Does Winning a Point Salad Game Matter?

A model of victory conditions and critique of Lost Ruins of Arnak

Welcome to all my new readers from Freddie deBoer’s Subscriber Writing post! I hope you enjoyed the article about machine learning. I have additional data science posts planned for the future, and I recommend checking my archives for more on the subject. Though I also write general social commentary, this article, will only discuss board games. No, I’m not going to use the topic of board games to discuss a broader social issue. This one’s just about board game. If that doesn’t interest you, I’m sorry, and I promise you’ll see some more relevant essays going forward.

Second disclosure for the board gamers: yes, my essays lean heavily on popular board games. This allows people to understand what the heck I’m talking about.

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Oftentimes, at the end of a board game, you find yourself filling out a spreadsheet like this:

or this:

or maybe doing a little math like this:

The first score sheet comes from Uwe Rosenberg’s Agricola. If you’re curious, you can see the scoring system below. Keep this memorized; there will be a quiz at the end.

This leads to an anticlimactic post-game, where players total their scores on their phones. Afterwards, everyone announces their scores, and wait, no one guy forgot to count something. You forgot to count that too, so you make an adjustment. You also recount one of your subtotals for the 5th time, to ensure that 1+2+1+4 is really 8 (it is). Finally, everyone announces their scores, and you determine the winner. Then there’s a tie, you ask if anyone remembers the tie breaker, no one does, and you search the rulebook for tiebreaking condition that no one planned for. Finally (for real this time), you determine the winner.

In these moments, I often ask myself: who cares? If I needed to consult a spreadsheet, a calculator, and the rulebook to determine the winner, did I really win anything? Why should I care what opponents scored if I didn’t strategize around their actions? What does the win mean thematically? How did I raise wild boards better than you grew vegetables? I applaud Galaxy Trucker for acknowledging this absurdity and awarding a win to any player with a positive net worth.

These endings can feel unsatisfying or pointless. I understand that many games (whether they involve a board or not) include limited player interaction. A player wins the golf tournament by completing the courses in fewest strokes. Golf doesn’t allow any direct physicals contact between opponent, but it does require players to complete the same tasks. All golfers play the same holes, making it straightforward to compare scores. However, imagine a tournament where a golfer, bowler, and dart thrower (darter?) each performed their respective sports. What would it mean to “win” such a tournament? Would anyone care?

To add an addition layer, games like Wingspan and Tiny Epic Galaxies provide the players with private objectives that score at the end of the game. This makes player scores even less comparable. In Agricola, you can at least see how many vegetables or wild boars your opponent owns. With private objectives, you can’t even determine what your adversaries are working towards. Imagine if the recent Super Bowl ended with Joe Burrow revealing a 10-point private objective for finishing the game between the 40 and 50-yard line. What would Skip Bayless think of that?

Ultimately, I don’t think anyone can provide a logical argument for caring about victory. I think we just like competing in a friendly manner, even when competition feels arbitrary. After all, I could take this a step further and ask why we care about the result of any game. We just do, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I could probably create some semi-plausible Evo psych explanation: you know, back in the Serengeti, mammals with a genetic proclivity toward competition would have blah blah blah lions or something. I think some if it stems from our culture, too. Japanese baseball games tie after 12-innings, while us Americans can’t let a meaningless match between two under-.500 teams end without a victor.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with engaging in some meaningless competition. However, I think designers should work towards more satisfying endings. For the remainder of this piece, I’ll discuss a framework for categorizing winning conditions, and discuss how games can create more meaningful victories.

How to Win a Game

I will hereby group winning conditions into three groups:

• Group one: Non-point winning conditions

• Group two: Currency winning conditions

• Group three: Victory points winning conditions

I ordered these groups from most satisfying to least satisfying. Group one includes games without a scoring system. Abstract strategy games like Chess and Santorini often avoid victory point systems. A player wins Santorini by scaling a three-story building, and you know how chess works. Other examples include racing games like The Quest for El Dorado or Cubitos, where players wins by finishing the race first. Though they often contain an optional scoring system for comparison sake, many solo-only differentiate victory and defeat without points. Players win Friday by defeating the pirate ships and Black Sonata by identifying Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. I don’t play any war games, but I’m guessing many of those end when someone wins the war.

Group two includes games where the player with the most money wins. Examples include Food Chain Magnate and Le Havre. In the former, players earn money through their restaurants, and compare their profits after the last round. Le Havre works a bit differently. Players earn and spend currency throughout the game, but individual cash doesn’t account for much of a player’s wealth. Rather, players increase their net work by constructing buildings, with each one worth a certain amount of money. The game climaxes with the reveal of a the steel ship, the game’s most valuable “building.” After the last round, the player with the highest net worth (freestanding currency + building value - value of outstanding loans) wins.

Finally, group three includes games where players win by earning the most victory points. Gamers refer to some of the more extreme versions as “point salads,” or games where players earn points from a plethora of sources. Examples include the aforementioned Agricola and Wingspan, where players earn a seemingly arbitrary (though almost certainly calculated and purposive) amount of points for various tasks.

The line between group two and three can get a bit blurry. In the The Gallerist, players buy artworks and boost the popularity of artists who created them. Like Le Havre, the player with the highest net worth wins. Unlike Le Havre, the end game requires converting a lot of different items into money (see below). In that sense, what differentiates it from a group three game? Wingspan allows a player to spend eggs, so could it have reached group by two by calling its victory points “eggs”? Not quite. The difference being that, in Le Havre, the monetary values of the building serves an in-game utility. At any point, players may sell a building to receive half it’s value in coins. Wingspan, on the other hand, doesn’t allow players to convert its various scoring mechanism into eggs. Returning to The Gallerist, some scorable items can be sold for currency. Others can’t, though many of those have an intuitive in-game reason to hold monetary value. I don’t think it’s worth litigating this particular game, though I will admit it reveals some fogginess in my framework.

This spills onto a second page, but you get the idea

I find group one endings the most satisfying. There’s no “calculation phase” at the end of the game, and I don’t have to flip through the rulebook to resolve all the intricacies of scoring. When I lose, I can tell what my opponents did better than me, which allows me to improve in future games. These conditions also give the game a more thematic and authentic feel. Similarly, I find group two endings more satisfying than group three endings. Though they might also involve a degree of calculations, they provide a more intuitive and thematic comparison between player performances. Even an ending from group 2.5 game, like that of The Gallerist, feels more gratifying than filling out a spreadsheet.

However, win conditions account for just one part of a game’s quality. One of my person favorites, Castles of Burgundy employs a point salad system, and I can’t imagine that game maintaining its essence without victory points. Sandbox games, like Agricola’s spiritual successor Caverna, thrive on their open-ended decision space. Switching to a group one (or even two) victory condition risks railroading the player and undermining the core appeal of these games. I’m not claiming that Agricola or Castles of Burgundy should re-design itself to become an abstract racing war game. I’m claiming that, all else equal, a designer should choose less victory-point reliant conditions.

Some games feel like they could have implemented a more gratifying win condition. In Viticulture, players plant, harvest, age, and crush grapes to fulfill wine orders. Players earns money in various ways, including selling graphs, and can spend that money to purchase buildings and workers. Once players have developed the right mix of grapes, they can fulfill a wine order for… victory points. Hence, despite the prevalence of money, Viticulture opts for a group three victory condition. I can’t help but feel that designer Jamey Stegmaier could have figured out a group two solution for Viticulture, especially since he did so for Scythe. Still, I don’t think it’s that interesting to imagine an economic game graduating from group three to group two constitutes a substantial improvement. The most interesting change would involve a game leaping from from group three to group one.

Lost Ruins of Arnak

So far, I haven’t expected the reader to know anything about the listed games, though my argument probably makes more sense if yo do. For this section, however, I will need to provide some background on Lost Ruins of Arnak.

In Arnak players explore a desert island, receiving victory points for obtaining cards, discovering new sites, defeating monsters, and researching. The game contains two currencies, coins and compasses, that can be exchanged for cards. Arnak also features three resources: tablets, arrowheads, and rubies. For our purposes, these resources correspond to [easier thing to obtain], [harder thing to obtain], and [hardest thing to obtain]. Many games use bronze, silver, and gold in a similar manner. Players usually obtain these resources by placing one of their fedora-clad workers at a sites like the one shown below.

Credit: https://goplaylisten.com/games/lost-ruins-of-arnak-board-game-a-four-sided-review/

Players use the resources for two purposes. First, players can spend resources to gain victory points and rewards on research track. At first, spending resources will move a player’s magnifying glass or notebook up the track. Once players reach the top, they can spend additional resources to obtain victory-point-rich temple tiles. Second, when discovering a new site, players get attacked by a monster, and have the opportunity to fight it off. Players can fight these monsters off with resources (no, I don’t know why tablets and rubies defeat a giant snake either), and doing so earns them both victory points and a small bonus.

In practice, players earn the majority of their points from the research track and its temple tiles. In the game’s last few turns, casual table talk ends as players optimize every last resource to buy the game’s most expensive temple tiles. Players also earn a few extra point by reaching the top row of the research track before their opponent, and that small difference can determine the winner. Thematically, it makes sense that research track should serve as the game’s deciding feature: everyone is researching a long-lost civilization.

Given, all that, why does the game end like this?

Arnak focuses so much of the player’s attention on the research track, and rewards so many of its points to the best researcher. The score sheet above, which comes from the rulebook, shows Min dominating on research (the top 2 rows) while Elwin scores the plurality of his points from defeating monsters (fourth row). Maybe we’re all playing the game wrong, but, in my group, no one comes close to victory without a high research score. While the best researcher doesn’t always win, it’s not a part of the game someone can afford to ignore.

Furthermore, the research track feels like a race. It awards bonuses to players who scale it faster, and awards additional points to the person who scaled it the fastest. Thematically speaking, no one would care about the second person to discover the secrets of Arnak. The research track feels like a race, so why not just make it a race?

In my “group one victory condition” version of the game, the first person to complete the research track would win. A tiebreaker based on resources or currency would break ties if multiple players finish on the same turn. When I say “completing,” I’m assuming some combination of moving one’s piece up the track and purchasing temple tiles at the top. I consider these actions mechanically and thematically similar.

For this to work, the game would need some changes. Most importantly, we would need to incentive players to discover new sites and fight monsters. Recall that players gain resources by placing their workers on different sites. At the beginning, Arnak only includes five boring sites. Through discovery, players can reveal up to twelve more interesting sites. Thus, discovery plays an important role in Arnak. It increases gameplay variety and gradually opens the decision space. Discovery also increases the value of compasses, as players need them to discover new sites.

In the current version of the game, discovering a new site earns the player an idol token. This token provides a small bonus, allows for a free action later in the game, and scores 3 points at the end. Then, the game reveals a monster at this new site. Defeating the monster earns a free action later in the game and 5 points at the end. All in all, a successful discover can earn the player 8 points, 2 free actions, and small bonus. In a game with a tight economy and winning scores in the 60-70 range, this discovery provides a ton of value.

If this game removed victory points, we’d need another way to incentivize discovery. Since the idol token would no longer score points, we’d need to increase its value. Maybe it would provide 3 coins instead of one, or it could provide some of the rarer resources. Meanwhile, defeating monsters (usually) cost the same resources that players spend on the research track, so monsters would need a larger buff. In the pictured track (one of the game’s four), players must exchange the following three “buckets” of resources to obtain the most valuable temple tiles.

In my “group one” version of the game, I’m imaging higher resource costs at the top of track. Instead of a coin and two tablets, the left bucket (pictured above) might require a three coins and four tablets. The the other two buckets would show similarly prohibitive costs. In my version of Arnak, players could exchange a defeated monster for any bucket of items. This would allow a player to construct a coin-light and tablet-light strategy, for example, and use a defeated monster to address that deficiency. I’m sure my proposed costs don’t work, but those would be corrected via playtesting.

There’s also the issue of cards, which players purchase via coins and compasses. These both provide more powerful actions and score victory points at the end. In some cases, a card featuring a weaker bonus may earn more victory points, forcing the player to make a tradeoff. Without victory points, the weaker cards would have no reason to exist. As such, the card could just… not exist. My version would eliminate the low-power, high-point cards and replace them with more useful ones.

I don’t mean to imply that such a change would be easy. I’m sure the designers put a ton of thought and playtesting into the game’s current state, and such a major would change would require tons of work. Still, I think board gamers have grown too accustomed to the point salad spreadsheet. In many areas of life (books, sporting events, random strings of numbers) endings stand out in our minds. I think we’d all enjoy the hobby more if fewer of those endings involve the calculator app on our cellphones.

Quiz

1. How many points are earned for rooms in a stone house?

2. How many wild boar are needed to score 3 points?

3. What does a farmyard space need to be considered “used?”