General Benefit

Choices are only choices if a player can evaluate them. If choices lead to completely random, hidden, or incalculable rewards, they are not choices. They are "general benefit".

Lucky dips

Some choices seem strategic, but actually lack information that the player would base their decision on.

My gangster game had three dice. One die got you money, and another attacked the other players. You'd plan out a strategy, and roll one of those dice. The third die just gave a variety of things. With that die, you didn't know what you were going to get, so you couldn't plan anything. To compensate, I increased the strength of the last die. However, the strategy remained the same. If you were winning, you rolled this die, because it was good. And then, you'd probably be winning by even more. If you were losing, you had to formulate a specific plan, and roll one of the other dice. Now, each die still has varied faces, but the faces on a die do the same type of thing.

There's a new bird in Wingspan that simply flips the top card of the deck, and does that power. It's an interesting design, but what's the strategy? You could get anything. You just hammer it, and "get stuff".

General strengthening

Avoid fundamental advantages that make a player just generally stronger.

Examples would be allowing the player to draw extra cards from that point on, or just granting them more income, in a game where the only resource is money. If the benefit is too broad, one player just feels generally stronger than another, and continuing the game seems pointless. And, for the stronger player, there's no new strategy created.

The Radlands card Muse gives you an extra water (the game's basic resource) each turn, so you have 4, not 3. This just leads to the player with Muse playing more "stuff". It doesn't matter what it is. The extra volume of stuff will wear the opponent down. They just have a simple, numerical advantage. Muse can be easily killed, but I still wouldn't design a card like that these days.

In Agricola, you start with two family members. This means you can take two turns per round. You can get a third person. That just makes you generally stronger, as you can then get more of everything.

"More turns/actions" is the most general benefit there is, and I recommend avoiding it, unless you're giving it to all players.

Instead of general strengthening, make a player significantly stronger in one specific way. This means they can still be competed with in other ways. Players who gain power in different areas will all feel like they have a chance, because they're ahead in some way.

Future benefit

Near-future benefit is good for a game. It ties the turns together.

In both Magic and Radlands, you can't use your characters the turn they enter play. You have to wait until your next turn. You don't exactly know what you'll want next turn, so you have to intuit it.

If a benefit is too far in the future, it can become too general, and be stripped of its strategy.

In the Radlands expansion, I tried an ability that allowed you to damage something, on your next turn. However, multiple cards would likely have entered and left play by then, so your damage would go somewhere you couldn't anticipate. Doing damage was still good, but it could only be evaluated as "a damage" versus its cost, as you didn't know what it was going to hit. It just became a general benefit.

In 7 Wonders, the first round is all about collecting resource and trade cards. However, these are really only important in round three, and somewhat in round 2. Round one is still an interesting puzzle, but it's very self-contained, because you don't know what's coming in later rounds. Rather than build up a big plan, you just collect a variety of resources.

Exploration

The "exploration" mechanic lets you go to an unexplored area of the map, and see what's there. It sounds fun, but why would you actually do it? Even if there are bonuses in there, you don't know what they are. You just have to average them all out, and step into the unknown.

Incidental benefit

An incidental benefit is one that you gain, without choosing to do so. You just gain it when you do something else, or it's an obvious benefit that you might as well gain.

Incidental benefits aren't the result of a strategic choice.

In my gangster game, there's a police cordon that can surround some locations. Being inside the cordon also protects you against the Drive By action, which is on one face of the red die. Players would sometimes go inside the cordon, but protection against Drive By was never the reason why. Drive By was only one face of the red die, so wasn't likely to be rolled. Players would sometimes be protected from Drive By, by the cordon, but it was just an incidental benefit. Drive By was supposed to be a cool effect which players could avoid, by hiding inside the cordon. It turned out to just be a more complicated and random version of regular damage.

I added Drive By to a second face of the red die. Now, it's twice as common, so you can expect a tangible benefit from hiding inside the cordon, which makes moving into the cordon factor into your strategy.

I added "Dens" to my gangster game. You'd put your den on a location, and every time you went there, you'd get an extra benefit. The problem is that you go to locations based on what you want to achieve. You'd get the extra little bonus from the Den, but it didn't influence your decision. It was just an incidental benefit.

Distinct options

Some actions don't have consequence because they're just a basket of goodies, that don't point to any strategy. They're not distinct from other baskets of goodies, so it doesn't really matter which one they take.

Make the options in your game (cards, board spaces, actions) as distinct as possible.

Give each option one distinct purpose, and make them achieve that purpose to a significant degree. (One "variety pack" space, with lots of different goodies, is fine though.)

The challenge for a player should be choosing their grand strategy, not trying to scrape together and manage incremental amounts of resources to fund it.

In one of my prototypes, players moved to locations in a town, to receive some combination of cards and bonuses. While this looked interesting, the players couldn't parlay this rainbow of options into any kind of concrete strategy, so they just "collected stuff", because more stuff was obviously good, and that's all they could deduce.

One of the locations in my prototype was the Karate Hall. You went there and got three Attack cards. This location was unusual, in that it was focussed. It was actually the most useful location in the game. When you decided you wanted to attack someone, you went to the Karate Hall, and got exactly what you needed — Attack cards. After that, I made all locations like Karate Hall. They gave one thing only, and lots of it.

Actions that do one thing might be less interesting on their own (and to you, the designer), but they make for vastly better gameplay. Please just give me three different spaces that each grant wood, stone, and gold, not three funky spaces that give some wacky combination thereof.