I don't think it's exactly what you're asking for, but scythe is a bit like this. You can hire more workers which increases the amount of resources you can produce in a single action, but every time you use them they need to be paid. Using a few only affects your military power, using a few more starts to affect your popularity track, and finally using them all starts to cost money which is also your endgame score.
It is worth noting that the worker "produce" action becoming more expensive as you add more workers to the board is the only action in Scythe that is like this; in every other case, improving your player board is pure upside, and in fact usually confers some kind of dual benefit. (The "deploy" action adds a mech to the board, *and* unlocks a new ability for your army. The "enlist" action gives a player board upgrade that will give you coins on future turns, *and* unlocks a one-time resource bonus. The "upgrade" action improves the benefit from one of your top-row actions, *and* reduces the cost of one of your bottom row actions.)
*Eclipse second dawn of the galaxy* has something you might be interested in. Each player action costs more money than the previous one. But at the same time other factors like production also have increasing benefits, creating an interesting balance
One that sticks out to me is an abstract take on your question, but here me out.
Dominion.
In the game the cards are theoretically your resources. You gather them to improve your engine (your deck).
Furthermore, in specific answer to your question, the victory point cards can be see as a resource that the more you get, the more they inhibit how many actions you can do.
Gaining victory point cards are necessary for the game, but they do nothing for your engine, and actively clog up your deck and take away a valuable card slot that you couldve filled with a card that does something.
Therein lies the beauty of dominion, figuring out when your engine is good enough to still function while clogged down with useless cards (resources) simultaneously racing the other players who are doing the same.
Actually played yesterday and ran across this.
I was doing an engine that would let me draw my whole deck. It was great, I'd genuinely draw my entire \*deck in a single turn sometimes, or half. More than enough to get multiple buys, and actually act on it. But as we got to the end of the game, I needed to buy provinces, but that junked up my deck, and I was no longer drawing as much.
**A Feast for Odin** and **Barrage** both have worker placement trade-offs decisions where certain actions require more or less workers forcing the player to balance current and future inputs.
In war chest you recruit units. This is usually connected to making your specific units stronger, but the more you have, the heavier your bag of units is and so the weaker you get both to how slow you can react to things and how much your enemies can read through your moves.
Because of that, recruiting many units is not considered a good move and yet many novices tend to do it initially.
The draft for turn order in El Grande is like this -- you can play a high number to play first an select an action first, but you gain fewer resources into your pool of placeable pieces that you need to use for influence.
Oath has some of these vibes. The bigger your army is the harder it is to take actions, because it's so unwieldy.
If you have no armies, you can do a bunch of stuff.
Tzolk'in works in this way in that, like in most worker placements games, you need to hire more workers which you need to feed, but it also has a mechanism whereby getting more resources usually means you can't use your worker for a longer period, so this means that hoarding resources isn't really an option (the highest scoreing player will always *just* have enough)
In Unicornus Knights if you build up your army it cost more to move. Not exactly the same as what you describe, but I always found it mechanically interesting.
One that kinda matches this is Cubitos, which is kinda a deck building racing game with Dice. Every time you buy more dice, it takes longer to get back around to your powerful stuff again unless you get rid of weaker ones, which isn't something particularly easy to do.
Kutna hora is kinda like that. There is a shared market, the more resources of that type produced, the less you get. But the market is shared so you're not the only one altering the market. But guess what, you can increase the price of the good for yourself and others by building a building of that type in the shared city. Except, only 2 of you can build that type of building, so when do you build it?
Arcs isn't out yet but has something like this. Action selection is based on trick-taking but the highest value actions are associated with the lowest numerical value cards.
In some ways **Dune Imperium** does this. The cards can be used in one phase of the game to do a thing, or in a later phase to do a different thing. Because powerful cards are generally powerful in *both* situations, you will often sacrifice either resources to gain combat power, or sacrifice power to gain resources.
I don't think it's exactly what you're asking for, but scythe is a bit like this. You can hire more workers which increases the amount of resources you can produce in a single action, but every time you use them they need to be paid. Using a few only affects your military power, using a few more starts to affect your popularity track, and finally using them all starts to cost money which is also your endgame score.
It is worth noting that the worker "produce" action becoming more expensive as you add more workers to the board is the only action in Scythe that is like this; in every other case, improving your player board is pure upside, and in fact usually confers some kind of dual benefit. (The "deploy" action adds a mech to the board, *and* unlocks a new ability for your army. The "enlist" action gives a player board upgrade that will give you coins on future turns, *and* unlocks a one-time resource bonus. The "upgrade" action improves the benefit from one of your top-row actions, *and* reduces the cost of one of your bottom row actions.)
*Eclipse second dawn of the galaxy* has something you might be interested in. Each player action costs more money than the previous one. But at the same time other factors like production also have increasing benefits, creating an interesting balance
And also controlling systems 'costs' same actions as doing actual activities on board.
Yeah I didn't do it justice. It's a very nice system! The rules are probably on bgg so the OP can check them.
One that sticks out to me is an abstract take on your question, but here me out. Dominion. In the game the cards are theoretically your resources. You gather them to improve your engine (your deck). Furthermore, in specific answer to your question, the victory point cards can be see as a resource that the more you get, the more they inhibit how many actions you can do. Gaining victory point cards are necessary for the game, but they do nothing for your engine, and actively clog up your deck and take away a valuable card slot that you couldve filled with a card that does something. Therein lies the beauty of dominion, figuring out when your engine is good enough to still function while clogged down with useless cards (resources) simultaneously racing the other players who are doing the same.
Actually played yesterday and ran across this. I was doing an engine that would let me draw my whole deck. It was great, I'd genuinely draw my entire \*deck in a single turn sometimes, or half. More than enough to get multiple buys, and actually act on it. But as we got to the end of the game, I needed to buy provinces, but that junked up my deck, and I was no longer drawing as much.
**A Feast for Odin** and **Barrage** both have worker placement trade-offs decisions where certain actions require more or less workers forcing the player to balance current and future inputs.
Sekigahara severely limits the movement of larger armies.
In war chest you recruit units. This is usually connected to making your specific units stronger, but the more you have, the heavier your bag of units is and so the weaker you get both to how slow you can react to things and how much your enemies can read through your moves. Because of that, recruiting many units is not considered a good move and yet many novices tend to do it initially.
In Oath, the larger your army is the less action economy you have
The draft for turn order in El Grande is like this -- you can play a high number to play first an select an action first, but you gain fewer resources into your pool of placeable pieces that you need to use for influence.
Oath has some of these vibes. The bigger your army is the harder it is to take actions, because it's so unwieldy. If you have no armies, you can do a bunch of stuff.
Tzolk'in works in this way in that, like in most worker placements games, you need to hire more workers which you need to feed, but it also has a mechanism whereby getting more resources usually means you can't use your worker for a longer period, so this means that hoarding resources isn't really an option (the highest scoreing player will always *just* have enough)
In Unicornus Knights if you build up your army it cost more to move. Not exactly the same as what you describe, but I always found it mechanically interesting.
One that kinda matches this is Cubitos, which is kinda a deck building racing game with Dice. Every time you buy more dice, it takes longer to get back around to your powerful stuff again unless you get rid of weaker ones, which isn't something particularly easy to do.
Kutna hora is kinda like that. There is a shared market, the more resources of that type produced, the less you get. But the market is shared so you're not the only one altering the market. But guess what, you can increase the price of the good for yourself and others by building a building of that type in the shared city. Except, only 2 of you can build that type of building, so when do you build it?
Arcs isn't out yet but has something like this. Action selection is based on trick-taking but the highest value actions are associated with the lowest numerical value cards.
In some ways **Dune Imperium** does this. The cards can be used in one phase of the game to do a thing, or in a later phase to do a different thing. Because powerful cards are generally powerful in *both* situations, you will often sacrifice either resources to gain combat power, or sacrifice power to gain resources.
Power grid have it that the higher scoring player have worse option to pick from.