue Giving
One player who knows a secret word or target composes a clue under rules that forbid the obvious, and teammates must guess the target from it, with the quality of the clue deciding the score.
Commodity Currency
The standard medium of exchange between players is a consumable item with its own use in play, so every trade weighs use value against exchange value and every use removes money from circulation
Contract Bidding
Before play, players compete to declare how much they will achieve, such as a number of tricks, the highest declaration becomes a binding contract, and scoring rewards fulfilling it and penalises falling short.
Deduction
Players uncover a hidden fact fixed at setup by making queries whose answers eliminate possibilities, racing to be the first to state the solution with certainty.
Dexterity
Physical manipulation of components, such as flicking, stacking, balancing, or throwing, resolves an action directly, so success depends on motor skill rather than on a randomiser or a chosen option.
GM Moves
The facilitator's interventions are codified as a named list of moves, triggered when a player misses a roll, when the table looks to the facilitator, or when a golden opportunity arises, and governed by a stated agenda and principles.
Hidden Movement Pursuit
One player moves secretly across a shared map, recording each move privately, while the other players move openly and try to corner them using scheduled reveals and clues left by each move.
Hidden Roles
Each player is secretly assigned an allegiance or identity that sets their win condition, and an informed minority works against an uninformed majority who must identify them before being eliminated.
Lane Pushing
Computer-controlled units spawn on a timer at each base and advance along fixed lanes toward the opposing base, while players fight alongside them to break the towers guarding each lane and to defend their own
Loot Distribution
A cooperating group allocates each shared reward, such as a boss drop or a treasure hoard, among its members by a stated rule, such as ranked need and greed rolls, turns, a leader's award, banked points or per-player loot
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.
Real-Time Play
Players act whenever they are able rather than in turns, so wall-clock time rations actions and speed of perception and execution determine who acts first and how often.
Referee Adjudication
The success and consequences of a declared action are decided by a designated neutral person applying judgement under published guidance, rather than by a table or randomiser alone, and that ruling is binding on play.
Semi-Cooperative
Players compete for an individual win but share a loss condition driven by the game, so if the common threat prevails every player loses and each must weigh feeding the shared defence against advancing alone.
Shared Holdings
A group pools assets in storage it holds in common, behind access rights set by rank or role, and any member with access can withdraw them, within any limit the rules set
Shared Narration
Authority to narrate what happens in the fiction is distributed among all players by rule, passing by turn, by interruption, or by spent currency, so no single facilitator owns the story.
Side Conversion
A player who is caught or defeated joins the side that caught them for the rest of the round, so that one side grows as the other shrinks until every player is on one side or a time limit ends the round
Side Swapping
A match is split into innings, rounds or halves, and the sides exchange roles or ends between them, so that each side plays both parts and the result combines what each scored in every part
Simultaneous Action Selection
All players choose their actions for the round in secret and commit them at once, after which every choice is revealed and resolved together, so no player can react to another's decision within the round.
Team Play
Players are grouped by rule into fixed teams that win or lose together, with scores pooled and often with differentiated roles inside the team, so the contest is between groups rather than individuals.
Traitor
In an otherwise cooperative game, one player or possibly none is secretly assigned to oppose the group, so loyal players must pursue the shared goal while judging whether setbacks are bad luck or sabotage.
Trick-Taking
Players each contribute one card from hand to a round called a trick under a follow-suit rule, the highest card by rank or trump wins the trick, and the number or content of tricks won is scored.
Coding guideline for interaction
Solo: operates identically regardless of other players. Indirect: players affect each other only through shared state without targeting (blocking a worker space, depleting a market). Direct: targeted effects on a specific opponent. Cooperative: a shared goal is intrinsic to the mechanic (hidden roles is not cooperative, whatever its information coding; team-based is mixed). Mixed: canonical implementations routinely span two or more. Opponents controlled by the game system are not players: a mechanic whose canonical form pits one player against the system codes solo; code direct only when the canonical form targets another human player.