Meaningful Choice Detection in Board Games

A dead turn is one where every legal option leads to roughly the same outcome — the player is technically choosing, but nothing they pick actually matters. A forced turn is worse: there is only one sane option at all. Both quietly drain a game of its own decisions.

How we frame it

We look for the moments where the choice stops being real, not just where the rules technically offer options. A turn with five legal moves and one correct answer is not meaningfully different from a turn with one legal move — the review flags both the same way, because a player experiences them the same way.

• What share of turns have a single clearly-correct option versus genuine tradeoffs?
• Do dead turns cluster at a specific point in the game — the opening, a resource drought, the endgame?
• Does a particular archetype or strategy experience more forced turns than others?
• Would adding one more legal option at the dead points restore a real choice, or is the problem structural?