I'm brainstorming scoring mechanics for a game I'm working on that involves the players generating multiple colored scoring tokens as the result of other actions. (There will be 3 to 5 colors of scoring tokens, to be determined in playtesting).
I want a scoring mechanism that meets two criteria:
1) To score highly, the players must diversify into multiple of the scoring token colors - preferably all of them. Diversity should be rewarded, and possibly necessary. The Tigris and Euphrates scoring mechanism is the extreme example of this; your score is the size of your smallest VP pool.
2) The different colors must be differently valued to different players. I.e. one player must get more value out of red, while another gets more value out of blue, etc. The Container value mechanic is the extreme example of this: each player has a different sequence of values for the different material types.
And, I'd like it to be very quick to add up at the end because this is a fast game, < 20 minutes. It would be ideal if scoring took only seconds.
I'd rather not have a straight hybrid of T&E + Container, i.e. each player gets a card that describes that player's score like "multiply your reds x3, your blues x2, and your greens x1 and take the smallest of those three values". That's fiddly and time-consuming to count.
My current best idea is a card for each player, dealt at random at game start, with a fixed sequence of colors on it. For example, one player might receive a card with four rows of colored boxes like: (Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Wild)
R R R R B B B G G G Y Y
R R R B B B G G G Y Y W
R R R R B B B G G Y W W
R R R B B G Y W W W W
Then at game end the player would fill these rows with scoring tokens in order, not starting the next row until a previous one was filled - a player's final score would be the total number of boxes filled.
What I like about this is that it's easy for the player to do, easy to score, and it's easy for me to tune the curves of the color values more finely than simply Rx3, Bx2, Gx1 etc. However, it still seems a bit fiddly and not as overall simple as I'd like for this game.
Any thoughts are appreciated!
