It’s like bonus day! Four mini-essays, in response to the excellent comments to Tuesday’s article here.
To Fuleng, who indicated displeasure with secret scoring in Knizia games: Secret scoring does seem to be out of line, in particular, with Knizia’s intent for Tigris and Euphrates, which, (I hope!), was to be a deep and intensely strategic game. Perhaps my opinion of the mechanic has been colored by too much Puerto Rico. (Is there such a thing?) Taj Mahal certainly copes well without it. And your point about the penalty for interruptions is well-taken, because it’s everyone who suffers. El Grande is particularly nasty in this regard, because while the number of soldiers you put into the Castillo is public, they’re kept hidden once there.

To John, who commented that Settlers seems to have a “secret scoring” feel to it: You’re right in that a lot of players don’t tend to watch what others have in their hands even though it matters a lot towards opponents’ threat to win. Part of the reason might be that in the beginning of the game, it’s not as big of a deal unless you are directly competing for expansion space with a particular opponent. It might be a neat advanced strategy to count how many resources, if they were the ideal ones, a given opponent would need to reach 10 VP, and use that as an internal victory meter.Of course, you would then need to adjust for things like a excess of unneeded resources, other players’ willingness to trade, the presence of ports, and so on.

To Nevin, who expressed discontent with scoring rules that “string along” players who have little chance of actually winning: This business of how much an early lead should help later play is certainly a difficult one from a design perspective. Ideally, there would be tradeoffs available; for instance, in the early Puerto Rico game, you can try to rack up a VP lead shipping cheap goods like indigo and corn, or you can try to develop and trade more expensive goods in the hopes of being able to buy large, useful buildings later. If these tradeoffs don’t exist at all then you’re completely right: you might as well just play two separate games, one for the beginning and one for the end, and declare a winner of each separately. Can you list a couple of games you’re particularly dissatisfied with? I find that in Catan, even if I get a really lousy start due to poor luck or poor strategy, I can have a satisfying game by making a personal goal to reach a “respectable” number of points, say 8, by the time the winner finishes.

To J. Vogel, who asked if there were games where players don’t know where they stand: I saved this one for last because it’s something I’ve thought about before when trying to design games. It’s certainly tricky, because the paradox is that the players need to be able to work meaningfully towards a goal, and yet not know how close they are. One way this can work is when the goal is “beat the other player or players”, but you don’t know what they have. In Poker it’s a matter of how much you’re willing to bet that your cards are better. In games like Gin and 31 you need to find the right moment at which you believe your hand is better than the other person’s; both games, since they have a large penalty for being wrong, also have the element of “how sure am I?” The intuitive way to get a game element like this is to have some component of the score be secretly chosen; perhaps score chips are secretly chosen or you choose a goal randomly and get bonus points for meeting it. The goal could even be revealed to the other players. However, this seems like it would add a dissatisfying element of chance to the game.
This is actually going to tie in with an upcoming article, when I talk about how games are ended. To spoil it a bit now: Evo handles this creatively, because the goal is “have the most points at the end of the game”, but you don’t know when the end of the game is going to be. The game proceeds for 6-8 turns, depending on the number of players; after that, after each turn, the game has an increasingly likely chance to end right then. It works particuarly well in Evo because that game provides many chances to make short-term gains at the cost of long-term growth.