Adjacency bonuses
Placing a tile, building, or unit next to a related one grants a bonus, so where you build matters as much as what you build. Civilization VI's district system is the canonical example: a campus beside mountains, a harbor beside the city center. Designers use adjacency to turn placement into a spatial optimization puzzle — the map becomes a board where good sites are contested and layout planning is a skill. It rewards foresight (reserving tiles for future synergies) and reading terrain. Key decisions: bonus magnitude (strong enough to shape decisions, not so strong that one perfect layout dominates), whether bonuses stack or diminish, and legibility — players must be able to preview a placement's yield before committing, or the system devolves into wiki-checking. Pitfall: adjacency math so opaque that only spreadsheet players engage with it, while everyone else places buildings randomly and misses the whole system.
- Dev effort: Small
- Timing: Real-time or turn-based
- Common in: strategy, 4x, city-builder