In a good board game, mechanics fit together smoothly. They add up to bigger things. You can play the game, not the mechanics, with a intuitive connection between the two. In a not-so-good board game, mechanics seem gimmicky and stiff. They work against the game being fun, or at least can be annoying. The differences between the good and the not-so-good can be a matter of taste and preference, but the skill of the game designer matters quite a bit.

One enduring mechanism is money. Money in the most absolute sense is pure, a single currency that you accumulate and spend on things over the course of the game. In the mainstream: Monopoly. Pay Day. Life. In our neck of the woods: Acquire, Age of Renaissance, Axis & Allies, Puerto Rico, Iron Dragon, and many, many more. Sometimes in games with money, the money is the victory condition, but that’s not always the case.

There’s also games where the money is a little bit funny. It’s not quite pure, or it plays a larger role. One good example is Advanced Civilization, where the money chits are flipped over and also used as population chits, which is one of the core mechanics that makes it such a fascinating play. Another example is Illuminati, where money plays a tactical role: it matters not only how much you have, but where you put it, and where you spend it from. A third is Tigris & Euphrates, where the tiles are used like money/power in conflicts, but only as a secondary role to board development.

There’s also (lots of) games where there’s money-like things, and we tend to call them “resources”. Usually, resources walk and talk like money, but are tied in with the game’s theme and have other special rules attached to them. The commodities of Settlers of Catan are a perfect example. And in fact, yes, resources in games typically come in multiple sets or flavors or colors. If they didn’t they would just be money! Accumulation and use of resources, conversions among different resource types, using resources to achieve victory conditions, this is the core of most board games. Many games that have actual money also have resources, such as Power Grid, but resources are barely ever fungible – if they were, you could just use money!

Finally, we get to the category of games that has money in multiple colors. It’s hard to call ‘em resources because they are usually completely abstract, they don’t represent anything more than units of capability to do something. “Mana” in Magic: the Gathering (yes, not a board game, I know) is a classic example. It’s just money in five flavors (six, if you count “colorless”) and the entire game revolves around what these colors can and can’t do with one another.

The Many Colors of Money thing is an easy starting point for a game design – maybe too easy. An annoying series of accounting hurdles does not necessarily equate with an evening well spent in leisure. Hence my introduction to this article – it takes great care to apply this idea in a way that adds up to fun and intuitive play.

Two examples from my recent gaming.

Ticket to Ride has seven colors of money, the “tickets” that you collect and then spend to purchase routes on the map. I mean, there’s no good reason why one should need “pink” tickets to go from Helena to Salt Lake City. But I guess that the abstract-ness of this idea is balanced by having a nice geographic map to play on. Also helping Ticket’s case is that the basic play is very simple, and it’s all about the ticket colors. So the color of money here is front and center, it’s not mixed in with too many other rules. Most people I know like Ticket quite a bit and are not annoyed by the arbitrary money scheme. It feels like you are having fun when you build up a big handful of ticket cards, scheming over how and when to splash down and claim your routes.

Alhambra has four colors of money, and the game is built on the premise that you’ll somehow enjoy not ever having the right colors you need to do the things you want to do. You use money to buy building tiles and place them in your growing palatal structure. But, the buildings all come from the same single stockpile and are randomly placed into different “sell” blocks during play, which controls which color of money you need to use to buy it with. So the arbitrary money color scheme requires additional mechanics just to make the distinction worthwhile. To me, this sticks out far worse than the colored map routes in Ticket to Ride. Sure, Alhambra can be a fun and competitive game, but the core competition is all about doing a better job that your opponents in managing a fairly annoying and artificial system of using money to buy things. The money cards have little symbols to match their colors, and perhaps somewhere in the rules there’s an explanation about why we have these four colors of money. It doesn’t even matter, because if it fails in game play, it’s a dud. This is a provisional heap of criticism because this game is fairly new to our group and maybe we’re yet to discover some brilliant facet of the play experience that makes it all come together…

I’m not sure whether my group plays any other game that uses Colors of Money as a play mechanic. Are there other good examples out there? Are any of them worth checking out?