Well done, Shannon!

I don’t know that I’d call your sample “Invisible” mechanisms invisible; I think they’re quite overt:  Your rank in the game dictates play order.  Clearly (One would hope, at least) the trailer will receive certain advantages.  (Roads & Boats makes fascinating use of a static, but changeable turn order:  When someone decides she wants a different position in the turn order, the last player gets dibs, ultimately leaving the first player with the leftovers.) That nomenclature quibble aside, I think I share your preferences.  I tend to savor games laden with trade-off choices.  Two fine examples are Vino and Power Grid.

In Vino (veritas!), turn order is determined instantaneously each round by your profits for that round – lowest first to highest last.  Of course, you choose how high your profits are (within your ability to sell that much, of course), and the later you are in the turn order, the more control you have over where you’ll be in the turn order for next round.  Ah, but of course, the trade-offs have only begun.  Yes, you want higher profits, but earlier in the turn order; however, the higher your profits, the lower your per-cask price when selling.  Selling only one cask maximizes your per-cask profit, but also maximizes the number of vineyards you’ll sacrifice in producing that cask.  Well, you get the idea of the delightful difficulty of these choices.  One of the biggest advantages of going early in the turn order is that you get first dibs on buying vineyards in a territory… after those with extant vineyards there finish buying (assuming they selected that region as one of the two regions where they’d be buying).  Interestingly, Vino can have small or large win margins, but you often don’t realize it until the end draws suddenly nigh.  Good, good stuff.

Power Grid – well, it’s a masterpiece of trade-offs.  As usual, you obviously want to be in the lead; however, being in the lead definitely means you get the worst prices on fuels.  Being in last not only gives you the lowest fuel prices, it can occasionally get you a miraculously uninflated price on a superb power plant that becomes available at just the right moment.  Oh, but that’s not all!  The further back you are, the earlier you get to build connections to cities, and connections are a very limited at any given time.  To spin things back the other way, the trailer’s lower income may seriously inhibit the number of connections he can afford.  One final stab of fun in Power Grid:  Leading in the game does not necessarily win you the game, because other players can usurp the fuels you need, escalating their prices beyond what you can afford, or perhaps completely exhausting them.  This is crucial, because the winner is the player who fuels the most plants on the last turn.  I have seen otherwise “3rd place” players win on occasion.  Superb!

Multiple equivalent goals are another favorite way of handling “catch-up”:  Mr. Jack is a good (albeit 2-player) example of this:  It is very possible for the detective to have whittled away Jack’s cover, and Jack still surprise the detective by escaping on the eve of certain incrimination.

The popular “food stamps” variant for The Settlers of Catan is a fascinating catch-up mechanism.  It’s overt, but seems so very reasonable and elegant.

One of my favorite games is Maharaja.  This efficiency game is brutal when you make mistakes, yet gives you ample opportunity to get back into the game.  In my first game, I screwed up my actions for the first turn.  Annoying, no profit, but march onward.  Second turn was another waste.  What was my problem?  Third turn, I mistook the city/advisor colors, and my fiendish plan proved utterly foolish.  By this time, I was disgusted with myself.  In a game with a maximum of 10 rounds, but often finishes in 7, I’d wasted* three rounds – 30% to 43% of the game.  Additionally, we were playing with the Guru and his extra action credits – not recommended for new players.  When the game ended, I was a mere half-turn away from winning it myself, having gotten into a strong second place.  So, the beating I dealt myself by throwing myself into the merciless cogs of Maharaja’s engine allowed me to really flex the game’s “catch-up” mechanisms, which are equally available to all the players.  So, that’s a lot of chatter without having mentioned the mechanisms:  You can mess with the order in which the maharaja will visit the cities, and thus evaluate players’ performances and reward them with nutritious cash.  You can change your role, which alters your special power and place in the turn order (mid-round!).  My own mother proved in her first game that staying first in the turn order (which confers no other special power) the whole game can give you the win, but I’ve more often seen it fail to do so.  An important aspect of the turn order is that the earlier you are in the turn order, the more easily you can secure high value for your buildings; however, the later you are in the turn order, the more easily you can build for cheap, or perform whatever role acrobatics you need, with the confidence that you will be able to do it.  The diversity and swappability of the roles generate some form of controlled chaos that is the catch-up mechanism for Maharaja.  I believe the game favors lateral thinkers, and a person who doesn’t fully comprehend that building palaces is the only real progress they can make is going to lose, and lose badly unless none of the players “get it”, and the game goes to 10 rounds with no one having built their seven palaces.  Given a few plays, though, I think even that crowd will become more efficient, competitive, and manipulating of the game’s metaphorical knobs and toggles, and flex its marvelous engine.

* Important footnote:  As I recall, my “waste” included building a central palace, which I guarantee was a foothold to get me back up the cliff off which I’d tossed myself.

I may be unusual, but I have no problem with most “beat on the leader” games.  It often feels like the most natural catch-up mechanism a game can provide.  I play with an experienced group, so it’s understood that each player has a responsibility to smack the leader if it can be done without compromising the player’s position.  And that last proviso is a key one, as it means that being in first isn’t necessarily a kiss of death.

I love Funkenschlag/Power Grid, but the way in which the leading players are deliberately hindered does feel a bit artificial.  The struggle to AVOID being in first can be comical at times.  While I don’t mind the catch-up mechanisms in games like these, I think I prefer the more honest method of letting the players themselves handle the leaders.

One of the reasons I think El Grande is so brilliant is because of how it takes the classic American warlike compete-for-areas game and takes away most of the whack-the-leader-fest you traditionally see. You can’t win without pursuing your own interests, i.e., the efficient control of areas. You can’t efficiently control areas if you’re just gunning for the first place guy. The game will often give you choices about who to take points away from, and all other things being equal you take them from the leader, of course. But things are rarely very equal, and doing what’s best for yourself has to come first. So people do take points from the leader when it’s convenient to do so, but it’s a long, long way from the ridiculous exercise it is in, say, Vinci.

I think the best trailer catch-up tool is simply not to give any advantages to whoever is ahead. Many German games do in fact fall into this category - there is no intrinsic or accrued advantage to being in first place (and that certainly includes El Grande). In a game like Age of Steam, where winning is money (sort of) and money makes more money, you need something. In Blue Moon City or Ra, where winning is points and those points don’t get you anything in-game, a “catch-up” mechanic is unnecessary as you simply have to play each turn to the best of your ability, and having a good turn 1 doesn’t give you any advantage towards having a good turn 9 (or whatever).

In Power Grid, I’ve always felt that all the turn order does is alter the calculation of who is “winning”. The player leading on the city track on the turn before the last is unlikely to win, so clearly he’s not “winning”. Getting ahead on the city track is not necessarily doing you any good, so it’s hard to equate that track with “winning”. Money or income would be a better metric, but connected cities and income aren’t always correlated. While I like Power Grid, I find its “catch up” rules very inelegant and have never liked them much.

"Beat on the leader” just helps #2 to win, so really doesn’t solve the problem the player at the bottom has; unless it is a two-player game of course. :)

One good example is (Advanced) Civilization: Just wait for Civil War, since the player in the rear will probably be the beneficiary. Now, if this is not the lead player, ah well, them is the breaks.

Vinci is a traditional whipping boy for the “bash the leader” syndrome and sure, you can focus on the leader if you want to.  But I don’t see it as being ridiculously easy to do.  As a matter of fact, I played just last week and there wasn’t a tremendous amount of leader bashing at all.  The leaders played it smart, chose their civs well, and gave their opponents few openings to get at them.  It was hardly the up and down affair the game is usually accused of being.

As for leader bashing just setting up the second place player, folks have to be smart about that as well.  It’s a balancing act and isn’t always easy, but you don’t have to always make a mad rush for the player in first.  With a little bit of subtlety, you can try to bring all the leaders back to the pack equally and maximize your chances for a come from behind win.

Honestly, I have to say that while Power Grid’s catch-up mechanism is interesting, it is far from elegant or intuitive.  It definitely falls under the “obvious” part of your categorization.  A lot of the time the game is spent on people vying for the last position, so much so that becomes silly as Larry had mentioned.  The flip-flop of turn order is also one of the hardest aspects to teach to new players, and I still have to remind myself of it every once in a while.  Clever, yes, but far from streamlined.

Jason, I don’t know if you’ve ever played Funkenschlag, the original version of Power Grid, but the disadvantages the leader is saddled with are even greater in that game than in PG.  Wire-to-wire wins in PG are possible (I’ve seen it happen); they’re virtually nonexistant in Funk.  You have to be VERY aware of the turn order in the earlier game, particularly late in the game.  Even though I like Funk a bit more than PG, I think I prefer the way PG handles the leaders, as going first isn’t the kiss of death it often is in Funk.

Funkenschlag (the original) is harder on leaders because the marginal payouts for larger numbers of cities are much less. So if you’re ahead in city count, you’re making negligible extra money and getting hammered on everything else. Power Grid’s more generous payout rates mean at least players ahead in turn order are making more money.

RE: Civilization and Civil War: this is a marginal catchup mechanism because Civil War can be used to hose both the recipient and the nominee. It can actually be much more devastating to the nominee if it causes lots of tax revolts. Civilization works because of the different hurdles, all of which are hard, and the fact that civ card purchases don’t “feed back” into the economy much. So in general, you have to perform well in each age and a killer early Bronze Age doesn’t necessarily give you much advantage in getting into the early Iron Age. So while there isn’t a true catch-up mechanism, there isn’t an inherent advantage to being the leader either (for Advanced Civilization, all this is somewhat less true and you do need to beat on the leader).

I like the catch-up possibilities in San Marco. There’s a scoring track, so everyone knows who is winning at all times.

There are two actions that can seriously affect the board. The first is the banishment. You pick a district and then roll a die. You must remove player cubes (aristocrats) equal to the number of pips. If you roll a four or higher, the district changes dramatically.

The other action is the transfer. You get to remove one cube belonging to another player and replace it with one of your own. Where control of a district is usually pretty close, this is a big changing element.

Finally, scoring in a single district occurs whenever a doge card is played. Sometimes a player will move the doge to a district that is not his best scoring opportunity because that district would also result in a second-place scoring for the leader.

Because you can track the score and see who controls each district, it’s possible to stop bashing the points leader and start going after the person who is best positioned to win. Often late in the second season, it’s obvious the current points is effectively crippled, and you should go after the player who has the most cubes on the board.

San Marco is a great game, and it’s usually not until very late in the game that you know you might as well be floating face down in a Venetian canal for all your chances of winning.

I’m also with those who don’t see turn-order mechanisms as invisible, especially not as seen in Power Grid.

But there are other possibilities. Consider an auction game where for each card X there are N copies of the card, where N is the number of players, which come into the game as it progresses, and you are not allowed to buy more than one copy of card X. Later copies will tend to go cheaper (if the game is designed right) which will tend to help less well-off players. Off the top of my head I can’t think of a game like this - but I know I haven’t dreamed it up, I lifted it from somewhere.

There are also mechanisms that superficially look like catch-up mechanisms, but aren’t. Buying advances in Antike is one. Only the first player pays the marked up cost. But only the first copy comes with the VP, and it turns out that the VP is what you really want.