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When I get my copy, I plan to print out a box sized picture of a meeple with the words Meeple Inc beneath it and attach it to the box face.

This is a seriously GORGEOUS looking game! I can't wait to get Tabletop to my tabletop! ;)

The printing on those cards looks spot on and so crisp and vibrant amazing job

Mumans! Haha, nice. Love the clearly distinguishable pose, too...

Did you get sued by Hans im Glück for using the word meeple or is there another reason you changed the title? Either way, looks very cool! Congrats on the funding <3

Mechanism = a process, method or means to derive an outcome Mechanic = a person that works in a garage

Thank you so much for this great video. While I was making the game, I had written down the rules like this: Something on my phone, something on my notebook, something in another notebook, something on a piece of cardboard while it came to my mind at work. But now it's easier for me to put it all together. :)

Great Video thanks:) one question… After initiate the First Event, did the 6 original Corporation cards Stay on Game or be changed ? And the the value also stay or Go back on the White Space ? Thx Christophe 😊

Actually, the majority of people do not know the rules to monopoly. They play with house rules and never opened the rulebook for long enough to learn the actual rules. Note how many people put the money they pay on free-parking only for the next person to land on it to pick it up (artificially extending the game) and let's not forget about the people who either build hotels directly or use replacements when hotels and houses run out (according to the rules they're a finite resource).

Pandemic's example of "Cure 4 diseases" is victory points, there's just only 4 of them. Same with Scythe's 6 stars.

Omg this is my favorite mechanics. Just played a stock market game with this mechanic. I call it the cookie cutter method. You cut the cookie, I pick the side I want

Greet approach sure but yes...victory points sucks

Actually american games do improve on the mechanics of their games via expansions even thou they are more themematic out of the gate, and thru these expansions they can be better than eurogame level mechanic wise. It is this level quality that makes them so expensive yet so worth it because it increase the replayablity of said game

How am I just discovering this channel? Fantastic deep dive into board game history! I can’t wait to see more

good video!

I don't have words for so many of these comments.... I have lost what words I did have.

I think legacy games originated with wargame campaigns and then roleplaying games. In an RPG we can have a shared world, published or created by the players. The palters may leave the game and the game story may reach a conclusion. The changes in the world, however, stay in its history. New players can be introduced to a known world but still learn of what happened in the past 10 years of game time, famous NPCs have been eliminated or retired, new powers rise as old fall, and the names of the previous players become part of the lore. It seems like this is what you are aiming for with this project. A big task to put into a board game. I am going to look into it.

Thanks for this Vid!

"Which do you think should be more important" Yes

Vp works fine for me. Not anti climactic. Doesnt feel dated either. Usually, that's a deeper fault pf a game. Plenty of extremely thematic games that have vp.

thank you

Thanks for this video. It made me it even clearer to me why I dislike victorypoints, will never use them in my own games, or play games that has them. (A big part of the problem with VPs is that it's often a stretch to call anyone a winner or loser by the end. -Say for exemple that 3 players scored around 20 VPs in one session, but around 100 in another. Why should the player who got 25 points in the first game win, and the one who got 95 in the second game loose? Is the game trying to tell us that you win if your Zoo is just a little less shitty than the "competition", instead of that everybody wins if there are 3 great Zoos on the continent? The games with VPs I've played often didn't have any explenation to this. Instead it was like saying that "this land won in Europe beacuse they had a little more resorces for two months". That kind of ending isn't conclusive at all, and certainly nothing to be proud of if you won by playing solitare for 5 ours and were just as surprised as your opponents when you where declared winner.

I tend not to like "point-salad" designs.

I can answer the initial question thusly: Victory points are delicious. Especially with a side order of my opponents tears of defeat. Yum.

Good (victory) points your making here. I notice that it's usually a drag for people who aren't attuned to counting in their heads. But tallying up the scores seems for seems hardly ever the issue. Though games that are scoring during play do seem more thrilling, but some added hidden scoring adds to the surprise winning possibilities (come back victory). I agree with most things you mention, and I am very happy with the subject. However the microphone that changes colors in combination with the cuts in edit, are very distracting. If at all possible, please turn off the changing of colors in your microphone while filming :) Also the transitions between cuts are distracting as well. Please make more use of no transitions, or script more. Because what you have to say is very interesting and added graphics are entertaining and useful. But the distractions keep making me scroll back to actually hear what you had to say. But I like the subject and what you had to say on the matter, so keep it up!

Strange that this came out the same day as the Fun Problems episode with a rant against victory points!

I'm just bored so i decided to make a game 😂

I agree that VPs don't suck but I don't quite follow some of your arguments. You mention that VPs allow alternate strategies, alluding to 'point salad' games, but those different tracks could feed into each other. Still, I would agree it's easier to design with VPs than building an interconnected engine of various options that feed back into a single path towards victory. It was the bit around 7min where you suggest that VPs can lower the luck that made me comment. I'm not even sure there's a correlation, let alone a causation! So many 'Ameritrash' games feature lots of dice rolling and still come down to points. Are you saying that VPs inherently lower luck in a game? But overall, I do agree that VPs have a strong utility in diversifying the number of possible games. Great vid overall.

This is a great point.. Something like final girl, with a thematic victory or defeat feel so much better than having to do accounting at the end of a game.

We talk about the endings of board games except Monopoly x"D

Game designer here. I think that victory points have a lot of potential that just doesn't get realized. Victory points rarely ever have an ingame effect and are just a tally.

I don't see why there is so much emphasis in these debates about victory points. First, we have to keep in mind that victory criteria are one thing and end-of-game criteria are another. Sometimes victory points can be used for both, but that is not a rule. But both are used to "drive" the player actions/decisions to an end. We can give victory points several thematic names: - Whoever collects the most money (victory points) wins; - At the end of 9 rounds, whoever is most famous (victory points) wins; - You will manage wineries and the one with the most prestige (victory points) wins. The point is that every game will have an end and a criterion to determine who is the winner. What makes the game interesting and makes us enjoy that game are the challenges that are proposed during the game, so that players can think of how to combine things/actions/resources in a more efficient way than their opponents. How or what to do to overcome the opponents is what makes the game good, not the name given to the victory conditions.

I think this question comes down to how each player thinks about board games. I really need a good narrative or story in a game to buy into it, so I tend to not like victory points. But I know and see lots of other players who think about games more as problems to solve, for whom I'm guessing victory points don't matter as much. I do agree with Scott Westerfeld's original premise, in that game designers should more strongly consider thematic victory conditions instead of knee-jerk defaulting to victory points because "that's how games end nowadays".

I think for multiplayer games having a singular path to victory is a good thing, as it means that players will inevitably get in each others way. Though they are both games with victory points, this is very related to the Agricola vs Caverna debate. In Agricola you are always going for the same things as your opponents, adding tension to the game, where in caverna, a game where players can win without ever noticing their opponent was even playing, that tension doesn’t exist.

I started calling points in baseball "Victory Points". My sports group hates me now!

I think the video's being a bit too harsh on specific victory conditions - it's not necessary for a specific victory condition to determine the method to get there. That's confusing the what with the how. It's like saying - sorry for the video game example - that every Civilisation game is the same because science victory is very specific. The ability to build a spaceship is tied to the player's production, science, military, all of which are very loose conditions which creates a huge possibility space. To simplify, say victory condition is buying a specific thing - if there are multiple ways of obtaining money to pay for it then voila we have multiple ways of obtaining that specific victory Yeah you can say then that money feels like victory points but it already is a huge thematic difference imho. And plenty of ways to complicate it if you want - add multiple steps to the victory condition, add alternative steps, make more currencies than just money each of different value intertwined in a complex economy...

You know, I've never quite thought about it in that way but I think this may partially explain why so very many euro games feel empty or disappointing to me. You spend the majority of the game building toward a finale which ultimately becomes "okay, now everybody count up your points". I don't think that invalidates victory points themselves as a tool but perhaps designers being more creative with how to make the end of a game exciting would go a long way toward making these games more memorable. Even games where the players are "racing" to be the first to reach a certain number of victory points feels far more exciting than just collecting and tallying scores at the end.

I'm surprised you didn't mention this, although nobody does (I haven't actively done research on the subject though): I call it symmetrical versus asymmetrical randomness (idk if the concept has a name, as I came up with it, though I can't be the first). I think it's much more important these days than input and output randomness, as output randomness seems to have been pretty much eliminated entirely outside of dedicated push-your-luck games. Asymmetrical randomness is when the randomness in question only directly affects one player, like when players draw cards from a shared deck (which is what nearly ruins the otherwise great Kingdom Builder in my opinion). Symmetrical randomness is when it affects all players at once, like when players pick cards from an openly visible row of cards, like how players can choose to buy goods or djinns in Five Tribes - the Djinns of Naqala, as well as the initial board setup (distribution of spaces as well as meeples on them). The beauty of symmetrical randomness is that it skyrockets replayability and prevents the emergence of a one-size-fits-all strategy. The randomness in Five Tribes is entirely symmetrical (except for the initial turn order, which is random, but barely affects the game, as players get to bid on the actual turn order right away), whereas a huge part of Kingdom Builder is drawing cards determining the terrain type one can build on. I thought about modifying the rules of Kingdom Builder, adding an initial pool of cards in the middle, which is created by revealing cards until 2 (out of the total 5) terrain types are visible, and filling it up whenever there are less than 2 types between player turns. This ensures that players get a choice of 2 or 3 (including their hand card) of the terrain types. The downside would probably be a slower game, but I haven't tried it yet.

Counter examples: sports. Football is just who scored the most victory points by moving a token from one side of the board to the other. And it's a multi billion dollar thing that society spends a lot of time watching and talking about. The real problem is accounting, not victory pounts themselves. If the players dont know, or lose track, of their score during the game, thats the problem.

Great example with Pandemic! Many cooperative games, such as Just One (and Hanabi, I think) rely on the players reaching certain score thresholds, with Just One's score basically just telling you how well you did. Such scoring systems are extremely boring to me, to the point that they noticeably detract from my fun with the game. Such systems remind me of old school arcade video games like Pac Man, where the scores seem entirely arbitrary and near impossible to wrap my head around. Although in the case of arcade games, that problem mainly stems from the game being realtime, meaning it's much harder to notice and get a feel for what scores you how many points, as opposed to a turn-based board game, where you might get some points each turn and have time to process how & why you just scored

I've always thought that they kind of suck, but then I've always liked Scyth and Catan.

I think victory points can heavily obfuscate a game, while also facilitating the coexistence of different playstyles. Great Western Trail is a superb example for this: It's hard to get into, because getting an intuitive understanding for what makes for a good strategy is severely hindered (It took me about 8-10 plays to finally not be last in this game, and then I suddenly just won. Playing it exclusively on Board Game Arena so far is probably part of the reason though). On the other hand, the use of victory points means that everyone can find their own way through the jungle of interlocking systems. The other extreme, I think, are racing games like Heat or the Quest for El Dorado, comparatively limiting the pool of strategies while making effective play more obvious. Somewhere inbetween there are scoring systems like in Concordia, where counting scores one category after another makes for an exciting kind of race at the end, greatly supported by visualizing the scores on the point track. The worst type of scoring in my opinion is full live scoring, i.e. when ALL points are scored right after an associated action occurs, which can lead to players falling behind to stop caring and trying and is especially frustrating for newcomers to a game. Yet, another of my favorite games - Splendor Duel - does this, BUT keeps it interesting by having 3 victory conditions based on 2 types of points, where one of them (crowns) can even grant mid-game benefits. Also this game just beautifully interconnects its ten-ish push & pull axes. All in all, I think that the use of victory points should be avoided - if possible - without needing to remove interesting mechanics from a game. That isn't always possible, however, and I don't think we'd have strategically complex games like the before-mentioned Concordia, Great Western Trail and Splendor Duel without them. (Quick PSA for anyone actually reading this essay: Splendor and Splendor Duel are apparently wildly different games, the former lacking most, if not all, elements that I find interesting about the game. So in case you're thinking of getting one of those: Don't just take the original version because you can play it with more people. Take a closer look, and maybe try them out before deciding willy-nilly)

It's kind of ironic to claim that victory points don't lead to climatic endings. Dominant Species has the most climatic ending I've experienced in a boardgame as you methodically tally up the points for each tile and everyone's on the edge of their seat hoping they end up the winner at the end In fact, i would argue that climatic endings are a strength of victory point games. You often don't know who is winning as opposed to non-victory point games which tend to be very anticlimactic.

They do

my take on the topic - when are VP positive? - win/loose don't feel as binary if the vp are close together - motivation of the player up to the final round (specially if it is hard to decipher who is winning) - easier to design a lot of game concepts that spurt different strategies and reward with the same general currency when are VP negativ? - if you crush your opponent so hard, that you pass him with a full leap on the VP track ahead - when your person goal is conflicted between whining and playing something for fun - long accounting at the end of a game

I have a slight issue with hidden victory points but it can be mitigated. I think sometimes this act of reveal can be disappointing if a player thinks they did great but is revealed to have done worse than expectation because of relative scoring. As long as you can feel you’re in a ball park you can adjust your expectations and I guess this is what Scythe does. Great video!

The problem I have with victory points is that they tend to turn games into solitaires by making it more efficient to spend your turns gaining victory points than trying to contest with your opponents over the win condition. I've seen "conquer territory" themed games where trying to conquer territory was a terrible strategy. Victory point games tend to feel like playing Civilisation but with only Science and Culture victories turned on.

The example of pandemic brings up an interesting further concept of inverse victory conditions, ie losing conditions. Pandemic has only one way to win but several ways to lose! Accumulating outbreaks and dwindling the supply deck feel like 'losing a life' and builds tension

One of the issues with victory point games (particularly point salad varieties) comes when they are not all equal in salad strength. My big beef with Lost Ruins of Arnak where the track up the side is clearly the best route to take. Then in other games where they are all equal the game feels a bit flat as it really doesn't matter what you do.

For me the question is are modern board game designers capable of coming up with a new innovative way of creating a game with a satisfying ending that doesn't use victory points. Games with victory points can still be fun, nobody needs to take that away from players, but I think the concept is a crutch. I'm waiting for something new to catch on