Not knowing your design goals for the project , you may be completely justified in having no meaningful player interaction . It ' s often useful to think about the end experience you want an imaginary player to walk away with . The more specific , the better . Then , when faced with one of the dozens of opportunities to add or remove anything during development , ask yourself if it will get you closer to , or take you further from , that target game feel . BUT , player interaction , direct I attack your dude or indirect I gather the ore so you can ' t can have many advantages that should be considered . If you don ' t get these benefits from other players , ask yourself how you can achieve similar things in your design . 1 . A nervous system . This means that by pursuing what ' s good for me , I naturally complicate how you will achieve what ' s good for you and vice versa . In a war game , this might mean zero sum conflict , but even in a pure engine builder , it will usually be more engaging if wrenches are at least occasionally thrown into the works . If you can pick a strategy on turn one and then pursue it without modification for the rest of the game , then you ' re really only playing making interesting decisions for a tiny fraction of the game time . Letting other players perform this function is usually more acceptable to a player than an event deck or some similar mechanic . In one case , I can anticipate and adapt and when things don ' t go well I ' ll feel I was fairly outplayed . In the other I just get helpedscrewed by RNG . This has a secondary effect of . 2 . Keeping players interested when it ' s not their turn . If you have constant simultaneous play , then this is not a problem . But most games have some kind of down time when a player isn ' t actively changing the game state . If I don ' t care what other players are doing because it can ' t possible effect me , it ' s much more likely I will get bored and disengage . In a perfect world , all players are not just interested , but riveted by everything that happens . This could mean that I ' m worried I will be attacked , or it could mean that some one else buying a certain tile in the market makes the one I need cheaper or more expensive , or more valuable , etc . As reyburgundy points out , auctions are a great example of this and compliment many other types of core experience , which is why you see auctions alongside all kinds of other mechanics . Auctions also highlight . 3 . Your most advanced components are your players . To reinforce otherworld ' s point , the major strength of table gaming is not the cardboard but the people . Unless you ' re designing a solitaire game , players will remember not what the game did , but what they and their friends did in the game . The more opportunities you can create for people to be funny , creative , clever , cunning , treacherous , whatever , the better . It will be easier to do this when players interact with each other as opposed to a puzzle by itself . Creating a great game that people want to experience again and again is as much , or more , about emotional highs and sometimes lows as it is perfectly oiled mechanical systems . Player interaction lets your players help you create a great game in the playing . With the caveat that there are too many games that give players a prompt and then say now figure out how to make it good . The heavy lifting should still be on the designer to create the structure that reliably leads to delightful and spontaneous player actions . 4 . Greatly increased replay value . Single player optimization challenges can quickly be solved to the point where improvement is minimal and therefore uninteresting to most . When other players are involved in the input of my decision making nervous system then the entire shape of the game can change dramatically from play to play . We feed off each other ' s variable mood , changing tactics , long term strategies , old grudges , new alliances , betrayals , early leaders etc . The whole shape of the game can change from the exact same group playing three , or five , or ten times in a row . Now over months . Now with new players rotating in and out . If those personal dynamics can ' t be expressed through the mechanics , then the corresponding , and free from the designer ' s perspective play variety is lost . Sorry if this is more conceptual than you ' re looking for . I ' ll try to think of specific examples and post again if I can find time .