I have a collection of about 150 board games. There are many themes, mechanisms, and point styles in these games. This post is about the style or method of tracking points in games.

What are “points?” They are the measurement of success in a game. In the game of Chess, there is a single winning point that is gained by the player who puts the other player in checkmate. No one talks about the “point” in Chess because it’s moot and doesn’t really exist. But you can still imagine it exists and it would make sense. There are other games like this and maybe this post applies to some of them. But for most of my board games, there is more than one point gained during a game by more than one player. These are the points that have a meaning in the game and that meaning is what I will discuss. More to the point (no pun intended), I will discuss how the points fit with the theme.

Terraforming Mars is a game where players pretend to be corporations that are trying to terraform mars for financial gain and prestige. This is not an economic game so money is not used as points. Instead, there is a Terraform Rating value that keeps track at how the players do overall. If you raise the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere then you increase your TR (Terraform Rating) by 1. That’s a “point.” If you play a card that shows a point value on it then at the end of the game, you get a point because playing that card meant something in the big picture of trying to terraform mars. If you are the first player to build three cities and you pay a little to claim it, you can get the “mayor” milestone and gain five points at the end of the game. In every case, the points in Terraforming Mars are a reflection of how much you contributed to terraforming mars. Sometimes the points on cards don’t feel thematic but it’s possible to correlate points to terraforming performance in most cases.

Arcs is a game where players move space ships around “space” on the board while trying to defeat other players ships in battle. There is also a card collecting component to the game and some actions allow a player to compete for gaining cards. There are points in Arcs but they don’t feel nearly as thematic as in Terraforming Mars. The entire Arcs game feels less thematic. In arcs, there are five chapters in the game and in each chapter, players play a card and take some number of actions on that card. The action card mechanism in the game is a bit complex and isn’t the point of this post, so I’ll just say that it is intricate. The one important feature of the action card mechanism is that the first player can reduce their card number value to zero in order to declare an “ambition.” Once declared, the ambition defines what resource or property players are going to be scored on at the end of the chapter. Since each chapter has six rounds of action card play and there is a limit of 3 ambitions that can be declared, the scoring at the end of the chapter could be based on between zero and three ambitions.

The ambitions in Arcs are thematic in the sense that they give players points based on how well they do at collecting resources, taking hostages, collecting trophies (opponent ships lost in battle) and some other things. What is not thematic is the ability for a player to pick the ambitions. There is no situation in real life, in my humble opinion, where two competing factions compete for something that only one of the factions declares as the prize and the other does not. This is less thematic than in Terraforming Mars because the points are not global and how they are gained changes, sometimes against the desires of some players. Arcs is still a very interesting game and compared to Terraforming Mars, it is much more complex strategically. But points are nonetheless less thematic.

Let’s move on to Cascadia, a m ore abstract game where the theme means little to nothing in the game. Cascadia is more like Chess in theme where the markings on the pieces could be changed from animals to space ships and the game would still be totally playable (noting that in Chess, the pieces and their movements have little to do with the real life movements of what they represent, unless you think that castles move around and capture enemy pieces in real life). Cascadia has players placing animal tokens on scenery tiles to form patterns. Randomly selected scoring cards determine the goals of the game and scoring is based on meeting the pattern requirements. For example, players might get points based on the longest run of salmon or for every bird that is lined up with another bird that it is not directly adjacent to. You can even score points for how many different animals are surrounding each of your fox tokens. In Cascadia, points have nothing to do with the theme (or are slightly related as in the salmon run length).

Let’s move on to a game whose points relate more directly to the theme of the game. Furnace is a game where players bid on cards that represent factories. Once bidding in a round is over, a player will run their factories in order to produce goods, convert good, and sell goods. At the end of the game, the player with the most money wins. If the game worked exactly like this description than it would be one of the most thematic point systems of all of my games. Alas, this is not quite true. Bidding on cards is not done with money, it is done using tokens that have bid values from 1 to 4. Bidding is tightly controlled and each player can only bid once on a card (a factor) and they cannot bid the exact same amount as another player has already bid. The theme-to-point relationship is also slightly broken when a player uses a card to convert their goods to money – it’s the card that determines the amount of money a player gets instead of some sort of global value where all players convert goods to money at the same rate. Still, the idea that you bid on factories, run them to gain, convert, and sell goods, and then count up money to determine the winner, is extremely thematic. There are no personal goal cards or any universal scoring cards that change each game. Furnace has one of the most thematic point systems of my games.

I’m going to go off on a tangent and mention games that don’t have traditional point systems. One such game is Nova Luna. Nova Luna is a completely abstract game with almost no theme beyond some decorations. Players select tiles from those available to them and then place the tiles in patterns on the table. The layout of the tiles cannot be altered with each new tile being placed in position and then left there for the remainder of the game. Points, if you can call them that, are represented by small colored disks that are placed on the tiles based on the various “goal” circles on the tiles. The goals are spaces that show what colored tiles you need to place next to the tile in order to place a score marker on the goal. The details are not important. What is important is how the first player to place their last score marker on a goal wins the game. There is no official second place, third place, etc. although the number of remaining score markers for each player can be used to determine the success of each player. You can also think of this as a race game where a player achieves a point each time they meet a goal. But there is no score track and no numeric value to the score in Nova Luna.

Many board games have scoring systems that keep track of how well a player is playing the game. In Rocket Men, a successful mission to Mars gives a player many more points than a mission to Earth orbit. And a Mars mission to build a Mars base gives more points than a mission to put a satellite in orbit around Mars. Points in Rococo represent how well a player does at making clothing, selling clothing, and having clothing that is worn to big fancy parties by fancy people.

Finally, I’ll describe a game I played once. Nucleum had the least interesting point system of any game I played recently. I will try to describe it but I will likely be wrong in how I remember it. I’m going off my memory because I don’t want to play it again.

In Nucleum, players are trying to connect cities, build buildings, and then generate power and power the buildings. What I remember is that there is a board along the side of the map board that has a scale on it. The scale is an achievement scoring track. Here are the rules for the track:

On the left side of the side board is the Milestone track, which consists of Achievement spaces that increase in value as you advance up the track. These Achievement spaces are grouped into six different tiers (1-2, 3-6, 7-9, 10-14, 16-26, and 28-40, depicted in different colors and showing different multipliers) on the left and four Milestone segments (1-6, 7-12, 13-22, 24-40, separated with lines) on the right. When placing one of your Milestone markers on the Milestone track, you can only have one marker in each tier, but multiple players can have their respective marker in the same tier, even on the same space.

The entire Milestone track feels tacked on as a way to let players compete for points in yet another way. The game suffers from there being too man y ways to gain points. A comparison might explain better…

Nucleum is like the Brass games from Martin Wallace. In Brass, you will make connections between cities and build businesses in those cities. You gain points based on how many businesses were successful (meaning a coal mine sold all of its coal or a mill shipped its goods). Points are also gained based on how many connections you make to cities and also on what businesses in those cities were successful ( coal mine that didn’t sell all of its coal is not able to score points for any players). There are no other ways to score points in Brass (except for earlier versions that gave points for money at the end of the game, something that is not done in the later versions of the game). In Nucleum, you will connect cities and use those connections to power buildings in a way that is very similar to Brass when you “use” a building or business to gain points. The points are counted later so the build tiles, as in Brass, are flipped to show that they will score points. Nucleum also has the milestone track that Brass does not have. Nucleum also has a set of tracks on each player board that give resources when players gain income. There is way to gain points from this. So in Brass, you gain boards for running businesses and for connecting cities. In Nucleum, you gain points by fulfilling contracts, building connections, building buildings or using them, shared player objectives, private objectives, advancing on the Nucleum track, gaining bonus tiles, and by doing or gaining a few other things.

I would say that Nucleum has an unthematic point system because in real life, we tend to gain lesser things, such as publicity and good will, real property and goods, contracts and deals, personal contacts, and many other things that then gets used as resources to produce things that eventually gain money or more of those lesser things. For a company, a government, etc., we do keep track of the “score” for lesser things but they get used up or converted to something else. Nucleum might have been better off calling the gain from milestones “publicity” and then letting the player use that to get contracts not available to the other players. Having every gain be represented as victory points makes the game feel too complex but also a bit to arbitrary.

I’ve said a lot about points in board games and what they represent. Some games have point systems that feel very thematic, some seem a bit arbitrary and tacked on, and some that I didn’t mention just have a race where the first player to some sort of finish line wins the game. I’ll leave it to you to decide what suits your personal tastes. But keep an eye on how the point systems in your favorite game work and if they are thematic. See if you can spot a trend for games you like more vs. those you like less. I definitely didn’t like Nucleum but Brass: Birmingham is one of my favorite games.