Granular scoring

I appreciate the replies so far.

I just finished another solo test last night and it reveals another interesting consequence of the scoring system. The final scores were Blue 51/Red 46/Black 38/Purple 33. In addition to scoring, the game's ending is uncertain and is decided by a die roll, whose probability of hitting increases as the final round progresses. In what turned out to be the final turn, the players knew there was a 1/6 chance that it would be the final turn, but the three trailing players failed to end up in position to score a second card (everyone scored one card). This cost the players:

Purple: 15 points (had a card, but was one resource short of being able to pay for it)
Black: 14 points (gambled on a bigger card than he could score, hoping to have one more turnto meet its conditions)
Red: 4 points (didn't grab an additional scoring card)

So the final scores, with one more turn, would have been: Black 52/Blue 51/Red 50/Purple 48

I can just picture the debates this kind of effect would provoke somewhere like BGG. On the one hand, players might complain that had the game lasted that one more turn, they could have scored that additional card and won/came closer to winning. On the other hand, it can be said that variable length is one of the game's considerations, and the outcome was fair -- Blue scored the most points in the 28 turns that this game lasted. It doesn't impugn the game's overall fairness that the outcome of a 29 turn game might have been different. I actually like this about the game; as Rick says above, it lets the non-winning players console themselves with what might have been.

So, granular scoring combined with variable game length -- I'll be interested to see how players react to this aesthetically and whether they'll like it or find it off-putting.

Well, let me turn you off to the game even more by pointing it out that it takes about 3 hours to play! "You mean we've been playing this game for 3 hours and I lose because the die roll says that the game ends now instead of letting us go one more turn?"

It's not a bug, it's actually a feature. If I know that this is the final turn, and I come after you in the seat order, I can hit you knowing there's nothing you can do about it. Maybe I even do something completely athematic in the process -- eg, maybe I empty all of my territories of armies and drop them all in your territory to win that battle. Etc. The uncertain ending tempers this to an extent by preventing you from knowing with absolute certainty when it's the last turn. And, it's bounded. You know for certain once the final "epoch" begins, you're going to get at least 6 turns and at most 9, and statistically speaking, you're probably going to get about 7. Not only that, but when the 5th turn ends, you know exactly what are the odds that the game will end in the 6th turn vs continue. And at that point, you've had about 28 turns to have done whatever you were going to do. So the difference between 6 and 9 turns is the difference between 28 and 31 turns overall.

I say all this to say that the mechanic is carefully constructed to permit risk-reward considerations, and to make it rare you'll have a sure thing, but at the same time to avoid having the game be decided by luck. But I'm not sure whether players will see it that way.

I think you're right, at least in the sense that these taken together do exacerbate the "problem" to the extent that there is one -- you effectively are required to contingency-plan both for "what if my scoring card is invalidated?" AND "what if the game ends sooner rather than later?"

I think it would be easy enough to change the scoring cards so that instead of thresholds, each card shows ALL the payouts for the different levels of achievement in that category, and you receive whichever payout is true. So instead of a separate card for 4 territories, 5 territories, 6 territories, etc, you'd just have a card that says "Territories", and if you get 4 territories you get 1 VP, 5 territories you get 2 VP, etc.

This would at least mitigate the destruction effect -- screwing up another player's scoring conditions would simply bump you down to the next level but wouldn't prevent you from scoring outright. So maybe it's a 5 point swing instead of 20.

But I've resisted making this change for a couple of reasons. First, I really enjoy, as a player, the need to choose whether to go for the big score, accepting the risk that it brings, or play it safe and take a card that you're sure you can score. I think that choosing your scoring category and then just receiving whatever payout you're entitled to based on your level of achievement takes some of the fun out of the decision of what cards to go for. Second, this mechanic is supposed to represent an emperor boasting about his empire's exploits. It seems more thematic for those boasts to be specific -- "I controlled lands from Spain all the way to India", not "I controlled some lands, I'll leave it to the historians to sort out which". But this isn't that big a concern.

I could see perhaps having a hybrid of these two approaches, whereby each scoring card has several levels of achievement, say 3 each, and you score for the highest one on the card that's true. So there is still a need to pick one card as opposed to another but the stakes of failing your card are lower. That could work pretty well, although it's a little more complicated.

True; my point is simply that you knew the game was going to last 28 turns, and you could either make sure you were prepared to score after 28 turns or gamble on the game lasting longer and accept the possibility of losing.

No one has really commented much on this aspect of the game in post mortems, but that could simply be because they had bigger concerns with other issues.

I've been solo-testing a lot lately, and while this works well to see the game play out, I don't get emotionally invested in one position rather than another, so seeing Blue throwing a body-block that deprives Red of some points doesn't frustrate me in the way that it might if I actually were Red.

In this case it might just be a case of which way the consensus lies. I like the way the game plays now, so from that standpoint, it's a success. But it remains to be seen whether players in general like or dislike these aspects of the system.

That's a good idea, and there is one technology players can acquire that lets you modify the die roll, so it is possible to have some control. I think putting it fully within player control might be difficult, simply in the sense that I'm not sure what condition should bring about the end. But I'll give it some thought. The die roll at present simulates the death of your emperor and I like that this isn't entirely within your control but is somewhat predictable.

True, but there is an element of player choice at work. For example, a player who pursues a 20 point card is probably following a one-dimensional strategy (generally either conquest or culture) and is putting all his eggs in that basket. And, he can choose to take a less valuable card that he is more confident he can hold, or go for a better card and hope that he can meet its conditions. But a more balanced strategy, pursuing a couple of lower-valued cards from a couple of different categories, is advantageous both because it's easier and because it's more difficult for other players to take away all of your scoring potential.

That might be easy to implement, actually. That might be worth a try!

That's worth a thought. When you score a scoring card, you get to hang on to it for the next turn and it gives you some tokens over the course of the next round. So early in the game, even though you don't get many points, you're getting tokens, which you use to buy technologies. So even though the early game scoring isn't very impactful on the final scoring, it impacts how you set up for the rest of the game. In the game I mentioned from the other day, the player who came in second place chose not to score the first two scoring rounds, choosing instead to set himself up to make big scores in the final rounds. It didn't work but he at least got close.

At the end, more or less. You can see immediately when someone has invalidated your card. For example, if you're holding a card that says "Had a population of 30", and someone attacks you forcing you to lose a few population, you can see that you're not in position to score the card. But, scoring only happens at the end of the round, so you might have a little bit of time to fix things to make the card true again.

It's about 3-4 hours, but this will probably only happen in the final scoring round, so there's no effective elimination where you're sitting around for a long time with no hope of winning. In some sense, it's the big climax at the end of the game -- do I get to score my cards or will someone try to screw them up at the last minute?

Pretty much; some cards are a bit more difficult to invalidate, but generally they're mostly the same for this purpose. Probably the player in the lead is most likely to get whacked, but among savvy players, probably the person who is holding the most points in scoring cards will be a target. Since scoring is all open, good players should be able to readily see the consequences of their attacks.

As I think about it more, I realize that my question is really "will this mechanic be objectionable to such a majority of people that it isn't worth bothering with it?" But I think ultimately, it seems some people will dislike it, some won't mind it, but it will depend on how it fits in with the rest of the game. I think I'm ok with that.

Welcome to BGDF!

Not exactly; you have to be in position to score big on the last turn to come from way behind, which is no small feat. But it's theoretically possible, which is important. If it's possible to be effectively eliminated an hour before the game ends, this is is widely frowned upon.

Heh heh heh. As much as I've tried to whittle the length of this game down, it's definitely not a 30 minute game. The excitement of the last turn comes in part because it's the culmination of the last 2.5 hours of gameplay, so it's the exciting climax at the end. You need the development to be able to appreciate the exciting climax, although how much development is required for it to be enjoyable is an open question.

I'm not sure what you mean; the scoring cards are chosen by the players, and you can voluntarily choose which category and level you want to attempt to score points for. So, you can choose to play it safe and take "Owned 7 Territories" for 10 VPs, or go for the gusto and try to score "Owned 8 Territories" for 15 VPs, and accept the risk that gaining and keeping those 8 territories will be more challenging than owning 7.

You can balance this somewhat by taking several small cards from different categories, which is more stable but requires you to be more diversified. The game steers you more toward specialization, and if you go that route you're likely going to try to score for a big card in a single category, which makes your scoring more "fragile", but the payoff is also bigger. It makes sense thematically (this is a civ building game) -- "He conquered all of Europe and Africa" is more interesting than "he built a couple of moderately impressive buildings, and he had a medium-sized population".

Thanks for your comments!

Pretty much. Also important is that there are four such opportunities to score points during the game, so it isn't just "play for 3 hours and only then do you get any feedback on how it's going".

I understand the point your making, and even the fact that I've never been in a 30 minute game of Settlers notwithstanding, my response would simply be that it's not very realistic to suggest that every game is reducible to an equivalently interesting 30 minute game. Not that you're necessarily suggesting that. But just look at the difference between San Juan and Puerto Rico -- SJ is the 30 minute version of PR, and it's enjoyable but in an entirely different way. They provide different player experiences. There are some player experiences that take 3 hours of development to unfold. The point of the development and unfolding in my game isn't JUST a contrivance to give rise to an exciting ending -- if that were the case, your admonishment to pick up the pace and get to the good part faster would indeed be applicable. And it is a good general principle.

In this thread, though, the question I'm asking is, assume for the moment that the experience of playing a game is enjoyable and satisfactorily occupies 3 hours; would the possibility of a potentially big swing of fortune right at the end be a deal-breaker?

But I think the suggestion to cut its length down by 5/6 is basically the same as saying "make a completely different game than the one you're making." And sometimes, that's great advice! But in this case, I think I'm close enough to the end that I don't really want to start over with an entirely different kind of game. Worst case, I'd rather adjust the scoring model to conform to people's preference, if there was a strong consensus that my current approach was loathed, then try and keep the scoring model and build a different game from scratch around it.

Thanks again.

I do appreciate that you're trying to be helpful, but I really don't find the attempts at mind-reading to be very productive. It would be quite inaccurate to say that "I know it has problems" -- quite the opposite, the game is almost exactly the game I've been trying to create for the 7+ years I've been working on the game. But having gotten to this point, I'm simply trying to take a step back and get a preliminary read on how players might react to certain aspects of the game. Of course, the opinions of players who have played the game will carry more weight, but my suspicion was that people might have a gut reaction to this mechanic in isolation, and that has indeed been the case, and I've appreciated the responses to the thread.

But in a similar vein, suggesting "why don't you take your 3 hour game and turn it into a 30 minute game" is not a very serious suggestion. It's sufficient to say that this mechanic probably wouldn't appeal to you in this game, and therefore you probably wouldn't care for the game in its present form. It's speculative in the extreme whether a 30 minute version of the game would be remotely interesting or even playable. It's not something I have very much interest in contemplating.

I do think you make some good general suggestions that might be good general principles for other designers to keep in mind.