Elegant design example

I am often spouting off about elegant design and so I thouhgt I'd share one I discovered recently. I was playing ECLIPSE last night, for the first time, with Lazyj and some friends. The game has an alliance mechanism that gives in-game advantages for each alliance you have. If you decide to attack someone you have a treaty with, you get a traitor card and that costs you VP's if you are holding it at game's end. The only way to get rid of the card is for someone else to break a treaty and then the card passes to them. The final rule that makes this elegant is that you can not make any more alliances while you have the traitor card.

With out going into great detail, I will simply say that it is disadvantageous enough to break a treaty to disuade anyone from doing it lightly, but not so egregious as to make players unnaturally adverse to otherwise prudent choices and decisions. weighing the decision of whether or not to break an alliance is meaningful and fun since the rule is plausible not arbitrary, with the end result being a very good simulation of diplomacy with a clean mechanic. In most games that aren't primarily diplomatic, the rules for diplomacy are always clunky, arbitrary, and ultimately unsatisfying. Not so in ECLIPSE.

This is an elegant design.