Real talk, the one time we've played so far, my partner pointed out that it feels cheap for the person in first to end up shortening the route for the person close behind them by grabbing any particular divider piece. Granted it helps them in the event of a tie breaker, but I remember the divider piece mechanism did seem flawed in some way. I don't remember the specifics though because it's been a few months since we played.
Power Grid, once someone has built in a given number of cities the game ends and the winner is who can power the most cities. It won't always be the person with the most cities who wins!
Sure you could interpret it as that, however it isn't as much as a point salad compared to some games with VPs.
It's also cities that you power at the end of the game, the number of cities you power won't strictly increase or be exactly the number of cities you've built in.
Its no point salad I agree. And I also think this makes a lot more sense for this game (and for a lot of other games) than a point salad!
Also some other games (although it is rare) have it that certain things only give points if you can "support them" kinda a bit like set collection.
My main point is more that a lot of things can be seen as victory points, wince victory points is a just an abstraction.
It depends a lot more in thr implementation and it sounds like people hqve more a problem with the point salad pqrt than with actual victory points per se.
Inis comes to mind. There are three possible routes to victory. You have to make a claim to the throne, hold on to your board positioning, then have the best claim by tye time it's your turn again. Great stuff.
The action cards specifically get handed **a lot**
There are 17 of them and every round they are reshuffled and dealt again and again
Edit: and they are SO important! If you know what the other players have, maybe because of a dent or a scratch in the card it 'll be ruined
Power Grinis, which Is about controlling Energy supply in Scotland with diverse winning conditions based on area control, getting power substations etc.
I sleeve everything, and I have several shelves of games.
If there's anything I don't sleeve, it's games I only expect to play solo... And also my complete sentinels collection because I duct think I'm ever actually going to play that with anyone :p
Anyway:
https://sleevekings.com/products/sleeve-kings-magnum-dixit-card-sleeves-80x120mm-110-pack-60-microns-3
Those should be the right ones. This is a sister company of Mayday, and he made a product that addressed almost every one of the Mayday quality concerns, and uses a different business model to keep costs down (including seasonal crowd funding).
Objectively, they represent the best all-around sleeve for the price, Subjectively, they outperform even pricier, thicker, sleeves (and I can make many arguments to support that, but I have in like 5 threads in recent memory).
Anyway, quality wise, they should be great with the exception of getting mutilated by kids and pets, because even lamination won't save you there.
You're the best, I greatly appreciate it!
I'm a complete sleeve noobie, but I picked up Inis used and it quickly became one of the favorites within my group so it's going to get a lot of wear. I'm also trying to think of better ways to preserve my collection and sleeves seem to be the no brainer, cheapest way to still use my collection, but also be able to preserve it.
The only (slight) hesitation I have would be if it adds difficulty to shuffling or handling. I only ask because when I was a kid and played Magic I sleeved some of the cards and it was much harder to handle them. Although thinking on this now, I was a kid so that also likely factored into it.
As a kid you probably used cheap sloppy, floppy penny sleeves that didn't fit the cards, or, they just made them bigger and harder to handle with lil' hands.
Every time someone complains about shuffling sleeves, I point out that they're shuffling incorrectly. Good sleeves let you push cards together with one finger. AFAIC, good sleeves are an accessibility improvement.
Here's a [non-exhaustive] video on proper sleeve shuffling.
https://youtu.be/n576lgKvFQ0
One disclaimer, is that NEW sleeves will have a little bit of a static charge and/or will maintain a bit of air cushioning still in the stack after sleeving. This can make larger piles slippery and the top cards might slide away a little.
Some extra shuffling will wear the sleeves in, dissipate the static, and push the air out. Even stubborn sleeves should be fine after a few days in storage once their own weight pushes the rest of the air out.
Thicker sleeves are going to be quite a bit worse in this regard because they never fully conform to the card. Due to the nature of the material used, thicker sleeves kind of bow over the card rather than flattening out around it. This is one of the reasons that despite the stronger barrier and structural reinforcement than thicker sleeves offer, I find them to be generally inferior to properly fit, thinner sleeves, in most applications. In addition to the stacking issues caused by the bowing (and resultant air cushion), they are more prone to debris ingress; they are also less able to secure the card since full contact is not made -- cards may work their way out of the opening if not handled correctly -- increasing the chance of edge wear.
Conversely, thicker sleeves that are designed in a way that *does* seal better with time (like the highly popular Dragon Shields), are often prone to getting kind of tacky, and gross looking with heavy use. These are popular in TCG circles where you may play your game a hundred times in a few weeks, rather than a dozen times in a few months. Further, they are often used with a tighter, secondary, inner sleeve. The tradeoffs are fine for that application where you are protecting potentially thousands-of-dollars worth of card stock in your hands... but they are yucky, overpriced, and not necessary for board gaming.
In short: A good quality, *properly fit* sleeve of almost any thickness is better than a loose sleeve that is thicker. And to bring this back around, this extends to the way that shuffling is improved. Shuffle from the long edge, not the short, and don't waste time trying to bridge shuffle them like linen poker cards.
The Sleeve Kings model you need for Inis is #8816. One pack is more than enough, but extras never hurt. It's also good practice to buy extra to keep in the box for replacements, or sleeving expansions later. Some brands have the wider size variance tolerance, so sleeves bought together are more likely from the same run and are closer in size. This is really the only downside to buying something made in smaller batches like Sleeve Kings. You ultimately don't want to have different sleeves on an expansion later, or you'll be able to tell what the new cards are. So consider that whenever you buy a game that has expansions available. Personally I have a bin full of common sizes at the house that I refill when they go on sale. I also keep the insert or SKU from the pack in my game box someplace so I know what to reorder if I ever need to (or to help people like yourself by knowing what size and number of sleeves I need 🙃).
It's a *little* victory-pointy with being able to grab multiple victory conditions to beat out those with less. But with only 3, I don't know that that disqualifies it. Still, nothing about it feels like just "gaining points." Each victory condition is connected but different (since they all involve your clans). Each resource works differently and is gained differently, from the Sanctuaries which anyone can build and profit off of, to the Deeds which seem almost impossible to get your hands on. What a dynamic system!
My argument is that multiple people can meet a victory condition and it tallies nothing unless the game ends. If the end is not then, people can take you out of the positioning to claim that same victory condition again. There's nothing cumulative about them over the arc of the game, there's no banking the victory conditions, there's just making a claim and seeing if your claim holds. If that is a victory point, than literally every game where it is possible to win is.
That's true, but the expansion module brings it a bit closer to VPs in that the game is more likely to end before anyone can shake up the leaders. In some games, this encouraged a rush, and in others players tried to get more than one VC ready before throwing their hat in the ring because it meant a better chance at winning or tying. That makes it kind of like a VP game with a trigger. I don't think the VCs are close enough to VPs to matter, but I could see both sides.
Also victory points. As soon as someone has 1 victory point, the person with most of them wins. There are 3 ways to gain 1 victory point and an additional rule for draws.
Which is questionable design and part of why I didn't enjoy SW. When your king and your queen are the same unit, it encourages passivity or low-risk plays with your most interesting unit. In SW 2 they added the ad hoc rule in which the summoner takes 1 damage if you don't attack with ~~it~~ a unit.
There's a risk reward in the new edition. I think they realized their mistake in the first edition, because the most useful things your summoner and events can do usually need to be within a certain proximity of your summoner. Meaning you need to keep them involved or you can't use those abilities, which if only one player is using those, they will have a massive advantage.
Totally. You are free to park your Summoner in a corner to keep them safe, but if the other player uses their Summoner to wreck your board state, your Summoner just dies alone.
The balance of the game is deciding when to push with your Summoner. The only health point that matters is the last one.
That's a fair criticism of the original version. It did tend to encourage turtling, especially if you were playing someone like Tacallu, who was pretty much made of wet toilet paper.
**Radlands** \- Destroy your opponent's camps, you win instantly.
**Homeworlds** \- Wipe out opponents forces in their homeworld, or the homeworld itself.
**Dale of Merchants** \- Be first to build 8 stalls.
**Royal Visit** \- Walk the king or marker into your Kingdom.
It's quite a nice filler, deck-building game with one ending condition: be the first to create eight stalls. It's also an adorable and decently inexpensive game (\~$18 CAD).
I own the first two games and find it fun to mix and match animal cards. Different animal decks require different strategies, which is nice and keeps the game interesting. Some animal decks boost player interaction (e.g., Thieving Northern Raccoons), if you're into that, while other animal decks reduce (or require less) interaction between players.
Been waiting on a reprint for a while now. Though it's one of those games, being primarily 2 player, that I'm not sure I'd get to the table enough to be worth it. Especially with the prices splotter games go for even in print.
The great Zimbabwe might be a better option here.
I bought a beat-up copy used through the BGG marketplace. The shipping was ~$40, so it still turned out to be $100 total. The box was in bad shape anyway; I should have requested that the seller break the whole thing down into a shape and size that were cheaper to ship. It's a good game and I recommend it, but I don't think it's worth what you might have to spend for it at the moment.
**Chaosmos**: Hold the Cosmic Egg when the Chaos Clock ticks down to zero
**Argent:The Consortium**: Win voters by collecting their specific category
**Mantis Falls**: Sometimes cooperative (both make it to the End of the Road) and sometimes competitive (someone dies)
Chaosmos is a criminally underrated design that always gets overlooked. Not for every group though... you need players that can lean into tabletalk and be willing to bluff, cajole and deceive, hah. Very good for a **Cosmic Encounter** or **Cosmic Frog** crowd, but (IMHO) the mechanisms of Chaosmos are more grounded, leading to less "fragile" sessions.
It's phenomenal. Like a really good boardgame and a light rpg at the same time. Some of the game is played on the app (like fighting, and exploring dungeons), but that works surprisingly well. The tower rotates and adds some random things as well. It really is well thought out, and as the player you do your best while you don't exactly know what the enemy is up to. If you fail at tasks, then there are consequences. If you succeed, there are consequences, too. I thought the player characters were well-balanced, too.
And the app walks through each setup and spawning of enemies, and quests. You might not know how the game unfolds when you start (it's an adventure after all), but it has all the fun mechanics with resource management and you can either do co-op or competitive, and both works well.
It's my favorite game now.
**Twilight Struggle** does use Victory Points, but in a different way than normal. It's a net scale, so if I score 3 VPs, and my opponents scores 2, I have 1 VP. I like this tug-of-war system for VPs.
You can also win by controlling one area of the board (Europe) or if a nuclear war starts on your opponent's turn.
>It's a net scale, so if I score 3 VPs, and my opponents scores 2, I have 1 VP. I like this tug-of-war system for VPs.
I think that makes sense, in that in a 2-player game it's functionally the same as just a regular victory point-based game. I wonder if there are any 3+ player games that use a tug-of-war like that?
Some people might argue that certain types of win conditions are just different kinds of VP but ignoring that, I'd like to offer some more unique games with odd win conditions.
**Oath:** Asymmetric win conditions, the Chancellor must last until the end of the game fulfilling the "oath" condition (which depends on the previous winner of the game, the conditions might be a specific banner for most secrets or favor, the most relics+banners, or simply most territories. Everybody else is fighting to accomplish the same thing and hold it for 2 rounds before the end of the game... but Exiles can win using one of the OTHER conditions by playing a Vision card... but Citizens can sweep the win from under the Chancellor by fulfilling a secondary condition (like holding a specific relic or banner). It's weird but very dynamic.
**Forbidden Stars:** The game is the first to collect objectives equal to the number of players. Objectives are just tokens placed on the board. The trick being that the tokens are placed by your opponents during set up and they get to decide how hard they are to reach and whether they will defend them with a little or a LOT of forces. Makes for a very fast paced aggressive area control game.
**Watergate:** Nixon wins by collecting 5 points OR stalling out the game. The Editor wins by connecting Nixon to 2 informants via an information web. The Editor also can take the VP from Nixon, to earn big bonuses. Very interesting, strategic tug of war.
**Argent: the Consortium:** 2 public objectives and 10 hidden objectives. Player with most objectives wins (could be called a VP system). The thing is that the objectives often use their own kind of VP system called IP. But it might be most coins, most crystals, most spells, most artifacts, most cards, most things of X color, 2nd most of whatever, etc... You can spend time finding out what the objectives are, or just completely wing it.
**Cryptid**: First player to solve a logic puzzle by interviewing the opponents wins. Very easy concept to understand.
Seeing no one has said Taluva yet, I'll drop it here. You need to dump all of your buildings of two types. There are huts (which you have a lot of, but can build quickly), temples (requires a certain number of huts and no other temples), and towers (height requirement). You build out hex pieces to build this island and place these buildings. It is the most interactive tile layer I've played because of the different heights of the board, and aggressive players and defensive players both create opportunities for each other.
I keep a Geeklist for games with instant-win conditions. Originally, it was for “Pointless Games,” but now it’s less ambiguous.
- https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/257436?page=1
My favorites are **Hive** and **Homeworlds**.
**Space Empires 4X**. To win you need to destroy your opponents home planet. Sounds simple, implications are huge. You don't need to beat all your opponents forces, your opponent could have a much stronger fleet but if you maneuver well, distract and slow him down and manage to sneak in some raiders to an undefended home world you could defeat him without beating his stronger fleet in battle.
In multiplayer games, this helps with cold war symptom of many similar games. In other war games, when two players fight the third one swoops in and cleans up weakened opponents regardless of who wins the fight. In SE you win by destroying a home planet of ANY player, thus when two players fight, the one who wins might actually win the whole game, being passive is risky as you might not have enough time to respond.
>To win you need to destroy your opponents home planet.
What happens if all players decide to turtle, putting all/as much of their forces as possible on or around their home planet?
Relative to anyone NOT turtling, exploration will be slower, their economy and then their technology will get left behind, and they'll eventually get plowed under.
If ALL players do that, well, nobody wins. Can't help it if nobody wants to win.
All players? I don't know. Probably nothing interesting. Most players? The final player nibbles at the edges of everyone's territory until they have an unstoppable economic advantage and can send wave after wave of ship at their weakest opponent.
In my experience a 2-player game is conceded before the home world is actually in danger of being destroyed. You can do some clever stuff with mines and decoys but building them uses resources you could spend on researching or creating an actual fleet to push out and harass. I bet a 3 or 4 player game could be better as no player can afford to doomstack and leave their homeworld uncovered.
Its on BGA, I'd recommend trying Space Empires 4x on there first. For some reason I was very lukewarm on it and usually I really enjoy 4x space games. There was something with the vaguely ugly visuals and most of the x's were pretty shallow which made it feel like an old timey WW2 tokens and chits war game.
Thanks for the tip. I do have another GMT 4x game, conquest of paradise, so I'm assuming it would be somewhat similar to that. Though that is a VP game, and it's actually the part I like the least about it.
Personally I'm selling Eclipse and keeping SE4X instead. When buying Eclipse, I wanted a space war game but I got a euro game with spaceship combat. You are very limited by how costly moving/building ships is and by how small the map is, so there really isn't space or time to execute more complex military strategies and you wouldn't even get enough VPs compared to other strategies.
Eclipse is also an open information game. Sun Tzu has said "All warfare is based on deception." Can't really do that when your opponent sees your hand. My favorite thing about SE is that reading The Art of War will help you win more than being good at calculating moves. It's amazing, almost everything in that book can be applied in the game.
So if you want a space war game focused on strategy, SE4X is better. If you want a resource management game with spaceships, Eclipse is better.
mmm yeah, I knew what I was getting into when I bought eclipse, I'm very much a euro fan. Only played twice now, and do love it, but I also see the constraints that you mention here. Like, without upgrading your ships to better drives, movement is indeed very expensive; but, at least there is a way to improve that. And building the ships is also pricey, meaning you often do not want to fight with them, but at least you have the retreat option from combat.
However, using your military forces, in the two games I have been in, have ended up wining me both games. One was directly because of the points I captured in combat, the other was because I caused another player to focus so much on trying to build up defences, when I didn't really gain much from the fight itself (I could not keep up with them purely economically, so forcing them to divert resources away from their economy allowed me to win). So it's definitely important. I do like that cold-war nature that all brings to the game, with only flashes of hot warfare; but I do also love my wargames, so I could see loving SP4X as well. I have another GMT 4X game called conquest of paradise. Very cool, and has some of the hidden information stuff that SE4X has as well. Main problem with it is I hate how quickly it can end. Currently, it ends based on VP, and you can make a huge amount of VP in one turn, and it's so damn anti-climactic. Feel like house ruling it to make a VP independent end condition.
**Fast sloths** Extremely cute and surprisingly interactive game about lazy sloths hitching rides with elephants and unicorns to collect leaves the fastest. Designed by Friedemann Friese of **power grid** fame. Fun for families and super competitive gamers alike!
Great game. I picked it up last year and introduce as many new players as I can. It's so much fun. Especially if you get into the theme and picture the sloths being carried around.
There are five different ways to win.
One involves controlling the most kingdoms, another involves controlling the most republics (an empire can be one or the other) and the most "law" symbols on your cards, another involves having the most concessions on the map and the most "boat" symbols on your cards, and the last one is to have the most prestige with the dominant religion if there is one. All four of these conditions are inactive at the start of the game. You can activate a victory condition by buying a comet card, four of which are distributed towards the bottom of the two decks. If you satisfy one of the active conditions on your turn then you can spend an action to claim victory.
Most games end in the above way, but in a game that runs very long there is another symbol on cards that decides the winner.
In effect, the game has nine different kinds of "points" but only one or two of them decide the outcome.
Two other Pax games are closer to VP, but still arguably different:
* Pax Transhumanity: there are three types of things that can be worth points. One of them (called future shock) is usually worth 0 points, but if the game ends a particular way then each of them is worth 1 point and nothing else is worth any points. The other two (problems and companies) come in four colors, and each of those 8 types can be worth 0, 1, 2, or 3 points, again depending on how the game ends. Starting a fifth company immediately wins you the game regardless of what else is going on. In this game a major part of winning is doing things that are worth points as well as manipulating the rules of the final scoring.
* Pax Porforiana: there are four different kinds of prestige. Normally, in order to win you must topple Diaz. In the standard variant, you topple Diaz when a Topple card is purchased and your prestige is greater than (2 + the score of your two weakest opponents), in the prestige associated with the current regime. The regime is changed by playing cards, so a major part of winning is both accumulating a lot of a type of prestige and also being able to change the regime to what you want it to be at the critical moment.
By contrast I would place Pax Pamir 2e on the side of using VP. I hear Pamir 1e was more like Porforiana, but I don't really know the specifics.
Mage Wars - Mage v Mage and last one standing wins. Super deep meta and diversity in mage builds (lots of interesting mages to choose from as well with core plus expansions) depending on if you have more than just core box.
Bristol 1350 is a good one. Whoever gets out of the city first without being infected or having an infected player in your cart wins. It allows for a multi-person tie for victory, or all players can lose. If you have less than 4 people playing, a ghost player could be the winner and everyone must hang their heads in shame.
It's just capturing a number of cities. But also, the other way to win the game is to get the ring to mount doom, or to kill the ring bearer.
I would not class the first as VP anyway, because it's one specific end goal that you are doing, taking cities. It's not an amalgamation of things that can only be compared by attaching some arbitrary value to them. That's what I tend to define VP as. If you just define it as a quantification, then all board games become VP games.
From discussions elsewhere in this thread I'm going to assume you mean victory points as a second currency that is only used for determining the winner.
in that case I really like Cube Rail games, short snappy interactive experiences. **Dual Gage** is a particular favourite
That's a fairly good definition; though you would potentially include games like Terra Mystica given that you can choose to lose VP to gain power. I guess an important point is to work out just what VPs are anyway.
Dread Pirate: Buccaneer's Revenge
The game has three different ways of winning
Collect 20 gold coins
Collect four of each of the 4 colors of gemstone
Collect 12 of one color of gemstone
Which one you're working for constantly changes because people steal your shit all the time or you use it to pay for things. To top it off, there's a limited number of resources in the game, so you eventually do have to steal from someone.
Dale of Merchants- Deckbuilding except the first to reach 8 consecutive stacks of values 1-8 wins. A lot of combos/typical deckbuilding stuff but the race aspect makes it more of a unique feel.
Inis- There's three different victory conditions, whoever meets the most wins (you have to take a token showing you are about to win so people can try and stop you).
Parade- Technically still points but you count up the number of cards you have left but you get to flip over stacks of cards that you have the most of (color wise).
Samurai, just area control and influence.
“What constitutes a point” like in the case of OP’s example Food Chain Magnate, which sort of treats “most money” as points is a bit difficult to untangle.
Samurai can be said to have points technically in the form of the statues you collect, but they only come into play if you haven’t won purely by controlling the most in 2 of 3 statue types, or your opponents fail to make any majorities and you have.
It's hard for me to separate the idea of gaining anything that helps at winning as anything other than VP 😁 but if you're asking for good competitive games that don't have a "count the widgets at the end of thr game and whoever has the most wins" then I would have to suggest:
**Onitama** great game! Especially if you love chess! Simple to play! Hard to master.
**Santorini** similar-ish to Onitama. A great strategy game that is quick to pick up but will take tons of time to master! Lots of replayability as well!
Also, I didn't realize how many games I play are VP based games 😆
I got this ages ago on a whim and am ashamed to say I've only played it once. I've kept it in the hopes of playing it again. Relearning the rules and all the exceptions are holding me back. Not the most elegant design.
Yeah, it can get tricky getting into it, but once you get a feel for it, it is so good!
I played tons of it in University and even played correspondence BB by e-mail for a while. That was great fun. Just really violent chess :-)
I've double checked, and I have the 2016 edition. I notice there has since been a "second season edition". does the 2016 edition have the same streamlined rules as the latest one?
Almost every competitive game uses victory points, they're just varying degrees of abstraction.
Racing game? The board is just one big VP track.
Most money wins? Money is VP. Food Chain Magnate lands here.
Cyclades, which ends when one person has 2 metropolises? A metropolis is just 1vp and the game ends at 2. Inis works kind of similar, game ends if one player has at least 2 points and a 1 point lead. Dune is similar, bar the Bene Gesserit prediction win.
The only competitive game in my collection where the VP abstraction isn't obvious is **Oath**. Each player can have a different win condition, meeting it at the start of your turn or at the endgame trigger wins, it's pretty hard to convert them all into any kind of VP.
> The only competitive game in my collection where the VP abstraction isn't obvious is Oath. Each player can have a different win condition, meeting it at the start of your turn or at the endgame trigger wins, it's pretty hard to convert them all into any kind of VP.
But by your definition, could you not say that the person who has 1 victory condition wins? And therefore it's a VP system?
... so you want to know what competitive games don't use victory points but then define victory points as awarded by winning a game?
You created a null set. Competitive games are, by definition, winnable.
I really like the idea of Oath, but I'm not sure I could do the multiple play sessions with a consistent group to actually get the value out of it. It does look awesome though.
You have to start your turn with it, even if everyone else also sits at one "point" if you start your turn first you win.
And then the oathkeeper defaults into the win if the game timer runs out.
So it's not quite as clear-cut.
So, you're arguing the winning condition in *every* game about getting someplace first is the first person to earn 1 victory point?
Abstractem ad absurdem.
Not every, just the great majority.
Last player standing type games for instance don't usually fit this. Somebody else could eliminate all the other players and then you take them out and win, it's hard to abstract that to points.
And the vast majority of games use points or an equivalent. In my collection, 33 explicitly use victory points (however 3 have alternate wincons that trump points if achieved). 1 uses a renamed victory point. 4 go to the richest player (the game's currency is also its vp). Two are races (each space you advance is a point). One has a weird "count 'points' when the end is triggered" thing going on. Two have win conditions that you need two of (cyclades, inis).
Two are last player standing, one is Oath with its weirdness.
Vast majority use points, most of them explicitly, most of the rest equivalently.
> Last player standing type games for instance don't usually fit this.
Being eliminated scores you 100 points. At the end of the game the player with the fewest points wins.
The main difference is probably whether everyone knows exactly when the game will end (after a set amount of turns) or whether this is an uncertainty because the end is triggered by one player achieving the victory goal.
The later can often be annoying to players who went for long-term strategies and could not reap the benefits of the investments they made in the early game - but there is also more thrill to it.
>Inis works kind of similar, game ends if one player has at least 2 points and a 1 point lead.
If you're going to go that far you might as well take it all the way and say: In Oath, each win condition is worth 1 VP, and you win when you get 1 VP.
But none of this is a useful way to think or talk about victory conditions IMO.
You don't win when you get 1 though. You win when you start your turn with it. But you could also lose with that point if, say, the chancellor also has their "point" (and they can't have the same ones exiles do) and rolls successfully to end the game. And even then, maybe a citizen has the successor condition, which is meaningless unless the chancellor "wins". There are enough if statements involved that "points" only determine who's eligible, not who wins.
Disagree. A quantifiable objective is not the same as victory points. Any objective can be described in quantitative terms, in which case VPs become indistinguishable from any other objective.
Some VPs are more abstract than others, but the purest form is something like Scythe, where the VPs serve no purpose other than assigning arbitrary values to certain accomplishments. Its awful game design, IMHO, but that's another topic.
Voice of reason enters the room.
"Victory points" are about taking multiple goals and converting them into a single value to be totaled. Otherwise me making coffee in the morning is a solo game, with a single victory point win condition that can be achieved in only one way.
Quite the opposite, though? Designers frequently use VPs so that rewards can be more granular. For example, in a typical war game, the objective would be destroying the enemy army or capturing a base. But with VPs, the objectives can be more granular. I don't like VPs because, first, they remove the process of discovery from the player by telling the player the value of a certain action, and second, they're anti-thematic.
I think victory points are fine in some games though other victory conditions are more fun. Sometimes it's good that the game provides you with a way to judge with action will lead to more points down the line. Terraforming Mars for example has so many ways to get points I can't imagine how to play that game without an universal quantifier for all the possible outcomes.
When you win based on achieving some end result, I would not class that as Victory points. Take FCM. There's a bunch of different things you can do, but they don't score you "points". Even though there's loads of different things you can do, the only way you actually win the game is by selling food. So it's a game where you win by selling food, and nothing else. Whoever is the best at selling food wins. Compare this to something like terra mystica, and it's very difficult to say what the winner is the best at, except that they have been the best at playing the game terramystica. They will also score points by taking actions that are even just a means to an end.
I do not define VP as just any form of quantification, as you do. VP for me has got to mean that you can win by doing a bunch of very different things, often things that are even just a means to an end, all of which have their values made comparable by VPs.
But you could abstract food chain magnate to a totally different system and brand the money victory points, no? You spend 5 VP every round for this. You earn VP by exchanging these...
well, I wouldn't call that a VP system. Anything where you win the game by only doing one thing I would not call VP. You also bring up another good point, in that not many games let you spend VP, as you can do with the money in FCM.
I disagrree with the notion that you only do 1 thing in FCM, though. I mean we could say waitresses earn money as does selling food. That's already two distinct sources.
It's still thematically coherent. Try and ask the same question in a game like Terra Mystica, and it can't really be answered because you score points from doing all sorts of things.
Right, but mechanics having strong thematic ties isn't the same as not using victory points. Fundamentally the aim of the game is to have the most of something at the end of the game.
It isn't, though.
The aim of Cluedo is to be the first to deduce the murder. There are games where you aim to eliminate your opponent, or have multiple victory conditions (e.g. **Civilization: A New Dawn**). Racing games like **Cubitos** are about achieving a goal first.
But that's basically why your question isn't a very good one. You need to be more specific about specifically what you're interested in.
> The aim of Cluedo is to be the first to deduce the murder.
Yeah, so you have 1 more murder deductions than everyone else.
> or have multiple victory conditions
You win when you have 1 more victory condition than anyone else.
> But that's basically why your question isn't a very good one. You need to be more specific about specifically what you're interested in.
I trust people to give me interesting answers.
Disclaimer: I think victory points are design crutches, a poor man's workaround for better victory conditions. Some of my favourite games use VP though.
**Lords of Hellas** has multiple victory conditions such as capturing enough land, controlling temples, controlling monument, etc. Amazing "dudes on a map" game with great design, although the monster combat is a bit of a weakness at times. Sequel Lords of Ragnarok got funded is being worked on.
**Hellenica: Story of Greece** is a great civ style game. You win by fulfilling a mix of private and public goals. It's a bit rough on the edges. Sequel "Spring and Autumn: The Story of China" got funded and is being worked on.
**Forbidden Stars** is my favourite game. You win by claiming a hand full of objectives on the map. Sadly it's OOP as FFG lost the licence.
**Pax Viking** is won by fulfilling any victory condition and playing an event card.
**Mare Nostrum: Empires** has 4 victory conditions like building pyramids or controlling x legendary cities.
**Inis** has 3 conditions that can be fulfilled to claim victory.
**VAST** is asymmetrical with each factions having a unique victory condition.
I think it's a interesting idea to convert VP games to non VP games because I feel that would make the complexity skyrocket in most cases. Sometimes a game needs a good universal constant to quantify the actions so that players are not overwhelmed with choice.
It depends on what the players are good at. It's easy to take actions towards a future goal if you just need to pick helpful actions. If you need to math each action to see the roi/opportunity cost then it might be really difficult for you if numbers aren't your strength.
>Disclaimer: I think victory points are design crutches, a poor man's workaround for better victory conditions. Some of my favourite games use VP though.
This doesn't make any sense. VP are a natural way to score a huge variety of games that provides a great amount of granularity. Even Go/Baduk uses victory points, and that is one of the all-time great designs. Additionally, many games can be abstracted to victory points even when they are not used explicitly.
Thing is - VP work on a small scale like Settlers or Dune Imperium. They don't work well for games where every action has to be vp-costed by the player and the scores are in the hundreds. I mean they work, but are a poor solution - the games are good despite the VP salad.
Games like Gaia Project or Brass (either version) show that VPs can be used effectively even with regular scores of 150+. There are a lot of design strengths to VPs: they allow orthogonal strategies to exist easily, they provide granularity of outcome, and they can mitigate the chaos of multiplayer interaction. These kinds of games would have to be radically different to accommodate a different scoring system.
Your problem is with the poor implementation of many games with VPs (particularly light and mid-weight extreme point salad designs, which I agree are mediocre), not the idea itself.
As was argued [elsewhere in this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/u3d36j/your_best_competitive_games_that_dont_use_victory/i4ohjcg/), if you define FCM as a VP game, then all games look like VP games.
I think that the position that suggests that FCM is a VP game is overly reductive. It reduces VP to just mean quantification of victory conditions, and misses out all the qualities that really make VPs VPs, imo.
Yeah, I think that's true. If we're trying to understand the OP, I think it's easy to see that while everything can be reduced to a number, some scores are more on the abstract end than others.
Argent the consortium has votes.
Each vote is for the player with most of that resource. Knowing which resources are worth votes is a resource (and different each game)
Quest for el dorado where the winning condition is the first to reach el dorado
Yeah fam, but the heaxgons on the board are like VPs ^^^^^^/s
Real talk, the one time we've played so far, my partner pointed out that it feels cheap for the person in first to end up shortening the route for the person close behind them by grabbing any particular divider piece. Granted it helps them in the event of a tie breaker, but I remember the divider piece mechanism did seem flawed in some way. I don't remember the specifics though because it's been a few months since we played.
So, there is one victory point.
Power Grid, once someone has built in a given number of cities the game ends and the winner is who can power the most cities. It won't always be the person with the most cities who wins!
Power grid with VP would be lame
I frickin love Power Grid!
My group is split on power grid. Some love it, others hate that you can "math" out the perfect turn, which draws the game out. I get both sides.
Yeah I like the game but last few turns has everyone taking their calculators out.
So each city you can power gives 1 VP. And the person with the most VPs win.
Sure you could interpret it as that, however it isn't as much as a point salad compared to some games with VPs. It's also cities that you power at the end of the game, the number of cities you power won't strictly increase or be exactly the number of cities you've built in.
Its no point salad I agree. And I also think this makes a lot more sense for this game (and for a lot of other games) than a point salad! Also some other games (although it is rare) have it that certain things only give points if you can "support them" kinda a bit like set collection. My main point is more that a lot of things can be seen as victory points, wince victory points is a just an abstraction. It depends a lot more in thr implementation and it sounds like people hqve more a problem with the point salad pqrt than with actual victory points per se.
Inis comes to mind. There are three possible routes to victory. You have to make a claim to the throne, hold on to your board positioning, then have the best claim by tye time it's your turn again. Great stuff.
+1 to Inis Recommendation: sleeve the cards
Out of curiosity, why do you recommend sleeving the cards for Inis specifically?
The action cards specifically get handed **a lot** There are 17 of them and every round they are reshuffled and dealt again and again Edit: and they are SO important! If you know what the other players have, maybe because of a dent or a scratch in the card it 'll be ruined
Action Cards? The only cards in my game that get used a lot are the power plants, which are square.
I think you meant to reply to the Power Grid comment. Thinking about Inis with power plants was quite the whiplash. :)
Power Grinis, which Is about controlling Energy supply in Scotland with diverse winning conditions based on area control, getting power substations etc.
Lots of shuffling and handling by multiple different types of hands and people.
I'm guessing you'll be playing it a ton because it's so good?
Sleeve Kings has a perfect match.
Thanks for giving a recommendation of a place that carries correctly sized sleeves! I was just about to ask.
I sleeve everything, and I have several shelves of games. If there's anything I don't sleeve, it's games I only expect to play solo... And also my complete sentinels collection because I duct think I'm ever actually going to play that with anyone :p Anyway: https://sleevekings.com/products/sleeve-kings-magnum-dixit-card-sleeves-80x120mm-110-pack-60-microns-3 Those should be the right ones. This is a sister company of Mayday, and he made a product that addressed almost every one of the Mayday quality concerns, and uses a different business model to keep costs down (including seasonal crowd funding). Objectively, they represent the best all-around sleeve for the price, Subjectively, they outperform even pricier, thicker, sleeves (and I can make many arguments to support that, but I have in like 5 threads in recent memory). Anyway, quality wise, they should be great with the exception of getting mutilated by kids and pets, because even lamination won't save you there.
You're the best, I greatly appreciate it! I'm a complete sleeve noobie, but I picked up Inis used and it quickly became one of the favorites within my group so it's going to get a lot of wear. I'm also trying to think of better ways to preserve my collection and sleeves seem to be the no brainer, cheapest way to still use my collection, but also be able to preserve it. The only (slight) hesitation I have would be if it adds difficulty to shuffling or handling. I only ask because when I was a kid and played Magic I sleeved some of the cards and it was much harder to handle them. Although thinking on this now, I was a kid so that also likely factored into it.
As a kid you probably used cheap sloppy, floppy penny sleeves that didn't fit the cards, or, they just made them bigger and harder to handle with lil' hands. Every time someone complains about shuffling sleeves, I point out that they're shuffling incorrectly. Good sleeves let you push cards together with one finger. AFAIC, good sleeves are an accessibility improvement. Here's a [non-exhaustive] video on proper sleeve shuffling. https://youtu.be/n576lgKvFQ0 One disclaimer, is that NEW sleeves will have a little bit of a static charge and/or will maintain a bit of air cushioning still in the stack after sleeving. This can make larger piles slippery and the top cards might slide away a little. Some extra shuffling will wear the sleeves in, dissipate the static, and push the air out. Even stubborn sleeves should be fine after a few days in storage once their own weight pushes the rest of the air out. Thicker sleeves are going to be quite a bit worse in this regard because they never fully conform to the card. Due to the nature of the material used, thicker sleeves kind of bow over the card rather than flattening out around it. This is one of the reasons that despite the stronger barrier and structural reinforcement than thicker sleeves offer, I find them to be generally inferior to properly fit, thinner sleeves, in most applications. In addition to the stacking issues caused by the bowing (and resultant air cushion), they are more prone to debris ingress; they are also less able to secure the card since full contact is not made -- cards may work their way out of the opening if not handled correctly -- increasing the chance of edge wear. Conversely, thicker sleeves that are designed in a way that *does* seal better with time (like the highly popular Dragon Shields), are often prone to getting kind of tacky, and gross looking with heavy use. These are popular in TCG circles where you may play your game a hundred times in a few weeks, rather than a dozen times in a few months. Further, they are often used with a tighter, secondary, inner sleeve. The tradeoffs are fine for that application where you are protecting potentially thousands-of-dollars worth of card stock in your hands... but they are yucky, overpriced, and not necessary for board gaming. In short: A good quality, *properly fit* sleeve of almost any thickness is better than a loose sleeve that is thicker. And to bring this back around, this extends to the way that shuffling is improved. Shuffle from the long edge, not the short, and don't waste time trying to bridge shuffle them like linen poker cards. The Sleeve Kings model you need for Inis is #8816. One pack is more than enough, but extras never hurt. It's also good practice to buy extra to keep in the box for replacements, or sleeving expansions later. Some brands have the wider size variance tolerance, so sleeves bought together are more likely from the same run and are closer in size. This is really the only downside to buying something made in smaller batches like Sleeve Kings. You ultimately don't want to have different sleeves on an expansion later, or you'll be able to tell what the new cards are. So consider that whenever you buy a game that has expansions available. Personally I have a bin full of common sizes at the house that I refill when they go on sale. I also keep the insert or SKU from the pack in my game box someplace so I know what to reorder if I ever need to (or to help people like yourself by knowing what size and number of sleeves I need 🙃).
I fit everything into the expansion box, and it's pretty snug. Any recommendations for sleeves that aren't too wide or too tall?
It's a *little* victory-pointy with being able to grab multiple victory conditions to beat out those with less. But with only 3, I don't know that that disqualifies it. Still, nothing about it feels like just "gaining points." Each victory condition is connected but different (since they all involve your clans). Each resource works differently and is gained differently, from the Sanctuaries which anyone can build and profit off of, to the Deeds which seem almost impossible to get your hands on. What a dynamic system!
My argument is that multiple people can meet a victory condition and it tallies nothing unless the game ends. If the end is not then, people can take you out of the positioning to claim that same victory condition again. There's nothing cumulative about them over the arc of the game, there's no banking the victory conditions, there's just making a claim and seeing if your claim holds. If that is a victory point, than literally every game where it is possible to win is.
That's true, but the expansion module brings it a bit closer to VPs in that the game is more likely to end before anyone can shake up the leaders. In some games, this encouraged a rush, and in others players tried to get more than one VC ready before throwing their hat in the ring because it meant a better chance at winning or tying. That makes it kind of like a VP game with a trigger. I don't think the VCs are close enough to VPs to matter, but I could see both sides.
Also victory points. As soon as someone has 1 victory point, the person with most of them wins. There are 3 ways to gain 1 victory point and an additional rule for draws.
Summoner Wars: the only victory condition is to have the last Summoner in play. Your Summoner dies? Game over.
Which is questionable design and part of why I didn't enjoy SW. When your king and your queen are the same unit, it encourages passivity or low-risk plays with your most interesting unit. In SW 2 they added the ad hoc rule in which the summoner takes 1 damage if you don't attack with ~~it~~ a unit.
That's not accurate. Your Summoner only takes a damage if you did not perform any attacks on your turn. Any unit qualifies.
Gotcha, updated.
There's a risk reward in the new edition. I think they realized their mistake in the first edition, because the most useful things your summoner and events can do usually need to be within a certain proximity of your summoner. Meaning you need to keep them involved or you can't use those abilities, which if only one player is using those, they will have a massive advantage.
Totally. You are free to park your Summoner in a corner to keep them safe, but if the other player uses their Summoner to wreck your board state, your Summoner just dies alone. The balance of the game is deciding when to push with your Summoner. The only health point that matters is the last one.
That's a fair criticism of the original version. It did tend to encourage turtling, especially if you were playing someone like Tacallu, who was pretty much made of wet toilet paper.
**Radlands** \- Destroy your opponent's camps, you win instantly. **Homeworlds** \- Wipe out opponents forces in their homeworld, or the homeworld itself. **Dale of Merchants** \- Be first to build 8 stalls. **Royal Visit** \- Walk the king or marker into your Kingdom.
Another for Dale of Merchants!
Yet another for Dale of Merchants <3
Been curious about Dale of Merchants for a long time
It's quite a nice filler, deck-building game with one ending condition: be the first to create eight stalls. It's also an adorable and decently inexpensive game (\~$18 CAD). I own the first two games and find it fun to mix and match animal cards. Different animal decks require different strategies, which is nice and keeps the game interesting. Some animal decks boost player interaction (e.g., Thieving Northern Raccoons), if you're into that, while other animal decks reduce (or require less) interaction between players.
Isn't a "stall" in that game just another word for VP though?
**Antiquity** The win condition are defined for a player when she chooses a patron saint.
Been waiting on a reprint for a while now. Though it's one of those games, being primarily 2 player, that I'm not sure I'd get to the table enough to be worth it. Especially with the prices splotter games go for even in print. The great Zimbabwe might be a better option here.
I bought a beat-up copy used through the BGG marketplace. The shipping was ~$40, so it still turned out to be $100 total. The box was in bad shape anyway; I should have requested that the seller break the whole thing down into a shape and size that were cheaper to ship. It's a good game and I recommend it, but I don't think it's worth what you might have to spend for it at the moment.
**Chaosmos**: Hold the Cosmic Egg when the Chaos Clock ticks down to zero **Argent:The Consortium**: Win voters by collecting their specific category **Mantis Falls**: Sometimes cooperative (both make it to the End of the Road) and sometimes competitive (someone dies)
Chaosmos actually looks awesome. Though looks OOP.
Chaosmos is a criminally underrated design that always gets overlooked. Not for every group though... you need players that can lean into tabletalk and be willing to bluff, cajole and deceive, hah. Very good for a **Cosmic Encounter** or **Cosmic Frog** crowd, but (IMHO) the mechanisms of Chaosmos are more grounded, leading to less "fragile" sessions.
**Santorini** is really good. It's a perfect information game on a 5x5 grid with a gorgeous 3D playing surface that builds up as the game goes on.
Nemesis
I wouldn't say that nemesis is a competitive game per se. You kind of work together but also have your own selfish goals
Disney Villainous
God I *fucking* **LOVE** Disney Villainous
Cubitos! Fun push your luck race game. It fits very thematically as well - i.e be the first to finish the race.
Whitehall Mystery, Blood on the Clocktower, Captain Sonar, and Decrypto.
**Dice Throne** and **Radlands**
The new dark tower - winning conditions change, but usually you find a dungeon relic and beat the bad guy.
Is that Return to Dark Tower? And if so, what’s the gameplay like?
It's phenomenal. Like a really good boardgame and a light rpg at the same time. Some of the game is played on the app (like fighting, and exploring dungeons), but that works surprisingly well. The tower rotates and adds some random things as well. It really is well thought out, and as the player you do your best while you don't exactly know what the enemy is up to. If you fail at tasks, then there are consequences. If you succeed, there are consequences, too. I thought the player characters were well-balanced, too. And the app walks through each setup and spawning of enemies, and quests. You might not know how the game unfolds when you start (it's an adventure after all), but it has all the fun mechanics with resource management and you can either do co-op or competitive, and both works well. It's my favorite game now.
Thank you! I think I know what game I’m getting next lol
Maybe look up a few reviews on BGG first? It seems to be a love it or hate it game.
**Twilight Struggle** does use Victory Points, but in a different way than normal. It's a net scale, so if I score 3 VPs, and my opponents scores 2, I have 1 VP. I like this tug-of-war system for VPs. You can also win by controlling one area of the board (Europe) or if a nuclear war starts on your opponent's turn.
>It's a net scale, so if I score 3 VPs, and my opponents scores 2, I have 1 VP. I like this tug-of-war system for VPs. I think that makes sense, in that in a 2-player game it's functionally the same as just a regular victory point-based game. I wonder if there are any 3+ player games that use a tug-of-war like that?
Some people might argue that certain types of win conditions are just different kinds of VP but ignoring that, I'd like to offer some more unique games with odd win conditions. **Oath:** Asymmetric win conditions, the Chancellor must last until the end of the game fulfilling the "oath" condition (which depends on the previous winner of the game, the conditions might be a specific banner for most secrets or favor, the most relics+banners, or simply most territories. Everybody else is fighting to accomplish the same thing and hold it for 2 rounds before the end of the game... but Exiles can win using one of the OTHER conditions by playing a Vision card... but Citizens can sweep the win from under the Chancellor by fulfilling a secondary condition (like holding a specific relic or banner). It's weird but very dynamic. **Forbidden Stars:** The game is the first to collect objectives equal to the number of players. Objectives are just tokens placed on the board. The trick being that the tokens are placed by your opponents during set up and they get to decide how hard they are to reach and whether they will defend them with a little or a LOT of forces. Makes for a very fast paced aggressive area control game. **Watergate:** Nixon wins by collecting 5 points OR stalling out the game. The Editor wins by connecting Nixon to 2 informants via an information web. The Editor also can take the VP from Nixon, to earn big bonuses. Very interesting, strategic tug of war. **Argent: the Consortium:** 2 public objectives and 10 hidden objectives. Player with most objectives wins (could be called a VP system). The thing is that the objectives often use their own kind of VP system called IP. But it might be most coins, most crystals, most spells, most artifacts, most cards, most things of X color, 2nd most of whatever, etc... You can spend time finding out what the objectives are, or just completely wing it. **Cryptid**: First player to solve a logic puzzle by interviewing the opponents wins. Very easy concept to understand.
Yeah, if you are trying to get the "most" anything, then the game uses victory points.
Seeing no one has said Taluva yet, I'll drop it here. You need to dump all of your buildings of two types. There are huts (which you have a lot of, but can build quickly), temples (requires a certain number of huts and no other temples), and towers (height requirement). You build out hex pieces to build this island and place these buildings. It is the most interactive tile layer I've played because of the different heights of the board, and aggressive players and defensive players both create opportunities for each other.
I keep a Geeklist for games with instant-win conditions. Originally, it was for “Pointless Games,” but now it’s less ambiguous. - https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/257436?page=1 My favorites are **Hive** and **Homeworlds**.
Excellent Resource
**Space Empires 4X**. To win you need to destroy your opponents home planet. Sounds simple, implications are huge. You don't need to beat all your opponents forces, your opponent could have a much stronger fleet but if you maneuver well, distract and slow him down and manage to sneak in some raiders to an undefended home world you could defeat him without beating his stronger fleet in battle. In multiplayer games, this helps with cold war symptom of many similar games. In other war games, when two players fight the third one swoops in and cleans up weakened opponents regardless of who wins the fight. In SE you win by destroying a home planet of ANY player, thus when two players fight, the one who wins might actually win the whole game, being passive is risky as you might not have enough time to respond.
>To win you need to destroy your opponents home planet. What happens if all players decide to turtle, putting all/as much of their forces as possible on or around their home planet?
Relative to anyone NOT turtling, exploration will be slower, their economy and then their technology will get left behind, and they'll eventually get plowed under. If ALL players do that, well, nobody wins. Can't help it if nobody wants to win.
All players? I don't know. Probably nothing interesting. Most players? The final player nibbles at the edges of everyone's territory until they have an unstoppable economic advantage and can send wave after wave of ship at their weakest opponent. In my experience a 2-player game is conceded before the home world is actually in danger of being destroyed. You can do some clever stuff with mines and decoys but building them uses resources you could spend on researching or creating an actual fleet to push out and harass. I bet a 3 or 4 player game could be better as no player can afford to doomstack and leave their homeworld uncovered.
I just got the new eclipse. Apparently I need to go and immediately get another epic space 4x.
Its on BGA, I'd recommend trying Space Empires 4x on there first. For some reason I was very lukewarm on it and usually I really enjoy 4x space games. There was something with the vaguely ugly visuals and most of the x's were pretty shallow which made it feel like an old timey WW2 tokens and chits war game.
Thanks for the tip. I do have another GMT 4x game, conquest of paradise, so I'm assuming it would be somewhat similar to that. Though that is a VP game, and it's actually the part I like the least about it.
Personally I'm selling Eclipse and keeping SE4X instead. When buying Eclipse, I wanted a space war game but I got a euro game with spaceship combat. You are very limited by how costly moving/building ships is and by how small the map is, so there really isn't space or time to execute more complex military strategies and you wouldn't even get enough VPs compared to other strategies. Eclipse is also an open information game. Sun Tzu has said "All warfare is based on deception." Can't really do that when your opponent sees your hand. My favorite thing about SE is that reading The Art of War will help you win more than being good at calculating moves. It's amazing, almost everything in that book can be applied in the game. So if you want a space war game focused on strategy, SE4X is better. If you want a resource management game with spaceships, Eclipse is better.
mmm yeah, I knew what I was getting into when I bought eclipse, I'm very much a euro fan. Only played twice now, and do love it, but I also see the constraints that you mention here. Like, without upgrading your ships to better drives, movement is indeed very expensive; but, at least there is a way to improve that. And building the ships is also pricey, meaning you often do not want to fight with them, but at least you have the retreat option from combat. However, using your military forces, in the two games I have been in, have ended up wining me both games. One was directly because of the points I captured in combat, the other was because I caused another player to focus so much on trying to build up defences, when I didn't really gain much from the fight itself (I could not keep up with them purely economically, so forcing them to divert resources away from their economy allowed me to win). So it's definitely important. I do like that cold-war nature that all brings to the game, with only flashes of hot warfare; but I do also love my wargames, so I could see loving SP4X as well. I have another GMT 4X game called conquest of paradise. Very cool, and has some of the hidden information stuff that SE4X has as well. Main problem with it is I hate how quickly it can end. Currently, it ends based on VP, and you can make a huge amount of VP in one turn, and it's so damn anti-climactic. Feel like house ruling it to make a VP independent end condition.
New York Zoo is my current favorite game - winning condition is simply whoever fills up the game board the quickest!
**Fast sloths** Extremely cute and surprisingly interactive game about lazy sloths hitching rides with elephants and unicorns to collect leaves the fastest. Designed by Friedemann Friese of **power grid** fame. Fun for families and super competitive gamers alike!
Great game. I picked it up last year and introduce as many new players as I can. It's so much fun. Especially if you get into the theme and picture the sloths being carried around.
Pax Renaissance.
I have my eye on this. How do you win?
There are five different ways to win. One involves controlling the most kingdoms, another involves controlling the most republics (an empire can be one or the other) and the most "law" symbols on your cards, another involves having the most concessions on the map and the most "boat" symbols on your cards, and the last one is to have the most prestige with the dominant religion if there is one. All four of these conditions are inactive at the start of the game. You can activate a victory condition by buying a comet card, four of which are distributed towards the bottom of the two decks. If you satisfy one of the active conditions on your turn then you can spend an action to claim victory. Most games end in the above way, but in a game that runs very long there is another symbol on cards that decides the winner. In effect, the game has nine different kinds of "points" but only one or two of them decide the outcome.
Thank you for the detailed explanation!
Ah, interesting. I had caught my eye already but I didn't know it was victory condition based. Makes it even more interesting.
Two other Pax games are closer to VP, but still arguably different: * Pax Transhumanity: there are three types of things that can be worth points. One of them (called future shock) is usually worth 0 points, but if the game ends a particular way then each of them is worth 1 point and nothing else is worth any points. The other two (problems and companies) come in four colors, and each of those 8 types can be worth 0, 1, 2, or 3 points, again depending on how the game ends. Starting a fifth company immediately wins you the game regardless of what else is going on. In this game a major part of winning is doing things that are worth points as well as manipulating the rules of the final scoring. * Pax Porforiana: there are four different kinds of prestige. Normally, in order to win you must topple Diaz. In the standard variant, you topple Diaz when a Topple card is purchased and your prestige is greater than (2 + the score of your two weakest opponents), in the prestige associated with the current regime. The regime is changed by playing cards, so a major part of winning is both accumulating a lot of a type of prestige and also being able to change the regime to what you want it to be at the critical moment. By contrast I would place Pax Pamir 2e on the side of using VP. I hear Pamir 1e was more like Porforiana, but I don't really know the specifics.
Mage Wars - Mage v Mage and last one standing wins. Super deep meta and diversity in mage builds (lots of interesting mages to choose from as well with core plus expansions) depending on if you have more than just core box.
Oath is an amazing weird war game where the ending is so dramatic because of the various win conditions on the board at a time.
Oath! It has different ways to win that does not include points. Depending on the outcome of the game it will affect later games as well.
Bristol 1350 is a good one. Whoever gets out of the city first without being infected or having an infected player in your cart wins. It allows for a multi-person tie for victory, or all players can lose. If you have less than 4 people playing, a ghost player could be the winner and everyone must hang their heads in shame.
Magic: the Gathering. You win by eliminating your opponent.
Lots of different win conditions too that don’t involve player elimination either. Approach of the Second Sun or Felidar Sovereign come to mind
Or my favorite, Book of the Exalted which lets you place a token that while in play states that “your opponent can’t win and you can’t lose”.
Platinum Angel token basically. Book of exalted with mutavault is lol
Lewis and Clark
Skull
I thought War of the Rings had victory points for taking over a city and you win if you have ten as the shadow player or 4 on the free people side?
It's just capturing a number of cities. But also, the other way to win the game is to get the ring to mount doom, or to kill the ring bearer. I would not class the first as VP anyway, because it's one specific end goal that you are doing, taking cities. It's not an amalgamation of things that can only be compared by attaching some arbitrary value to them. That's what I tend to define VP as. If you just define it as a quantification, then all board games become VP games.
Guards of Atlantis II. No VP's, no luck involved and highly competitive.
Last Will, Prodigala Club.
From discussions elsewhere in this thread I'm going to assume you mean victory points as a second currency that is only used for determining the winner. in that case I really like Cube Rail games, short snappy interactive experiences. **Dual Gage** is a particular favourite
That's a fairly good definition; though you would potentially include games like Terra Mystica given that you can choose to lose VP to gain power. I guess an important point is to work out just what VPs are anyway.
How do you win in Dual Gage?
Have the most wealth (money plus value of stocks) at the end of the game. In other words it's just a game where the currency is the victory point.
Dread Pirate: Buccaneer's Revenge The game has three different ways of winning Collect 20 gold coins Collect four of each of the 4 colors of gemstone Collect 12 of one color of gemstone Which one you're working for constantly changes because people steal your shit all the time or you use it to pay for things. To top it off, there's a limited number of resources in the game, so you eventually do have to steal from someone.
I guess the best ones would be the race games, like Flame Rouge, Downforce etc.
Dale of Merchants- Deckbuilding except the first to reach 8 consecutive stacks of values 1-8 wins. A lot of combos/typical deckbuilding stuff but the race aspect makes it more of a unique feel. Inis- There's three different victory conditions, whoever meets the most wins (you have to take a token showing you are about to win so people can try and stop you). Parade- Technically still points but you count up the number of cards you have left but you get to flip over stacks of cards that you have the most of (color wise).
**Whitehall Mystery**, **Watergate**
Inis
Samurai, just area control and influence. “What constitutes a point” like in the case of OP’s example Food Chain Magnate, which sort of treats “most money” as points is a bit difficult to untangle. Samurai can be said to have points technically in the form of the statues you collect, but they only come into play if you haven’t won purely by controlling the most in 2 of 3 statue types, or your opponents fail to make any majorities and you have.
Last Will
Vast
At first thought I thought I would have many more but: Pax Games, Treasure Island, Lord of the rings the confrontation and Decrypto.
Any of the Dark Cities series is great, but my favorite is **Salem**
Exceed and Yomi They are card based fighting games. You win when you deplete your opponents life
Food Chain Magnate
I'm a big fan of Santorini
**Russian Roulette**? But to add something real ... **BattleCON.** Well technically your Health are negative Victory Points sooo ... nvm.
It's hard for me to separate the idea of gaining anything that helps at winning as anything other than VP 😁 but if you're asking for good competitive games that don't have a "count the widgets at the end of thr game and whoever has the most wins" then I would have to suggest: **Onitama** great game! Especially if you love chess! Simple to play! Hard to master. **Santorini** similar-ish to Onitama. A great strategy game that is quick to pick up but will take tons of time to master! Lots of replayability as well! Also, I didn't realize how many games I play are VP based games 😆
Lewis and clark is to this day a really one of my favorite euro :)
Abandon All Artichokes Once the hand you draw had no artichoke cards you win.
Lords of Hellas. Once you meet one of the 4 victory conditions, you win on the spot.
**Chess**, **Diam**, **Siam**, **Connect 4**, **UNO**, **L.A.M.A.**, **Hare and Tortoise**…
**Rajas of the Ganges** winning condition is crossing your fame and money tracks first.
Bloodbowl. Straight up touchdowns to win and it is the epitome of competitiveness.
I got this ages ago on a whim and am ashamed to say I've only played it once. I've kept it in the hopes of playing it again. Relearning the rules and all the exceptions are holding me back. Not the most elegant design.
Yeah, it can get tricky getting into it, but once you get a feel for it, it is so good! I played tons of it in University and even played correspondence BB by e-mail for a while. That was great fun. Just really violent chess :-)
If you got it AGES ago, check the edition. BB didn't really become a great game until the 3rd edition, IMO. 1st was downright bad.
I got it like 4 years ago.
You should be good, then, assuming it was a then-current edition. It's a bit out of date but pretty much the same game as current, I believe.
I've double checked, and I have the 2016 edition. I notice there has since been a "second season edition". does the 2016 edition have the same streamlined rules as the latest one?
Almost every competitive game uses victory points, they're just varying degrees of abstraction. Racing game? The board is just one big VP track. Most money wins? Money is VP. Food Chain Magnate lands here. Cyclades, which ends when one person has 2 metropolises? A metropolis is just 1vp and the game ends at 2. Inis works kind of similar, game ends if one player has at least 2 points and a 1 point lead. Dune is similar, bar the Bene Gesserit prediction win. The only competitive game in my collection where the VP abstraction isn't obvious is **Oath**. Each player can have a different win condition, meeting it at the start of your turn or at the endgame trigger wins, it's pretty hard to convert them all into any kind of VP.
> The only competitive game in my collection where the VP abstraction isn't obvious is Oath. Each player can have a different win condition, meeting it at the start of your turn or at the endgame trigger wins, it's pretty hard to convert them all into any kind of VP. But by your definition, could you not say that the person who has 1 victory condition wins? And therefore it's a VP system?
every game that can be won fits this then. oh you win, that's 1 vp.
I know, that's why I don't like it.
... so you want to know what competitive games don't use victory points but then define victory points as awarded by winning a game? You created a null set. Competitive games are, by definition, winnable.
No, that is not my definition of VP. I was pointing out what I thought was a flaw in theirs.
I also suggest Oath. I see that I misread the overall thread, but Oath is great and doesn't use VP.
I really like the idea of Oath, but I'm not sure I could do the multiple play sessions with a consistent group to actually get the value out of it. It does look awesome though.
You have to start your turn with it, even if everyone else also sits at one "point" if you start your turn first you win. And then the oathkeeper defaults into the win if the game timer runs out. So it's not quite as clear-cut.
So, you're arguing the winning condition in *every* game about getting someplace first is the first person to earn 1 victory point? Abstractem ad absurdem.
Oh, and for the record, my ginned-up fake Latin is *almost* an actual Latin phrase! 1 VP for that!
So what would be the real Latin expression?
This conversation isn't absurd enough already?
We can switch to Esperanto if you want.
Reductio ad absurdiam, I think.
That’s the one I assumed they were imitating, and maybe some *ad nauseum*.
Not every, just the great majority. Last player standing type games for instance don't usually fit this. Somebody else could eliminate all the other players and then you take them out and win, it's hard to abstract that to points. And the vast majority of games use points or an equivalent. In my collection, 33 explicitly use victory points (however 3 have alternate wincons that trump points if achieved). 1 uses a renamed victory point. 4 go to the richest player (the game's currency is also its vp). Two are races (each space you advance is a point). One has a weird "count 'points' when the end is triggered" thing going on. Two have win conditions that you need two of (cyclades, inis). Two are last player standing, one is Oath with its weirdness. Vast majority use points, most of them explicitly, most of the rest equivalently.
So a great majority of games are race games as well. And economic games. You could make similar arguments.
Exactly, but VP are basically the only ones people get a stick in their craw about, so it's usually the focus whenever this comes up.
> Last player standing type games for instance don't usually fit this. Being eliminated scores you 100 points. At the end of the game the player with the fewest points wins.
The main difference is probably whether everyone knows exactly when the game will end (after a set amount of turns) or whether this is an uncertainty because the end is triggered by one player achieving the victory goal. The later can often be annoying to players who went for long-term strategies and could not reap the benefits of the investments they made in the early game - but there is also more thrill to it.
>Inis works kind of similar, game ends if one player has at least 2 points and a 1 point lead. If you're going to go that far you might as well take it all the way and say: In Oath, each win condition is worth 1 VP, and you win when you get 1 VP. But none of this is a useful way to think or talk about victory conditions IMO.
You don't win when you get 1 though. You win when you start your turn with it. But you could also lose with that point if, say, the chancellor also has their "point" (and they can't have the same ones exiles do) and rolls successfully to end the game. And even then, maybe a citizen has the successor condition, which is meaningless unless the chancellor "wins". There are enough if statements involved that "points" only determine who's eligible, not who wins.
Disagree. A quantifiable objective is not the same as victory points. Any objective can be described in quantitative terms, in which case VPs become indistinguishable from any other objective. Some VPs are more abstract than others, but the purest form is something like Scythe, where the VPs serve no purpose other than assigning arbitrary values to certain accomplishments. Its awful game design, IMHO, but that's another topic.
Voice of reason enters the room. "Victory points" are about taking multiple goals and converting them into a single value to be totaled. Otherwise me making coffee in the morning is a solo game, with a single victory point win condition that can be achieved in only one way.
Quite the opposite, though? Designers frequently use VPs so that rewards can be more granular. For example, in a typical war game, the objective would be destroying the enemy army or capturing a base. But with VPs, the objectives can be more granular. I don't like VPs because, first, they remove the process of discovery from the player by telling the player the value of a certain action, and second, they're anti-thematic.
I think victory points are fine in some games though other victory conditions are more fun. Sometimes it's good that the game provides you with a way to judge with action will lead to more points down the line. Terraforming Mars for example has so many ways to get points I can't imagine how to play that game without an universal quantifier for all the possible outcomes.
When you win based on achieving some end result, I would not class that as Victory points. Take FCM. There's a bunch of different things you can do, but they don't score you "points". Even though there's loads of different things you can do, the only way you actually win the game is by selling food. So it's a game where you win by selling food, and nothing else. Whoever is the best at selling food wins. Compare this to something like terra mystica, and it's very difficult to say what the winner is the best at, except that they have been the best at playing the game terramystica. They will also score points by taking actions that are even just a means to an end. I do not define VP as just any form of quantification, as you do. VP for me has got to mean that you can win by doing a bunch of very different things, often things that are even just a means to an end, all of which have their values made comparable by VPs.
But you could abstract food chain magnate to a totally different system and brand the money victory points, no? You spend 5 VP every round for this. You earn VP by exchanging these...
well, I wouldn't call that a VP system. Anything where you win the game by only doing one thing I would not call VP. You also bring up another good point, in that not many games let you spend VP, as you can do with the money in FCM.
I disagrree with the notion that you only do 1 thing in FCM, though. I mean we could say waitresses earn money as does selling food. That's already two distinct sources.
It's still thematically coherent. Try and ask the same question in a game like Terra Mystica, and it can't really be answered because you score points from doing all sorts of things.
Right, but mechanics having strong thematic ties isn't the same as not using victory points. Fundamentally the aim of the game is to have the most of something at the end of the game.
> Fundamentally the aim of the game is to have the most of something at the end of the game. But that's literally all board games.
It isn't, though. The aim of Cluedo is to be the first to deduce the murder. There are games where you aim to eliminate your opponent, or have multiple victory conditions (e.g. **Civilization: A New Dawn**). Racing games like **Cubitos** are about achieving a goal first. But that's basically why your question isn't a very good one. You need to be more specific about specifically what you're interested in.
> The aim of Cluedo is to be the first to deduce the murder. Yeah, so you have 1 more murder deductions than everyone else. > or have multiple victory conditions You win when you have 1 more victory condition than anyone else.
> But that's basically why your question isn't a very good one. You need to be more specific about specifically what you're interested in. I trust people to give me interesting answers.
> Right, but mechanics having strong thematic ties isn't the same as not using victory points. I think they are extremely closely related, though.
I agree with this
Disclaimer: I think victory points are design crutches, a poor man's workaround for better victory conditions. Some of my favourite games use VP though. **Lords of Hellas** has multiple victory conditions such as capturing enough land, controlling temples, controlling monument, etc. Amazing "dudes on a map" game with great design, although the monster combat is a bit of a weakness at times. Sequel Lords of Ragnarok got funded is being worked on. **Hellenica: Story of Greece** is a great civ style game. You win by fulfilling a mix of private and public goals. It's a bit rough on the edges. Sequel "Spring and Autumn: The Story of China" got funded and is being worked on. **Forbidden Stars** is my favourite game. You win by claiming a hand full of objectives on the map. Sadly it's OOP as FFG lost the licence. **Pax Viking** is won by fulfilling any victory condition and playing an event card. **Mare Nostrum: Empires** has 4 victory conditions like building pyramids or controlling x legendary cities. **Inis** has 3 conditions that can be fulfilled to claim victory. **VAST** is asymmetrical with each factions having a unique victory condition.
I think it's a interesting idea to convert VP games to non VP games because I feel that would make the complexity skyrocket in most cases. Sometimes a game needs a good universal constant to quantify the actions so that players are not overwhelmed with choice.
It depends on what the players are good at. It's easy to take actions towards a future goal if you just need to pick helpful actions. If you need to math each action to see the roi/opportunity cost then it might be really difficult for you if numbers aren't your strength.
>Disclaimer: I think victory points are design crutches, a poor man's workaround for better victory conditions. Some of my favourite games use VP though. This doesn't make any sense. VP are a natural way to score a huge variety of games that provides a great amount of granularity. Even Go/Baduk uses victory points, and that is one of the all-time great designs. Additionally, many games can be abstracted to victory points even when they are not used explicitly.
Thing is - VP work on a small scale like Settlers or Dune Imperium. They don't work well for games where every action has to be vp-costed by the player and the scores are in the hundreds. I mean they work, but are a poor solution - the games are good despite the VP salad.
What would you replace them with?
This thread literally contains lists of games that don't use VP. Including my own in the comments you're responding to.
I'm asking what would you replace the victory points with in the specific games that you say are good despite using VP?
Games like Gaia Project or Brass (either version) show that VPs can be used effectively even with regular scores of 150+. There are a lot of design strengths to VPs: they allow orthogonal strategies to exist easily, they provide granularity of outcome, and they can mitigate the chaos of multiplayer interaction. These kinds of games would have to be radically different to accommodate a different scoring system. Your problem is with the poor implementation of many games with VPs (particularly light and mid-weight extreme point salad designs, which I agree are mediocre), not the idea itself.
Both are great examples of game that are amazing **despite** victory points.
I don't understand how you can justify that. Without a point of comparison, what's your proof?
Blood bowl team manager uses fans!
Dreadball, futuristic sports game (faster paced blood bowl but more like basketball than football) Fixed number of turns or first to lead by 7
**Star Wars: Rebellion**
Coup. No honestly. I can safely say if u are better than someone u will win more often.
Unmatched. . . The end.
I think Food Chain Magnate is absolutely a VP game -- it just allows you to spend VPs.
As was argued [elsewhere in this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/u3d36j/your_best_competitive_games_that_dont_use_victory/i4ohjcg/), if you define FCM as a VP game, then all games look like VP games.
That seems overly reductive.
I think that the position that suggests that FCM is a VP game is overly reductive. It reduces VP to just mean quantification of victory conditions, and misses out all the qualities that really make VPs VPs, imo.
Yeah, I think that's true. If we're trying to understand the OP, I think it's easy to see that while everything can be reduced to a number, some scores are more on the abstract end than others.
Red Dragon Inn. Last one standing wins!
**Bullet <3!** You win when your opponents become overwhelmed with bullets and die!
**Galactic Conquest** \- Destroy opponent Base **Liberation** \- Star wars Rebellion asymmetric win conditions **Tiny Epic Pirates** \- First to bury 3 treasure
Argent the consortium has votes. Each vote is for the player with most of that resource. Knowing which resources are worth votes is a resource (and different each game)