Some advice to new designers

Recently on a board game design forum, a first time designer expressed concern that their design didn't have deep enough strategy. As someone who deals with first time designers (in my board game design class) I thought I might be able to help. This is the advice I gave him and I thought others could benefit from it as well:

An exercise I like to give to first time designers is to review all of the actions that the player can do and all the affordances the components provide.

For example in your game you have:

The 5 different classes of gems
The tiles with 2 different types of gems
The hand of cards
Drawing a card from the deck
The numbers 1-5 on cards
The card attributes - just dirt, +1, -1, mine closed, steal card, etc.
The action of revealing the cards
The action of collecting the gems

You want to think of all of the things you can do with these components and actions and what other things the players can do with them. For example, you could have a tile with 3 types of gems, the gems could have different values or allow the player to buy certain actions, there could be a restriction or method to how the cards are drawn (draw 2 and keep 1 and discard 1 or draw 2 and give 1 to another player, or draw 2 cards and keep 1 and place the other on the top of the deck) or how the gems are collected - the gems are of limited supply and you can choose whatever color you'd like or the gems must be taken in a certain order that causes actions to happen when taken (for example, a cave in) or that the gems must be thrown into a bag and selected blindly but they can be stolen or traded between players. As you can see, with just the elements you have you have lots of options.

So, what is a designer to do? Which are the best choices? First, I would say use these choices to make the player play the game you want them to play. What is the "primary action" of the game? Collecting gems? Playing cards? Something else? What type of game is it? Blind bidding? Push your luck? Screw your neighbor? Make EVERYTHING in the game move the player towards this type of game play. If it conflicts with this, then it probably shouldn't be in the game.

Also consider another (at least two) ways for the player to win the game. It might be "get points by collecting gems" or it might be "play sets of cards and get points for those" - I like to make games that you can get points during the gameplay and points at the end of the game. This is often called "points salad" in Eurogaming and it can get out of control in heavier Euros - but lightly done, I find it interesting. It obfuscates the answer to "who is winning this game" until the very end (and you always want to end with an exciting finish)

Finally, I designed a "make a value go up or down by making it +1/-1 game" and when I shopped it around, I was politely told by publishers that they weren't interested in that type of game. That it was too basic and not engaging and they see a millions of these types of games. The game now lives on my shelf. I merely mention this so you might benefit from my own experience.