I've always wanted a decent Civ-style computer game that did that, it would solve the "diplomatic AI in a zero-sum game makes no sense" problem.

Careers has way too much of a luck component and not enough direct competition for serious gamers but for a light family game it's basically a not terrible version of Monopoly or Life.

Edit: also from the designer of Careers: invented language Loglan. I guess there's something to the "language as cooperative game" theory.

Your response reminded me of another theme common among designer boardgames: the manipulation of randomness. It's common to see non-replacement probabilities like drawing from a stack of cards or a bag of chits, and less common to see unmodifiable die rolls. Non-replacement randomness is an easy way to include a strategic component to what could otherwise be boring die rolls. If dice are used, often it's possible to manipulate the results post-roll a la The Castles of Burgundy and many other Stefan Feld games.

Twitch controls and player elimination are still huge with video games. Battle royale modes and MOBAs are very in, but any multiplayer game I remember playing a lot of was usually centered around this. FPS games, RTS games, fighting games, they are all about your reaction speed. A lot of modes will at least let you play the whole match of a game, but still require a heavy amount of confrontation and twitch gameplay. Turn-based games are a slog to play multiplayer though, so I can understand why that's the case.

There are a lot of people who enjoy twitch board games though, games like nerts or slamwich (both of which I'm not a huge fan of), so maybe the opposite is true of board games: that there's an untapped market out there for this style. I do really enjoy Spot-It for some reason however :)

I'm 31 now, and my twitch reaction is nowhere near what it was in highschool, yet Overwatch offers a whole bunch of characters (around half) who don't require (or don't have) twitch / reaction gameplay. There are characters who heal the other characters just by being in their vicinity, characters with beam weapons which automatically lock on to opponents, etc.

If you die, you are out of the game for 6-10 seconds as a penalty, but not "player elimination" in the board game sense.)

The game simulates the rise and fall of civilisations, and a key part of the game is knowing when to call it quits with your current civilization and start playing with a new one. You skip a turn whenever you do that, so you can easily shoot yourself in the foot if your timing is off.

If you liked M.U.L.E., you will love Settlers of Catan.

But anyone with 8 or more cards has to discard half rounded down.

Take a look at Uwe Rosenberg’s games, particularly Caverna or Agricola.

Patchwork is great two player game, by that same designer, that I can even play with my mother. She's not particularly into games either.

My game of the year so far is Yokohama. If you like worker placement, I imagine you would like this.

Counter-Strike does, but each round is very short. What MOBA features player elimination? All the MOBAs I can think of have fairly short respawn times.

I suppose that RTS games with >2 players have this, but they are mostly know for 1v1 modes.

Oh..one great example is Bomberman, although some games have dead Bombers fling bombs from the side.

It's a team game, always 4 v 4. You can still see the game and talk to your teammates when you are dead. Everyone die within a minute usually. A death has not much impact -except a severe sudden disadvantage- since the entire team win or loose, there is no individual play.

Due to the game mechanics of 'aim time' this somewhat eliminates the huge advantages of ping time and those with super human reaction times.

Doing well requires good team strategy as well as deep understandings of tank mechanics such as armor weak spots, tank positioning to increase chances of bounces etc and also map strategy.

Therefore, the great players aren't those who have developed better reaction times, they are the ones who have developed deep knowledge and skill around the games many maps and 300+ tanks

It's the same for FPS at high level. Learn the map and the probably position for anytime at anytime.

They don't spend a lot of time aiming and moving when already knowing where the enemy will show up. Just have to click.

To give a good illustration, top players could almost play blindfolded.

Yes, there are tactical positions, but you can't just camp for most of them. They maps are large enough that your team must be dynamic enough to adapt.

You also can't just click without aiming. Damaging a tank always requires aiming, even if you know where they may show up. Many tanks can only be damaged effectively in small weak areas, depending on the gun of your own tank. This can require that you actually focus for several seconds on the spot you are trying to hit to get a good enough aim to actually hit it.

Twitch control yes, but elimination not really, in multiplayer video games it's timeout rather than elimination e.g. in CS you wait for the round's end (2~3mn usually), in MOBAs you have a time-out of variable length (caps out at ~2mn in DOTA).

And when there's an elimination system (e.g. Hearthstone Arena) you're not stuck waiting around for other people to finish, you can just go do something else (in-game).

Actual old-board-game-style player elimination is very rare in video games, otherwise it wouldn't be a defining feature of pubg.

Doesn't help when you want to stick with a group of players (e.g. friends, team) and brings its own kind if issues.

Can't do that when I'm with my friends for the evening.

Where boardgames solve it by making the "time to elimination" as long as possible relative to the game, videogames solve this by allowing players to return to the game quickly.

Elimination deathmatch modes exist, but they're usually an optional mode, and even then calibrated so matches take no more than a few minutes.

But saying PUBG model is ubiquitous? No, the die and respawn is in fact the common model, and I don't see that changing outside of battle royale style games.

> "Lack of a player elimination mechanic" is nearly ubiquitous in action games

Unless it is poolday.

  * you can do what you want, but success chance is random
  * action choice is random, success is deterministic

Obviously luck is not necessary for a good game, but I do think it makes certain elements of game design easier.

The dynamic you describe is my experience in approximately 20% of 4 player games, maybe 30% of 2 player games.

Really skilled Race players see a wide variety of paths to victory in my experience, so if someone has a lead on one strategy, you pursue a different strategy and it’s not usually not obvious who will win.

The first one makes everyone rich and causes rents just go back and forth for ages. The second one makes it take much longer to get monopolies on property groups.

The strategy everybody follows is basically "buy everything you can, and decline all bad trades". Buy everything, of course, to prevent others from making full property groups. Since there is no such thing as an equal trade, no trades are made.

As you can imagine, since nobody has full property groups, the game takes forever, it's terribly boring, and pretty much boils down to luck.

This is because if two players complete two monopolies first, they are basically guaranteed to be among the final two at a 4+ person table, as their early monopolies will quickly drain the other two or more players who refuse to make these trades and are therefore wasting time walking around, during which they’ll grow weaker and weaker due to your monopolies.

Knowing this, it almost doesn’t matter if the trade is equal, so long as you’re trading for a post-jail monopoly (pre-jail tends to be low value), because the winner, once you and your opponent have your improvements, will be decided by chance, as one of the two monopolists will bankrupt one of the other, more behind players first, and then take all their money and property, almost certainly netting themselves several more monopolies and funds for improvements.

Somehow a particular set of house rules got popular enough to make everyone hate monopoly. It turns a game of high stakes, high commitment resource scuffling, into a game where you either get knocked out fast or are given enough free assets that you can only lose in the slowest, most agonizing way possible.

It's kind of funny how a game designed to heavily favor aggression to make a point had that entire point negated by house rules.

An interesting read