VP Engines: Why Can They Suck?

dragonstout wrote: I think the best of this kind of game is Agricola. Everything gets you points in that game. Of course, that one is helped by the fact that you're goal is very transparent: you get a little bit of everything. It also feels like farming, or at least the idea of farming. That's close enough in my book.

I think a key reason why I think that games with the aforementioned VP system don't work is that it can drain the tension out of the game as there's less feeling like you're losing. When we played 7 Wonders, everyone felt like they were doing pretty well, because everyone knew that they were making VPs every turn, and since you don't add them up till the end you don't know that you aren't making as many VPs as someone else (when I mentioned Taj Mahal before, I forgot that you score as you go along in Taj, so that is not a good example). There has to be a possible feeling of failure.

Agricola, of course, totally has this feeling: the constant fear of not feeding your family. So the tension is kept; in fact, until the end game setting up an engine for feeding your family feels like the *real* goal of the game, you don't feel like you're collecting victory points till that's set up.

In 7 Wonders, you're worried about what, losing a POINT due to military? That system is a joke: you can lose an absolute maximum of 6 points that way the entire game, in a game where ending totals are around 50. There should never be an entire mechanic in a game that revolves around docking you one point out of 50. That does not contribute to tension.

So can anyone else think of GOOD examples of this kind of game beyond Agricola, Ra, and Small World? Do all the rest suck? It's actually one of the things that makes me suspicious of Mage Knight and Eclipse.

I thought this was a good post, so to hell with it, I figured I'd just make it a thread because it got me thinking. I'm also a bit averse to VP games but I never really put much thought into why until I read this. I can think of several games where I'm grabbing VPs, but the game seems to work - Agricola, Dominant Species, RA, Mage Knight came immediately to mind. Others like Hansa Teutonica, Race for the Galaxy, 7 Wonders and Troyes I found to be complete snooze fests.

So what do these good games have that the bad ones don't? They all involve either building an engine or working inside an evolving engine to grab as many points as possible. But the games I consider crap lack any kind of tension. To win, you just take the path of least resistance. If two people fight, the third player is by default more efficient and typically wins.

The better games have everyone trying to achieve roughly the same objective in order to force that friction. Agricola gets a bit of flak in that everyone wants to build the same type of farm. How the hell is this bad? If the end game scoring worked differently, I think it would suffer from the problem of these other multiplayer solitaire snoozefests. Instead, players are fighting for the same limited resources and there's no corner to hide in.

Another fantastic example is RA vs. 7 Wonders, two games with a remarkably similar end game scoring mechanism. Outside auctions being more interactive than the card drafting, I couldn't put my finger on what else separated the games. Then it hit me - in RA, there's a random assortment of tiles in a lot rather than the items being taken one at a time. Suddenly your Pharaoh strategy might be at risk because someone's great farming lot may have put that player in striking distance of your monopoly. The randomized nature of the system gives players enough freedom to pursue different strategies while frequently forcing in that needed conflict. In 7 Wonders, the likely result would be that Pharaoh either being buried in a Wonder or just passed to the next guy. Lame.

The other point that was brought up is that VPs can be arbitrary and often hard to calculate until the end game, which takes out the sense of struggle between players. This is probably why I prefer Vinci to Small World, there's no slipping under the radar if you've taken the lead. It's why Dominant Species and El Grande work so well (on top of the high screwage from the actions).

The argument of the point mattering in a game of 50 points doesn't really strike me much though. 50 points to 1 aside, if the typical margin of victory is 5-10 points, that one can be pretty significant. Still, it's damn hard to eyeball the scores in 7 Wonders and that definitely takes away from the sense of conflict.

The first half of that quote is from San Il Defanso, not me.

As I was saying in that thread, I think of this as very distinct from games where you're collecting VP and the first player to a threshold wins (Settlers, Twilight Imperium, Merchants & Marauders), as well as distinct from games where you're getting all your VPs from only 1-2 sources (otherwise you can claim just about any game as being a VP game; when there are just a couple sources, you're not collecting VPs, you're trying to achieve those 1-2 things).

I think it's also connected to open scoring vs. closed scoring, though I'm not sure. I wonder whether I'd feel any more sense of competition and struggle in 7 Wonders if there were a scoreboard and we scored as we went along (this would be a huge pain in the ass, but say you're playing on the computer and it can do it automatically for you). I doubt it would even then.

Re: the 50 points/1 point thing. I disagree with you completely, and HATE games where the final score is high and the range is low! The reason I feel this way is that a chief problem with games like this is that it's entirely possible at the end of the game to wonder "why the hell did he win?" Since everyone's picking up VPs all the time, unless you can see someone picking up drastically more than everyone else the winning moves are not as evident. This is especially bad in games like 7 Wonders where, for example, in our 4-player game everyone's point scores were in the 50s (maybe someone's was 49). In the final Age, every turn I was picking up something like 5-10 points. The winner won by, in a few of those turns, picking up one more point than me. It is *impossible* to tell why he won, or even why he picked up one more point than me those few times. This contributes to an anti-climactic ending, and less feeling of accomplishment.

It's true though that any game with hidden scoring can have this feeling at the end. I think what's actually more important than being able to know why you're the one who won at the end is being able to know why you're the one who *lost*. There needs to be able to be a point in the game where you feel totally screwed, and you know that you are clearly going to lose. Acquire has hidden scoring (I guess that's debatable), and sometimes you don't know why you ended up with more money than someone else, but if you got into that state where tons of shit is going down and you had no cash, you at least felt at that point "I am losing, and it is very clear why".

7 Wonders is even worse about not having this necessary feeling of failure than most count-VP-at-the-end games: not only is there no real way to fail, but one of the key things that can make you lose, other people taking the cards you wanted and either discarding them or building their wonder with them, is hidden! This aspect was so unsatisfying that we found ourselves gloating when we buried something someone else wanted, even though it is strategically entirely disadvantageous to give them that information, for multiple reasons.

While you and I both listed RA as being one of the good games which uses a get-VP-for-lots-of-stuff, count-it-up-at-the-end system, I think it's actually good entirely in spite of the system, and I don't think it does anything at all to mitigate the system's problems of obfuscating how you won and rarely making you feel screwed. I think it's a good game just because the push-your-luck is fun and psychologically evaluating other players is fun. I think the scoring is just a necessary evil to facilitate making the lots up for auction different in value for each player, therefore making it tricky to figure out what other people will do.

Going back to high points / low variance in points: imagine a game where everyone grabs a handful of sesame seeds and lays them out in front of them, and the person with the most seeds wins. It's hard to tell who's winning at the end when you look at everyone's pile, which makes it feel more arbitrary. Whereas if you're grabbing walnuts, you can tell who won pretty easily before officially counting up, that person was able to wrangle a whole extra couple walnuts into their hand, and it seems a little more impressive.

Sorry, I have a tendency towards horrible analogies, and I also need to learn to be much more succinct.

I think Eurogamers like these systems because they're very "feelgood": you never have to feel like you're losing, you can always feel like you're winning. But "feelgood" is in opposition to "tense", and I'm hard-pressed to find a game that I like without tension.

i concur, generally i dislike victory points in games. I can see the counter arguments to my views, but i think that vps reduce the emotional value and significance of objectives in the game. He conquered my planet, who cares i can get victory points via another system instead etc. Small world is a good example of this. I can't get into the game because each empire i build is meaningless, its only purpose is to add to a score track. If i compare this A Game of Thrones. Each territory is important to my survival my economics and my ability to manouvre. Now i appreciate that AGOT still in a sense has a VP system, but the VPs are area control tied. I can loose as well as gaining them.

I think you hit the nail on the head SaMoKo when you noted that its about knowing that your loosing. VPs often cloud your judgement in a game. I prefer games where you can look at the board and get a good idea of who is dominant. When the game communicates this i prevents it from fizzling out as you suddenly find its over and you did or didn't win. Twilight struggle has a good vp system, but like AGOT, you can loose as well as gain VP's.

dragonstout wrote: The first half of that quote is from San Il Defanso, not me.

Oh gawd I'm bad at quoting :cripes:

I know exactly what you mean by grabbing sesame seeds. Hansa Teutonica gave me this feeling more than anything else I've played. I had no idea what the points even meant, and they just seemed to flood in from everyone's little plans as we went about our own business with a bit of passive agressive skirmishing on the edges. That dicking didn't even directly affect the score. At the end of the abstract race for god-knows-what, we crapped out our totals and it just felt arbitrary and pointless. Nobody even gave a damn about the ending, and we resolved to not even give it another chance.

Dominant Species is similarly decided by a narrow band of points in a high scoring game, but the narrative gives feedback to where you're screwing up with the constant aggression between the players. At the end, I might think "Shit! I would have won that if those damn spiders didn't strangle my reptiles in the forest!". Here, the narrow point difference means that no single attack (and all actions are attacks) is trivialized. In a dramatic game, that's a huge strength. In a less than dramatic game, you don't have the same emotional connection to the cause/effect, so it all becomes meaningless and arbitrary.

Friction creates drama, and drama gives meaning~

I hate the 'accounting' that most games have at the end of the game. "For every 3 of these get x VPs, and if you're the leader in this category get y VPs, ...". Why can't more games have simpler end game scoring?

That's why I love Battle Line. You can technically say 1st to 5 VP (flags) out of the 9 flags total. But it doesn't feel like VPs. Or any 3 adjacent flags wins. You're not doing a math exercise at the end of the game. And the tension is high in the game because you know where you stand.

An example of a game I like playing, but not its end game scoring is 'Fire and Axe: A Viking Saga'.

I'd rather games do 'for every 4 of this item' used *during* the game to get you a special action or resource, instead of waiting until the end of the game & load way too many 'If-Thens'. I'd rather the end game can be 'most of x is the winner', or a specific win condition. It feels anit-climactic while everyone has their heads down at the end of the game counting this & that.

Why don't we see more Euros move away from VPs and go to Victory Conditions? For example Cyclades, VC (victory condition) is first player to own 2 metropolises.

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This review sums up the end game accounting in many euros:
Fire & Axe: A Viking Saga review by Matt Drake

This reply by Barnes quoting Branham always stuck with me about if you're going to have VPs, make them a low, manageable number:
New Games Suck

Oh man, your use of Hansa Teutonica on this really hits home about why I sometimes dislike these types of games. I played it once at Trash Fest with some nice older gentlemen who loved euros. What a complete and utter shitfest.

It is the CLASSIC example of really having no idea what won or lost you the game at the end. I mean, yes, someone really analyzing the game could figure it out. But there are 0 memorable or exceptional moments, no real pivotal points. Just a consistent linear grind of points where sometimes you pick up a new ability. But the abilities are boring and one ability is ClEARLY better than all the rest.

Samurai has two scoring methods, the first presumably gives you a feel for how you're doing. The second, hidden/endgame one, totally undermines that.

It even has the possibility that a player could make their score worse by capturing more.

Both are counter-intuitive, both convince me not to play this game.

Unfortunately, it's very common for Euros.

Groth, I feel like some of those games are deliberately designed so that the scoring must wait until the end. The designers don't want players to feel uncomfortable by engaging in direct conflict or even clear passive-aggressive conflict. They want everybody to focus on their own section of multi-player solitaire, quietly running numbers in their heads until the end.

I agree with you that games are improved when there is payoff during the game for achieving certain objectives. That can make the entire game more interesting and engaging, instead of just the final accounting.

Personally I hate most VP games (the kind with fixed number of rounds, and counting your beans in the end) because the ending is usually anti-climactic. "OK, it was the final round, let's count our points. I have 47. Dave? 58. Chris? 52. Oh, looks like Dave won. Good for you, Dave." It's fucking depressing. It's even worse, when the game is so "balanced" (i.e. has a catch-up mechanism, that doesn't simply handicap the leader, it cripples him), that everyone ends up with roughly the same number of points.

Interestingly, I really love Tigris & Eufrates, which has an end-of-game scoring suspiciously like that. Maybe it's because you are racing against yourself throughout the game (it not having a fixed number of turns aside, which is also a plus). There is tension the whole time, because you see, that while you have a shitload of reds, greens and blues, you only got two blacks, which means you have two measly points. And that goddamn Dave just scored another five blacks! Fuck you, Dave.

For those of you not too keen on VP games, what are your thoughts on Ascending Empires? I've found the most efficient way to gain VPs is to blow up the other players' stuff. While it does have some end of game scoring, my games have shown that it doesn't dramatically affect the end result, plus you know exactly what the other players will be getting prior to game end, so you can plan accordingly.