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How to make Victory Points exciting...

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SteelShark
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Well, I've designed my first game using victory points. My previous games have had single goals, such that at any point, it was easy to see who was the leader, and who was just behind him (or dead last for that matter).

Now with VP's, much of the "How am I doing?" is lost as you might have some idea, but really there is no clearcut leader until the game is nearing or at the end. Now, I can make mini-goals in the game, but this makes the game that much more complex. So how do you achieve an exciting game when you don't get that race and finish line feeling?

Rick-Holzgrafe
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Re: How to make Victory Points exciting...

SteelShark wrote:
So how do you achieve an exciting game when you don't get that race and finish line feeling?

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!

jwarrend
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Re: How to make Victory Points exciting...

SteelShark wrote:

Now with VP's, much of the "How am I doing?" is lost as you might have some idea, but really there is no clearcut leader until the game is nearing or at the end.

You can still achieve this by simply tracking VPs publically, on a scoring track. I'll note that having the leader be ambiguous is not necessarily a bad thing; sometimes it can lead to a "hit the leader" effect. Of course, making the leader secret doesn't always solve that; people just hit the "perceived" leader.

Quote:

Now, I can make mini-goals in the game, but this makes the game that much more complex. So how do you achieve an exciting game when you don't get that race and finish line feeling?

The first step is clearly to try to play some VP-based games and decide whether you think they're fun or not. Rick mentioned a couple, a few more include Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne.

VPs are a great design tool because of their versatility. They allow you to reward incremental progress towards victory, to allow victory-gaining occurences to happen at other times than just the end game (eg, "scoring rounds"), and, as mentioned, to allow different paths to victory. I think VPs generally work best when there's a timing mechanism attached to the game, so that you're trying to acquire as many VPs as you can given some restriction in how much time you'll have available.

They're also useful because it's an easy design knob to turn. If people aren't fighting as much as you think they should, simply increae the VP reward for combat. You can shape what actions players will take by what rewards you assign to them.

-Jeff

zaiga
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How to make Victory Points exciting...

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.

johant
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How to make Victory Points exciting...

For me its not a question if it is exciting with VP its rather a question how to balance it.

any rules of thumb on how to figure out the different VP and building cost in a game?

Johan

zaiga
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How to make Victory Points exciting...

johant wrote:
any rules of thumb on how to figure out the different VP and building cost in a game?

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.

zaiga
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How to make Victory Points exciting...

Also, you might want to distinguish between VPs awarded for major goals, and VPs awarded for minor goals. Major goals are the things you want the players to be pursuing, the "strategies" as you will. The minor goals are often there to balance the game, or to keep the game interesting when a player cannot, for one reason or the other, pursue a major goal, perhaps temporarily, or at the end of the game.

For example, in "Taj Mahal" there are two major ways of scoring points. You can score points for commodities, or points for chains of palaces. You can not realistically win without pursuing one of these major strategies.

You can also score points for playing the Princess card, but it isn't a major strategy. Rather it is a minor goal, which exists to give the Princess card a useful ability, and to spice up certain decisions.

Finally, one can score points for cards in hand at the end of the game of one color, but these are usually only a few points (when compared to the major strategies). This scoring mechanic exists to balance the end game, to make sure that players don't go "all out", throwing in all their remaining cards in the last turn, but it is not a major strategy.

Gogolski
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How to make Victory Points exciting...

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.

johant
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How to make Victory Points exciting...

sounds interesting!

sedjtroll
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How to make Victory Points exciting...

Gogolski wrote:
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)

PLEASE tell me the words Kessel Run appear somewhere in your game! I've always wanted to design a game named, based on, or in which players make a "Kessel Run." Maybe the best upgrade you can get will be the Millenium Falcon!

- Seth

Gogolski
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How to make Victory Points exciting...

sedjtroll wrote:

Quote:
PLEASE tell me the words Kessel Run appear somewhere in your game!
I'm afraid I have to disappoint you... In fact, I even had to google "Kessel Run" to know what you were talking about (I've only seen the three SW-movies that came out first, and that was quite some time ago... If it was mentioned in one of these three films, I can't even remember...)

I wanted to do something like the "Tour-de-Fance"-in-space. (Well, at least I wanted to have a race composed of several races.)

I will probably sign up for a Game Design Workshop spot when I have a prototype for playtesting... If you want, you can then print out the game yourself and call it Kessel Run.

Cheese!

sedjtroll
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How to make Victory Points exciting...

Gogolski wrote:
I had to google "Kessel Run" to know what you were talking about (I've only seen the three SW-movies that came out first, and that was quite some time ago... If it was mentioned in one of these three films, I can't even remember...)

As you undoubtedly found out in your google search, Han Solo brags about his ship when Obi Wan and Luke are looking for a ride off Tatooine. He says "you never heard of the Millenium Falcon? It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs."

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

SteelShark
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How to make Victory Points exciting...

Not to derail the discussion back to the original question but....

Thanks for all the VP discussion. In my game, there is a time factor, so this should help the race feeling.

And I have played some VP games. Maybe it's just me, but Ticket to Ride is really just so so for its in-game excitement. I'll try to play some of the other games mentioned and see if they replicate what I have in my non-VP game.

I'll also investigate the VP track, but the game is pretty fluid throughout play, so this method may not work. But in the end, if my playtesters aren't excited, it'll be back to the drawing board with this one....

larienna
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How to make Victory Points exciting...

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.

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