How to make Victory Points exciting...

The feeling's still there. There are several different ways to use VPs, but all of them are good in their way. Here are several cool ways to use VPs:

The Race: First to get to X VPs is the winner! Settlers of Catan is like this: a race to get 10 VPs.

He Who Dies With the Most Toys: The game ends when some condition occurs, and whoever has the most VPs at that point is the winner. Ticket to Ride is like this: the game ends when someone's supply of plastic train cars runs out (more or less), then you count up everyone's final scores.

The Balancing Act: There are several kinds of VPs, and the winner is the person who has the best-balanced collection. Reiner Knizia is known for this, and used it in both Samurai and Tigris & Euphrates.

Hidden Points: In each of the above examples, some of the points collected during the game are kept hidden. That way, no one can be quite sure who will win until the final accounting at the end of the game. This mechanism also keeps the losing players from getting discouraged because they can't be certain they're losing, nor by how much; and it reduces leader-bashing because nobody's sure who the leader is. (There are also excellent VP games without hidden points, of course, such as Carcassone.)

Puerto Rico, Princes of Florence, El Grande, they're all VP-collecting games, and (IMHO!) they're all plenty exciting. The last game of Puerto Rico I played, I won because I was able to buy that crucial "big building" at the last minute, and my biggest rival didn't quite manage to buy one of her own. That's finish-line excitement, right there. So I don't think you need to do anything special to make VPs an exciting goal.

In fact, Knizia says he likes to have a different scoring system in every game he designs. It turns out that a creative points system isn't just a way to tot up the final score; it really affects the entire strategy, tactics, and "feel" of the game. If you think your game in its current state isn't exciting enough, maybe some creative thought about your scoring system would help.

Some general suggestions: people like games where there's more than one "path to victory." A (somewhat lame) example: suppose there are four kinds of resources that you're collecting. Your points at the end of the game are a combination of how many resources you've got, plus how many you have of each different kind. So one way to win is to become the "King" of one kind of resource, and collect a huge amount of it; but another way is to spread out and collect many different kinds.

You can also create interesting tension if most moves that players can make wind up benefitting others as well as themselves. This forces players to take a larger view of the game, and not just focus on their own advancement. Puerto Rico and Tower of Babel (a new Knizia that I highly recommend!) are good examples of this.

Hope this helps!

Jeff and Rick raised some good points. I agree with Jeff that, if you haven't played much VP games, it's wise to play a few of time and try to find out what makes them tick. I would want to add "Ra" to the list of VP games to try, because it has so many ways to score points, which makes it an interesting design to analyze.

Having various ways of scoring VPs may be the driving force behind several tough decisions:

- Now vs later. Do you take that action which will immediately pay off 1 VP, or do you take that action which might pay more later on?
- You vs other players. Do you take this action which will give you 3 VP and another player 2 VP, or do you take the action that gives just you 2 VP?
- VP vs resources. Do you take this VP, or do you take the gold which might allow you to score more VP later on?

Etc. You can mix and match the above in various combinations.

I also agree with Jeff that having VPs in a game makes it easy to tweak a design, and it makes it easy to have various paths to victory. If the chruch building strategy is too weak, then you can easily make it better by awarding a few more VPs for building churches.

There is no magic formula, of course. The ways you can score points are so different in each game, that it is hard to even come up with a few good rules of thumb. Risky actions should score more than "easy" actions. Things that score only at end of game should score more points than things that score regularly. The lowest scoring unit should be 1VP. Normal things should score perhaps in the 2VP - 5VP range. This allows for a little wiggle room on both ends, to allow for a bit of tweaking.

It also depends on what things you want to reward in the game. For example, I'm currently working on a card collecting game, with a push-your-luck mechanic. I want to reward the following things:
1) Collecting a lot of cards
2) Collecting cards of different colors
3) Collecting cards with high numbers

These goals may sometimes conflict with eachother, which creates tension in the game. The way these goals are scored is as follows:

- The player with the most cards at end of game gets 5VP. It rewards drawing a lot of cards, but how many is "a lot" depends on how many cards other players are doing. The player with the least cards loses 5 VP. Which means that if you cannot win "most cards" at least you want to avoid having least cards, keeping this tension until the end of the game (usually).
- Players score a number of points for their highest card in each color. There are 7 colors in the game, and players will usually collect around 8-10 cards, so it's often important to not pick a card in a color you already have, and of course, the higher the number on the card the better it is.

An example of a published game that works in a similar way is Ticket to Ride. For this game the things that are rewarded are:
- Connecting the cities on your tickets (if you do you gain VPs, if you don't you lose VPs at end of game)
- Claiming long tracks (a 1 train track scores 1 VP, a 6 train track scores 15 VP)
- Having your trains in a continuous line (the player with the longest chain of trains gains 10 VP at end of game)

Again, these various goals create tension, as there will be moments in the game where you have to choose between pursuing one goal or the other, as you cannot always do all of them at the same time.

In a game I am working on, players race with a cargoship through the universe. During the races, you have to ship cargo from between planets to earn money to modify your ship, to buy fuel during the races and buy missiles to damage other ships (or to defend yourself against other players' missiles)

There's six races and after every race VP's are awarded.
At the end of the game (after the last race), players can get VP's for having shipped most cargo between a certain planets.

The awarding of VP's is done in a very common way in this game, but there's other stuff that deals with the VP's in the game:

1) Turn order: The player with the most VP's will go first on the next race, the one with second most VP's goes next...
2) Taking away VP's: If a player is not able to finish a race (running out of fuel or having your last jet-motor blasted off by a missile...), he pays 1 VP for every tile he is away from the finish. (Players start with 5 VP)
3) Selling VP's: Players can sell their VP's between races, when they are modifying/upgrading their ship. You might have a worse starting-place for the next race, but a better ship to compete with the other players or a bucket-load of money to buy and transport a massive amount of cargo that will reward you loads of money during this race and a bunch VP's at the end of the game.

These are not realy extraordinary uses of VP's, it has all been done before, but the conclusion is that VP's can be more than just points/rewards.

Cheese.

- Seth

It turns out that a Parsec is a unit of distance, not time, so that statement is iffy, but the 'kessel run' is evidently a somewhat legendary thing that a smuggler might do - and there's an inference there that one might be better at it than another. Thus, your game about racing w/ cargo in Space sounds like a perfect match for the theme about Han Solo and other smugglers competing to do better than each other at the 'kessel run'. And since the Kessel run isn't really defined, there's plenty of room to make stuff up!

- Seth

A Forum topic which arrives just in time(^_^)

I am currently making an expansion for illuminati and the prototype will be completed soon. The idea was to convert the "What you have" scoring system with the "what you did". And I use victory points to determine the winner.

Players can get points from different sources.

- Goal : All players have 5 goals and completing them give them points.
- Mission : Complete a mission and gain extra points.
- Title : Obtain a title and get extra points
- Nb Group : At the end of the game, each controled group give points.

The player with the highest number of points at the end of the game win. But how do you determine the end of the game?

In a new deck of cards(I am currently making) there is a series of "Revelation" cards. Once drawn, they must be played immediately. When a certains number of these cards are on the table(number determined according to game length) the game ends.

This mean that you never know when the game ends. You can try to weaken the player with the highest VP, but accumulated points cannot be removed. So he will only receive less points from the number of group.

I have calculated that the points earn by each type, would follow this proportion :

Goals 75 Points
Mission/Tille 50 Points
Nb Group 50 Points

By the way, does anyones know the names, stats, goals, and special power of the 2 new illuminati added in the expansion(or where I could find these informations). I know that one is called shangri-la and I think they must control 6 pacific groups. But that's all I know.