Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder when
I step off the train, and deliver an episode to you while I walk home.
I'm Brendan Riley.
Well, it's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago.
I'm on my way home after having gone into campus for a meeting.
The birds are chirping and I'm happy to be talking with you.
Well, planning to talk about, I thought I would start with thinking a little bit about
weird scoring conditions.
What was it that made me think of this?
Oh, so the other day I in my music shuffling, I was just listening to a variety of different
tunes in my MP3 library.
I happened across an old song from Moxy Fruvous, which is a Canadian mostly acapela
band from the 90s and they had a song they performed in their live album called
Lowest Highest Point.
It was like a trivia quiz for the audience and they said which state has the lowest
highest point and then they did a song, (singing) Lowest Highest Point, Lowest Highest Point, etc.
And the idea was, it's just which state do you think it is?
It got me thinking that it might be interesting to talk about interesting scoring conditions.
One of my favorite things about playing a new board game is discovering that it has an
interesting scoring condition, something counterintuitive, something weird, something that makes
you think about the game in a different way.
Most games have uninteresting scoring conditions - earn the most points being the most common
one, have the most money being the second common one, which is basically earn the most points.
I thought that it would be interesting to explore five different interesting win conditions
and talk a little bit about why I find them interesting and go from there.
So start with I do want to go to acknowledge:
I did in a quick glance at the Pick Up and Deliver pages.
I believe that I did do one previous show where I talk about an issue sort of related to
this and that is there's an episode I did called Currency As Points where I was specifically
talking about how I like when a game makes you think about spending your points to do things.
Any game that uses money as the final score and you have to spend money to do stuff is already
doing Currency As Points but there are some games where you just have to give up points in
order to do things.
One example that came to mind was Small World where you have to give up points in order to
choose a different faction or a guy a project where if you want to take a bonus from one of your
opponents doing it doing an advancement you have to spend points to do that and there's an interesting
trade-off to think about like getting a bet getting a benefit in the game but giving up some of your
scoring edge to do so and you know I like that trade-off. We're not talking about that today
necessarily but I do want to mention it. I'll put a link in the show notes if you want to go
back and review that episode. It was a long time ago but I thought I would talk about five different
endgame conditions or win conditions that I think are pretty cool and always make me interested
in again. The first one is the first one I want to talk about is sort of in its strongest mode
in Cockroach Poker but appears in a number of other modes as well in a slightly less dramatic way
and this is just one loser. Now in Cockroach Poker there is no winner of the game. If you haven't
played that game it's a memory game where you're passing it on cards and telling each other the cards
are this or that and if somebody incorrectly challenges those cards a certain number of times they
lose the game. When they lose the game that's the game is over one person lost everybody else wins
and can laugh at them but there are a number of other games where when one person loses enough
that ends the game and then the winner is the person who has the most points or most money or whatever.
The example that I'm thinking of lately is That's Not a Hat which if you've played Cockroach Poker
and then you go play That's Not a Hat you're like oh this is an iteration on this idea. It's a fun one
and I actually like That's Not a Hat better than Cockroach Poker but they're very similar games
in a lot of ways but the idea of That's Not a Hat again when somebody loses enough to get a certain
number of negative points then the game ends and the person the people, the person are people who have
the fewest negative points win the game. I know that there are other games out there where the game ends
when somebody loses and then we determine the winner. I can't think of any others off the top of my
head but I know there are others so I would say that's an interesting win condition to me is like
the game ends when somebody loses and then we determine a winner or not. All right the second one I
wanted to point to is: I like end game conditions where it's points but the points come from making
your own point choices. Now on some minor games the way this will work is something like in like
Coimbra or Shipyard there will be condition end game scoring conditions that you're aiming for
and if you achieve those then you get points. If you're playing Shipyard with the variant rule where
all five instead of getting an individual scoring condition which is more traditional in terms of
scoring instead there are five on the board and you can aim for one to resolve that feels interesting
to me you are deciding on your own win condition. A more dramatic version of this is the card game
Arboretum. Arboretum you're building a display of trees and you score the trees where you have the
most trees in that number I believe if you have the most trees in a line of anyone else then you get
to score that kind of tree you also have to have in your hand the highest value card of anyone else
of that type of tree so like if you want to score an oak tree you have to have a line the biggest
line of oak trees in your in your park then you also have to have the highest value oak tree in order
to score those things you need both as I recall it's possible that you just score your line of oak trees
if you have the highest number but I think you have to have both so there's an interesting element where
you're trying to hold on to a really high number to screw your opponent out of scoring and that's
really fun so if you haven't if you haven't tried Arboretum it's worth a try if you remember it is a
ridiculously mean game so make your own scoring else I said Coimbra because in Coimbra there are a number
of scoring conditions that you can activate by going around on the board and so you kind of get
to decide which ones you want to try to score. All right next up I wanted to mention bottom
loser/top loser and these are games that usually have some sort of win condition that's determined by
points and so there's not anything really special about that except that you usually also have
a secondary rule where if you are the bottom loser or the top winner then you don't win because
you are the bottom loser or the top winner and there are a couple different games I can think of
like that in High Society if you have spent the most money you lose the game even if you
even if you have the most points so there's an element of you want to get the most points but you
don't want to spend the most money because then you're poor and the whole thing of High Society is
you're not supposed to be poor. Similarly in QE if you spend the most money in that game you also lose
and then you win if you have the most points after the person who spent the most money is eliminated.
So both of those games turn on the idea of their auction game so you're trying to decide how much
to spend but if you spend too much then you lose the game even if you got the most points.
And then there are games where there's a bottom loser as well sometimes it'll be the person with
the fewest the lowest score in some secondary track is out the best example of this or my favorite
example of this is taught in A Study in Emerald. A Study in Emerald is an excellent Martin Wallace
area control game where players are in one of two teams and you don't know who's on your team
or not except by their actions and maybe what they say and at the end of the game everyone reveals
their team and then you look at the scoreboard and whichever player on the board has the lowest score
everyone on their team is out of the game and then the winner is the person with the highest score
who wasn't on the team with the person who had the lowest score it's a great and wild
result that I just I really enjoy so that's bottom loser/top loser as in the side it also strikes me
one one that I didn't mention that I do find a lot of fun our individual scoring
individual win conditions where each player has their own thing they're trying to do and the game
ends if one of them accomplishes it the best example I can think of for that is Nanty-Narking but of
course ROOT also has that element now in ROOT you know what everybody's win condition is. In Nanty Narking
you know what all the possible win conditions are but it's secret who has which one so a part of the
game is trying to figure out who's going for what and not let anybody achieve any of the win
conditions because they might be going for that one I'll call that an honorable mention no it's not
one of my five all right so the last one is gonna go back to a mystery I started at the being the
episode. Pay attention friends that's what's you that's what you call a narrative cohesion. it's going
back to the idea of the lowest highest point, Now there are two games I want to point to that have
interesting lowest highest point mechanisms the first is gonna be Tigris and Euphrates although
this stands in for many Reiner Knizia games that do this and many other games that do the same thing
which is there are a variety of scoring conditions or ways that you can score different things
and at the end of the game you look at those categories in whichever category you've scored lowest in
that's the category that is actually your score so in tigers and your friddies you want to have
as many points as you can in a lot of things but as I recall the one you scored worst in is the one
that you score similarly in the game Between Two Cities you have two cities and one of them will
have one score and one have another whichever score is lower that is the score that you get to
use as your score for the game so there's an interesting balance there where if your second city
is the lower score for both you and your opponent then you have a tie and you have to see who do
better on your better city but I really like that balance because the game forces you to try to
keep them even, but I think the game if I'm going to point to one game that I think has the most
interesting win conditions this is the game Lords of Xidit. Now Lords of Xidit is a weird game it is a
programming game where you are arranging different adventurers and you're going around a map collecting
different kinds of points and there are three different ways that you can collect points as I recall
I don't remember the specifics of each one but there are three different ways you can collect
points you can put points in the wizard towers you can earn points from saving cities and
there's one other way that you can earn points and all but all three of these different point
structures you earn different amounts of them from different things you do and you get some flexibility
into like contributing them or whatever but your goal is to look at them in a variety of ways and the
game lists has all three metrics in order and what makes the game really interesting is that when you
get to the end of the game this is randomized which three is it is for second or third when you get
to the end of the game we examine scoring condition one first whichever of the three forms and
whomever has the worst score in that category is out of the running for winning the game
they're out of the game then we go on to category two we look at category two whoever has the worst
score of the remaining players in category two is out of running for winning the game then we go
on to category three of the remaining players whoever has the best score wins the game so that one is
really the lowest highest point what a fascinating score mechanism and boy does it bend your brain
when you're trying to decide where to put your energy to the point that for some people it ends up
being really hard to just figure out what you're supposed to be doing because it's so brain-vending
but it's really fun and I sure enjoy it so loads of zidit coolest scoring mechanism that I can point
to today so what games did I miss what games would you add what mechanisms would you add for cool
scoring mechanisms to think about these could be games where you win not having the most points but
I'd love to know what it is about specific sets of points that makes you think x y or z share your
thoughts over on board game geek and guild three two six nine and or send me a message wombat929
is my username there brendan@rattleboxgames.com is my email address I'd love to hear from you
to know what are your thoughts on these specific elements. well thanks for joining me on my walk today
so I hope you're next walk is as pleasant as mine was. Bye bye
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- Brought to you by Rattlebox Games
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