Ok, time to turn our attention to another class of player goals, that of acquiring "Victory Points". In contrast to "race games", these games don't have the "all or nothing" feel of either being first across the line, or not; instead, players make incremental progress towards winning throughout the course of the game. The routes for VPs can be quite varied; a game could have contributions to your VP total from a single kind of action repeated over and over (example?), from different actions that all pay out VPs similarly (eg, Carcassonne), or from different actions that give multiple mechanisms for VPs (e.g. Puerto Rico, where shipping and building VPs are qualitatively different).
What makes VPs so popular as a player goal? I know I myself lean heavily to making VP systems. Why is that? What kind of player experience do they lead to? What problems/flaws can they exhibit?
(Note that discussions of "Open/closed VPs" are valid for this discussion, but discussions of "rich get richer" problems are not so much on topic, since we're going to talk about "cash acquisition" games like Acquire and Settlers next week--although, Settlers can still be discussed as a VP acquisition game this week...)
-Jeff
I for one am working on a game using hidden VP, somewhat similar to Tigris and Euphrates' system, with the addition of "Wild: VP attained from a subsystem of the game mechanics. As in T & E, the winner will be the one with the highest number of VP's in his lowest category. I find this to be a superb system using hidden VP, and presents the frequent problem of leader bashing less often. Interested to hear ant ideas you all may have. :)