Power-ups

Bolting abilities onto a game that has none

A limited use is one of the cheapest ways to make a simple game interesting. Give everybody one reroll, one swap and one steal for the whole game and a plain race becomes a game of timing: the reroll is worth most when you save it, and saving it is hard. The rule takes ten seconds to explain and needs no new components, which is why it turns up in so many games under so many names.

What it does need is bookkeeping, and that is where it falls down at a real table. People forget whether they have used theirs; somebody claims they have two left; an argument takes longer than the turn did. A token that visibly flips face down is the physical answer, and this is that token with the counting done for you and a log of who spent what, in case it is ever queried.

Hint tokens in a classroom

The classroom version is a hint token, and it is one of the better things you can give a class. Three hints each for a problem set changes the question from whether to ask for help to when to spend one, which is a far more useful thing for a child to be thinking about. It also makes asking legitimate: spending a token is not admitting defeat, it is using something you were given.

Set the refill to every round and each lesson starts fresh, or leave it at once a game and the tokens have to last. Other abilities that work the same way: a pass, an extra minute, a swap of questions, a chance to answer for a partner. Write your own, up to eight, and everybody in the room has the same set.

Shared abilities, not secret ones

Everybody here holds the same set. That is deliberate: an ability that only one person has is a role, and a role has to be dealt out in private rather than displayed on a shared screen. The secret role cards do that properly, with the pass-around screen that shows each person their own card and nobody else's.

For a resource that is a quantity rather than a count of uses, the energy meter is the page, and for abilities that arrive by chance rather than being held from the start, the event deck deals them out as the game goes on. Names come from the same shared list every tool here with players uses.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

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