Resources are one of the most common building blocks in board games. We collect wood, stone, money, food, cards, workers, energy, actions and dozens of other things, and then use them to do something we could not have done without them. Because the idea is so familiar, it is easy to treat all of these as variations on the same basic mechanism: you have a certain amount of something, you spend it, and in return you receive something else.
Mechanically, however, resources can behave in very different ways, and those differences have a much greater effect on the game than the name or physical form of the resource. Two games may both give players coins, for example, while using those coins to create completely different decisions. In one game money might be accumulated and spent repeatedly throughout the game; in another it might be extremely scarce and difficult to replace; in a third, having money might itself provide an advantage, which means spending it carries a consequence beyond simply having less of it.
This is why I find it more useful to think about resources according to what they allow the player to do, what happens when they are used, and how their value changes over time. A wooden cube and a card can perform exactly the same economic function, while two identical wooden cubes can represent fundamentally different kinds of resources.
The interesting question is not what the resource looks like. It is how the resource behaves.
Some resources disappear, while others change what you can do
Perhaps the most familiar resource is the consumable one. I have three coins, I spend two, and now I have one. Wood becomes a building, food is consumed to feed workers, mana is spent to cast a spell. The transaction reduces my ability to make similar transactions later, at least until I acquire more of the resource.
This creates a familiar kind of decision because using the resource now competes directly with using it later. If I spend my last two coins, I gain whatever I purchased, but I also lose the ability to buy something else until I earn more money. Even before we consider the relative value of the different things I could buy, scarcity creates tension between the present and the future.
But not every resource disappears when it is used.
In Splendor, the gem tokens players collect are consumable in the conventional sense: when I use them to buy a development card, I return them to the supply. The cards I purchase, however, also provide gems, and those gems behave very differently. I do not spend them. Once I own a red development, it permanently reduces the ruby cost of every relevant purchase I make for the rest of the game.
The token and the card can therefore both answer the same question — “How many red gems do I have available for this purchase?” — while behaving as completely different resources. One is temporary purchasing power. The other permanently changes my purchasing power.
This difference is crucial because a permanent resource is not merely something I possess. It changes the set of actions that are available to me from that point onward. Acquiring it is an investment in my future turns.
That distinction appears in many forms. Workers in a worker-placement game may return at the end of each round, making them renewable rather than consumable. A technology may permanently reduce future costs. An additional action can increase the amount I am capable of doing every turn. A new card in a deck may not provide anything immediately, but it becomes part of the system that generates future possibilities.
Calling all of these things “resources” is useful, but it can hide the much more important question of what happens after I use them.
A resource can be valuable now or valuable later
This leads to another distinction: some resources primarily solve current problems, while others increase our ability to solve future ones.
Suppose I can spend three coins to gain five victory points immediately, or use those same three coins to purchase something that will generate one additional coin every round. The first option has an obvious value. The second cannot be evaluated without knowing how much of the game remains.
Early in the game, the investment may be extremely attractive because there is enough time for it to repay its cost and continue producing value. Near the end, the same investment may be almost worthless because there are too few turns left to benefit from it.
This is one of the reasons engine-building games tend to feel different at different stages. During the early game, players are often willing to sacrifice immediate results in order to improve the machine that produces their future resources. As the end approaches, the value of improving that machine decreases, because there is less future left in which to use it. At some point the player’s attention shifts from building the engine to extracting value from it.
The resource itself has not necessarily changed. Time has changed its value.
That makes timing an important property of resources. A resource that is extremely valuable on turn two can be nearly useless on the final turn, while victory points often behave in almost the opposite way: they may do very little for me during the game, but eventually become the only thing that matters.
This is also why victory points occupy an unusual position in game economies. They are often described as a resource, and technically they can be treated as one, but in many games they are a terminal resource. Their purpose is not to create additional possibilities but to measure the final result. If gaining a point does not help me gain another point, buy something, move somewhere or change another player’s behaviour, then the point has value without utility.
Money usually has utility because I can do something with it. Victory points often have value precisely because I cannot.
Of course, games can deliberately blur this distinction. A victory point can also be spendable, or the amount of prestige I have accumulated can unlock new abilities. Once that happens, the same quantity is serving both as a measure of success and as part of the game’s economy, and the decision to spend it becomes much more complicated.
The important thing is not whether we decide to call victory points a resource. It is understanding that different resources occupy different positions in the chain between what I have now, what I can do next, and what ultimately wins the game.
Flexible resources create decisions before they are spent
Another important difference is how many problems a resource can solve.
Imagine a game with three materials: wood, stone and iron. If every building requires a specific combination of them and each material can only satisfy its own requirement, then their values are largely determined by what I currently need. Having six wood is not particularly helpful when the building I want requires iron.
Now introduce a wild resource that can count as any of the three.
It is immediately more valuable, but not simply because it is “better”. Its value comes from preserving options. As long as I keep it, I do not need to decide whether it will eventually become wood, stone or iron. The decision can be postponed until I have more information.
That flexibility has a strategic value of its own.
This can be seen very clearly in cooperative games such as Pandemic, where cards are simultaneously associated with locations and used as part of the process of curing diseases. A card may be useful because of what it allows me to do now, but keeping it can also be important because of what it might allow the team to do later. The more roles a resource can potentially fulfil, the more carefully its use has to be considered.
Flexible resources also create an interesting relationship between efficiency and certainty. A specialized resource may be easier to acquire or more efficient when used for its intended purpose, while a flexible one is valuable because it protects me from uncertainty. I may be paying, explicitly or implicitly, for the ability to delay commitment.
This is why flexibility should not automatically be treated as a bonus that can simply be added to a resource. If one resource can replace every other resource without a meaningful disadvantage, the distinctions between those other resources begin to disappear. A well-designed flexible resource usually needs some form of limitation: it may be rarer, more expensive, less efficient, restricted to particular actions, or valuable enough in another role that using it as a substitute genuinely hurts.
Otherwise flexibility stops creating interesting choices and starts eliminating them.
Resources can be stored, capped or forced to move
A resource also behaves differently depending on what the player is allowed to do with it after acquiring it.
In some games, there is no meaningful limit to accumulation. If I can earn money and keep it indefinitely, saving becomes a strategy. I can delay spending, wait for a better opportunity, protect myself against future uncertainty or build toward a very expensive action.
That sounds innocuous, but the ability to hoard changes player behaviour significantly. Every resource I am allowed to keep creates the possibility that keeping it is better than using it.
This can be exactly what the game wants. Saving toward something large can create anticipation and long-term planning. Holding resources can also create visible information for other players: if someone suddenly has an enormous pile of money, everyone at the table may start wondering what they intend to do with it.
But accumulation can also create problems. Players may become reluctant to spend resources because they fear needing them later, particularly when future requirements are uncertain. A game can then end with players holding large quantities of things they spent the entire game protecting but never actually used.
Designers have several ways to change that behaviour. They can impose a hand limit or storage capacity, cause resources to decay between rounds, make them worth less later, reward frequent spending, or simply make new resources easy enough to acquire that holding onto old ones becomes less important.
A hand limit is particularly interesting because it transforms abundance into pressure. Receiving another card is normally good, but if my hand is already full, gaining one forces me to decide what to discard. The resource system is no longer only asking “How can I get more?” It is also asking “What am I willing to give up in order to keep this?”
The same thing happens when a resource expires. If unused action points disappear at the end of the turn, there is little reason to save them. If food spoils at the end of a round, its value depends on whether I can find a use for it before that happens. The game changes the resource from an asset I can preserve into a temporary opportunity.
Storage rules therefore do much more than control quantities. They determine whether the player thinks like a saver, an investor or someone trying to extract value before an opportunity disappears.
Renewable resources create a different kind of economy
There is also a major difference between something that is consumed permanently and something that returns.
A worker in many worker-placement games is unavailable after I place it, but only temporarily. At the end of the round I get it back and can use it again. The worker therefore behaves less like money and more like capacity.
This changes the nature of scarcity. When I spend a coin, my question is usually how I will replace that coin. When I place a worker, I know it will return; the question is what I am giving up by committing it to this particular action for this round.
Actions themselves often behave in the same way. If I receive three actions every turn, I cannot save thirty actions by doing nothing for ten turns. The resource replenishes according to the rhythm of the game, and its scarcity exists within a limited time window.
Renewable resources are therefore closely tied to tempo. The important quantity is not necessarily how many I own over the entire game, but how much capacity I have available at a particular moment.
This distinction becomes especially important when games allow players to increase that capacity. Gaining another worker, another action or another die is powerful because the player is not receiving a one-time benefit. They are increasing the amount of the resource that will continue returning to them in future rounds.
Again, what looks like “one more resource” can actually be a permanent change to the player’s economy.
The same resource can change type during the game
These categories are useful for thinking, but they should not be treated as boxes into which every resource must fit neatly. In many interesting systems, a resource behaves differently depending on when, where or how it is used.
A card might be playable for its printed action, discardable for a generic effect, spendable as currency, or worth victory points if kept until the end of the game. It is not four different cards. It is one resource whose function depends on the player’s decision.
Money can be spendable during the game and then converted into points at the end. Workers can begin as renewable actions and later become permanently committed to buildings. A resource that is initially scarce can become abundant once a player’s engine develops, completely changing the decisions surrounding it.
These transformations are often where resource systems become particularly interesting, because players are no longer deciding only how much something is worth. They are deciding what kind of value they want it to become.
A card that can either be played now or saved for end-game scoring creates tension between utility and value. A worker that can be permanently sacrificed for an upgrade creates tension between current capacity and future efficiency. A resource that becomes less useful as the game progresses encourages players to find the right moment to convert it into something else.
The categories therefore matter less as labels than as questions a designer can ask.
Does this resource disappear when I use it, or does it return? Does acquiring more of it improve my future capacity, or only solve my current problem? Can it serve one purpose or several? Can I keep it forever, and if I can, what behaviour does that encourage? Does its value remain stable throughout the game, or does time change what it is worth?
Once we ask those questions, two resources that initially looked identical may turn out to have almost nothing in common.
Designing the behaviour, not the object
When designing a resource system, it is tempting to begin with nouns. The game is about building a city, so we need wood and stone. It is about running a company, so we need money. It is about survival, so we need food.
Those choices may be thematically obvious, but they are not yet design decisions.
The design begins when we decide what wood, money or food actually does within the system. Is it consumed? Does it regenerate? Can it be stored? Is it useful for several different actions? Does having more of it increase future production? Does it become less valuable as the game progresses? Can it be converted into something else, and if so, when?
Those properties determine the decisions the resource will create.
Two games can both contain money while asking players to think about it in completely different ways. Two games can both contain workers while one treats them as renewable action capacity and the other allows them to be permanently committed. Even victory points, which seem like the simplest possible quantity, behave differently once a game allows players to spend them, lose them or use them to unlock new possibilities.
That is why I do not think the most useful question is simply, “What resources does this game have?”
The better question is:
What does having this resource allow the player to do, and what changes when they use it?
Once we answer that, the resource stops being a cube, a coin or a number on a track.
It becomes part of the design.