No-Use Bonus

The providing of bonuses to unselected actions to make them more like to be used in the future.

Some actions may be underused in games where players can choose between different actions. This may be because of specific races between players or that the game state currently makes some actions less valuable. To balance the use between all actions, those actions selected by no player during a turn may receive additional resources or bonuses as extra incentives for players to chose the actions next turn.

Examples

Puerto Rico (and San Juan) have a No-Use Bonus through the placement of a coin on the actions not chosen during a turn. Agricola has a weak for of No-Use Bonus in that some of the possible actions produce resources every turn, so those not chosen one turn will have double or more the "normal" amount of resources.

History

An updated version of the pattern ... that was part of the original collection in the book Patterns in Game Design.

or

New pattern created in this wiki.