Secret Scoring
Posted by Rob Herman at October 4th, 2006
Secret scoring is a mechanic that seems very strange to me. And yet many popular games use it; many by Reiner Knizia, such as the recent Blue Moon city and classic Samurai, but also hits like Puerto Rico. The reason it’s strange is this: all points are awarded publicly, but you keep the number you actually have secret from the other players. (A screen is involved, or chits that can be worth varying numbers of points and are kept face-down.) So there’s no reason why you couldn’t keep track of how many points each player has. But it’s not made easy, and in the cases I’ve seen, players don’t tend to.
The reason for using secret scoring, I suspect, is to discourage laborious, extensive analysis as the game nears its end. Nefarious reader Fuleng brought this up as a possible weakness in Power Grid, which lacks secret scoring; unless the game is a runaway victory, players are well served by calculating the exact sums of money each opponent will need to obtain needed reactors, get fuel for them, and connect the last few cities. It makes it a less novice-friendly game that it would otherwise be. If not for the secret scoring, Puerto Rico might similarly drag down near the end, with players keeping a tally of other players’ totals and pushing the game to an end, or trying to delay it, based on whether the last few points could be scraped together.
Secret scoring also sends the implicit message to the players that the game is not meant to be played with intensive calculations near the end. Heck, you’ll win more games per hour if you cross your fingers and play with your best guess instead of keeping track of secret scores in your head and taking 20 minutes to work out the best course of action; not to mention that your fellow players are much less likely to get bored and go watch television. If these games were played for serious prize money or something, would I expect the best players to keep score in their heads and perform thorough analysis? Yeah, I would; I would also expect “tournament rules” without secret scoring to develop, to take the burden off since the analysis is going to happen anyway. But for the majority of board game play, where having a game take 45 minutes rather than 75 is a huge advantage, I think secret scoring successfully keeps bright players from overthinking the games.
Secret scoring is a very Euro-game feature. I’ve always thought that one of the defining features of European games is the way they try to make sure that it remains open for anyone to win until the end. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is open to debate — on the one hand, it’s no fun to keep playing a game once you know you’re going to lose (and only slightly less fun to be kicked out ahead of time), but on the other hand, the endings of these games often feel arbitrary to me when I know they were designed to come down to the last few moves no matter how good or bad I played at the start.
Hidden scoring is an interesting example of this technique. It lets people THINK the game is still open, even when one person is running away with the victory. I usually find it annoying, as it seems like a heavy-handed technique to make me think I could still win.
For the record, I don’t mind Blue Moon City’s technique at all. The number of crystals (currency for buying victory points) in your hand is kept secret, but everyone can see how many VPs you have already bought. This is a good mix, which keeps the details hidden but not the general score. My other recent favorite, Goa, is similar. Most of your points can be calculated by glancing at the boards in front of each player. The only points you don’t know before the end are the ones for the cards being held and the bonus for having the most money. (The VP tiles are rare enough that you can easily remember them.) That adds some surprise to the game without making me feel like the designer had to hide everything to keep it interesting.
I often, but not always, feel that Settlers has a “secret scoring” feel to it. Although the actuall VPs are very much public (with the exception of development cards which are easily counted by experienced players). The fact that many games have been a hard fight for the win by all players with as much as a 3 point spread seems to make the victory points not indictive of how much a player is winning by. This instead is better determined by a combination of board position, what cards they have in their hand, and of course VPs. One of these factors and argueably the most important one is the cards in your hand which like a secret scoring mechanic is given publicly but kept secret. The only thing keeping players from keeping track of the resources everyone has is a sense of fun and the occasional stealing of random cards.
Curious: Are there any (board or card) games that set up situations where each player may not know themselves exactly where they stand, though they might have a general idea?
I specifically exempt games like Flux, where it’s impossible to tell what the hell is going on from turn to turn.
I’m thinking mostly of something like the Amber Diceless RPG, where the amount of experience points you actually gain are a secret - you present a list to the GM of what you want to buy with them in priority order, and he keeps track of what you’ve achieved behind the screen, so to speak. So at any point after chargen, you have only a rough idea where you stand relative to the other players, or even what your own full capabilities are. To the best of my knowledge, this setup is unique (and fits Amber admirably).
Ack. Meta-note: Your comment preview puts backslashes in front of apostrophes, but renders them properly if you use the HTML ampersand code for them. The actual comment post does not parse ampersand codes, however. Thus, the garbage in my previous comment.
[I went in and fixed them. I’ll see what I can do about fixing the preview feature. -Rob]
Hmm. I have a pretty low opinion of secret scoring in general. In most of the games I’ve seen with secret scoring, it either seems to be unnecessary (Puerto Rico), or else knowing the score is so important that players almost have to take time to memorize the score every turn (Tigris and Euphrates, Samurai).
In the first case, it’s acceptable. There’s no good reason why VPs are secret in Puerto Rico, but perhaps it limits ass-dragging, so I don’t mind it. It’s also easy enough to keep track of the point count anyway - I almost always keep a running tally of the difference in shipping totals between me and the other players, which I find easier than counting their points exactly (ie, I’m three shipping VPs ahead of player X).
For the Knizia games, I usually find secret scoring to be quite irritating. Tigris and Euphrates and Samurai, in particular, give a massive advantage to the player who knows the exact score, and even worse, having the score be public knowledge actually decreases the ass-dragging time. This is because the score is easy to count at a glance (it involves small numbers of wooden cubes/tokens) and the uncertainty of losing track means you have to sit and ponder instead of taking action. Secret scoring also penalizes players for interruptions, which is not a bad idea in theory, but losing track of the point total because of a necessary phone call or because you had to arrange the pizza order is really annoying. When I play Samurai and T&E, I highly advocate playing with public scoring.
As for Power Grid, technically it would be faster to have money totals be secret, but I think it would diminish the game to remove the end-game analysis. While is sometimes slow, I don’t find it to be onerous, because it only kicks in at the last round, and some level of careful thought is almost inevitable in such a heavy game. Losing the end-game frantic money counting would make the game 5-10 minutes shorter, but I think would take something essential away from it as well.
In Puerto Rico, it has been my experience that secret scoring is a greater drag on the game than public scoring. The people with whom I play are always analytical. If the scores are kept secret, then they will take the additional time to determine each player’s score and analyze at length to make a decision. Since they’re going to reason out all of the scores anyway and there is no avaoiding the lengthy analysis, it’s easier to just make the scores public and let them do what they’re going to do without forcing tedium upon them or the rest of the group.