Saturday Morning Gaming: Scoring Systems

Guys. It’s time for some game theory.

There are a lot of fairly common win conditions in games. Tic-Tac-Toe’s 3 in a row, the finish line for games like Candyland or Chutes & Ladders, and scoring like in Hungry Hungry Hippos or Yahtzee.

Games like Risk ask you to eliminate all of the other players to win. Games like Battleship or Stratego are straight up zero sum and say that you have not won until your opponent has lost. Chess gives the opportunity to play a game where neither person wins.

Games like poker are more iterated. You can play a game at a table and play 20 hands and win 12 of them but that doesn’t tell you the interesting information. I remember playing at a table in Vegas and the guy across the table won a small pot as his wife came up and asked how things were going and he told her “I can win the small pots but I’m not winning the big ones.” Whether you’re up or down at the end of the night is not based on how many you win, but on which ones you win.

There are a handful of games that have some odd goals for each player such as having multiple “the player with the most X at the end of the game gets bonus points” or “the player with the fewest Y gets bonus points”. I’ve played a handful of games where the player has secret bonuses that aren’t known until after the game ends and scores are tallied (this makes it somewhat more difficult to be a dog in the manger as a tactic).

I recently played Tigris & Euphrates and it had a scoring system I’d never seen before. There are four kinds of commodities: farming, trading, religion, and government. Your score is based on which of these you have the *LEAST* of. So if you have 50 farming tokens, 48 trading tokens, 40 religion tokens and 2 government tokens, you are going to get beaten by the guy who has 3 of each.

Which makes it the most interesting scoring system that I’ve seen recently and I don’t know that I know of another game that uses it.

So… what are you playing? (And how can you tell if you’re winning?)

(Featured image is Photo of Risk dice by Val42 via Wikimedia Commons)