The Pink Starburst Effect

Growing up, my family would help out at/attend a high school summer camp from my church called Survival Camp.  There were many activities to do during free time that week, but one of my favorites was Starburst Poker.  Obviously, since it was a church thing, outright gambling wasn't going to be allowed.  There was a daily Snack Shack setup where kids could buy candy, though, and since they're all individually wrapped, it was easy to use Starbursts as chips to bet with.  Starburst Poker has an interesting side effect that you'd never see in real poker that I have dubbed the Pink Starburst Effect (PSE for short).  In regular Poker, chips or money are all worth the same amount to players across the board.  The blue chip for me has the same value as the blue chip for you.  However, in Starburst Poker, since we all can eat our winnings and people have different taste, different colors have different value to everyone.  With most people, the pink Starburst is the most valuable one (hence the name), but that wasn't always the case.  For me, yellow, red, and orange were all valued at 0 (throwaway money) and the pinks meant I had something awesome.  I'm not good at bluffing, so I don't even try.

I never really thought of using this effect as a game mechanic intentionally until the last couple times of playing Suspicion.  Early on in playtesting, I used little white tokens for people to easily tally how many points they had.  In the later iterations, I changed it so you steal points from each other and I noticed a funny side effect with using those tokens.  If people didn't have a game incentive/feud helping them decide who to take points from, they would pick based on shapes to help them create whatever it was they would make using the shapes when they weren't playing.  For example, one of my friends like to create a battleship, so if he needs that road piece for the cannon and you've got one, then you better watch out!

In the final version of Suspicion, the tokens aren't going to be shapes, so that game mechanic won't be in the final version, but it's definitely given me an idea for another game.  I would like to see if actually turning that into a mechanic ruins the fun of it.  Stealing a particular shape from someone for fun is entertaining and harmless.  But if the game makes you search for particular shapes, is the enjoyment PSE going to be altered?  One day I hope to find out.