My Top 10 Favorite Games with Benefit Pairing

[@tteshera]

Rebuilding Seattle has benefit pairing with 3 "paired" benefits. You purchase buildings using cards (usually) which combine 1) a building tile which can convey both short and long-term benefits depending on how/where you place it in your neighborhood, 2) either a bump up on an amenity track or some other benefit when triggered by a later event, and 3) a bump up on a quality track or a benefit during either a later (profit) phase or end-of-game scoring. There's a large market of building cards with very different pairings which makes for very interesting decisions, especially when considering how/when the various benefits will trigger depending on other cards you've previously acquired.

[@jameystegmaier]

Nice! That's a lot of entangled benefits--very clever.

[@vincedemarco5585]

Great list today with a lot of games that I really enjoy. Not a mechanism that I’ve given a lot of thought to. Good job.

[@AndreasBolor]

Ku Ka King is a nice set collection game for kids where you simultaneously draft stacks of three cards. This seems to be a pretty pure benefit pairing game. Zooloretto, Coloretto and Triqueta are games where sets of 3 or more cards/tokens are created by the players and players can chose to add more or take and leave the round.

[@bradynooren1529]

First game I thought of is Harrow County, where one of your four actions is paired with a random token where the first person to take the action gets the benefit.

[@jameystegmaier]

That's one of my favorite action mechanisms from this year, and I totally forgot about it for this list--thank you for the reminder!

[@shockwavemasta]

I'd check out UMATAKA, a worker placement and rondel game where how many workers you place equal how many spaces you move on the rondel.

[@jameystegmaier]

That sounds great! Thanks for the recommendation.

[@StevenStJohn-kj9eb]

Drafting at the start of a game is always a fun mechanism, though it does give experienced players an advantage. Garphill does this in 2 of their games. In Viscounts of the West Kingdom, "hero" cards (which are more powerful than your starting deck and usually buff a major action in the game) are laid out paired with a card that lists your starting resources. These are drafted in reverse turn order. In Scholars of the South Tigris, resource cards are paired with "translators" which are cards that give the owner little benefits as other players use them; again these are drafted as pairs in reverse turn order. Not only is this a fun mechanism, it has 2 other benefits: 1) all of your starting resources are listed on the resource card you drafted, so you don't have to look up in the rule book what players get based on player count and turn order - you just draft the card. 2) it gives the last player in turn order the first decision of the game, which is a great way to overcome the sometimes bad feeling when you learn you are going last. This is such a fun mechanism that I sometimes use it as a variant in other games where this is possible but not a BTB rule. Scythe for example (faction/player board combos).

[@StevenStJohn-kj9eb]

I've heard the Castles of Mad King Ludwig mechanism called "incentivization". It's sometimes passive like in Castles and sometimes active (e.g., if you want a card in Century Spice Road deeper in the line you add cubes to the early cards; in Architects of the West Kingdom it's a coin). Great way to keep a card market from getting static.

[@jameystegmaier]

I do really like that system for determining your starting resources!

[@SoundsLikeZach]

I would put Men Nefer and Nova Roma on this list for their central board pairings

[@MadSlantedPowers]

I see Azul on the honorable mention list, but the only thing I can think of in that game that would be benefit pairing is getting the first player token.

[@jameystegmaier]

Azul's asymmetric pairings are the randomized pools of tiles from which you select. I agree that it's a looser connection than most of the other games on this list.