Rondel (gaming)

A rondel is a board game mechanism shaped like a wheel divided into a number of segments, each representing a different possible action a player can take on their turn, with a marker for each player positioned somewhere on the wheel to track their available choices. Rather than picking freely from a menu of actions every turn, a player using a rondel can only take the action shown at their marker's current position, or pay a cost to move their marker further around the wheel to reach a different action, which limits how often any single action can be repeated and forces players to plan several turns ahead. The mechanism was introduced by the German designer Mac Gerdts in his 2005 game Antike, and it has since become a recurring building block of modern strategy board game design. Later designers adopted and adapted the idea in games including Vikings by Michael Kiesling in 2007, Finca by Wolfgang Sentker and Ralf zur Linde in 2009, Trajan by Stefan Feld in 2011, Gerdts's own Concordia in 2013, Teotihuacan: City of Gods by Daniele Tascini in 2018, and The Search for Planet X and Planet Unknown in the years that followed, showing the mechanism's lasting influence on the hobby.