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[Drab Emordnilap]

Had a discussion over the weekend which we were unable to satisfactorily resolve -- who came up with the idea of "victory points" in board games?

When I say victory points, I mean basically an abstract "currency" that isn't spent like money is, but instead is used as a tally to determine the winner, and is obtained in varying amounts for doing different things in the game, as a way to quantify incomparables. We were trying to come up with the oldest example we could think of, and the oldest we had that definitely qualifies is Outpost (1991), but surely that can't be the first?

Cosmic Encounter, for example, wouldn't count here, because your points aren't quantifying incomparable things; your points are all from doing the same thing.

[Kirian]

Do we include card games?  I rarely think of card and board games as being separate categories, but dozens of card games played with standard decks have been doing this for centuries.

[Watno]

I think one of the oldest games in existance, Mancala, already qualifies.
Many traditional card games qualify as well.

Using a track on aboard to count VP's is usually attributed to Wolfgang Kramer and his 1982 game "Das große Unternehmen Erdgas" (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramerleiste)

[Drab Emordnilap]

Right, I knew of card games (Bridge for example, but there are many others) that used such points systems, but we couldn't think of a board game before Outpost.

I think the distinction I'm trying to make might be overly fine, though. Really what I'm looking for is the oldest game that used "points" to compare things that wouldn't be comparable otherwise. In mancala, ultimately you're comparing how many stones you've captured, right? (Honest question, I'm not 100% on the rules of mancala.) In Catan, settlements, cities, longest road, largest army, and some of the development cards all "count towards victory", but they don't count equally, so you need some valuation system to quantify them.

[Watno]

Well, in Mancala you can either capture the opponents stones or bring your own home I think.

As for games that hav an actual board, I haven't found anything older than the above mentioned Das große Unternehmen Erdgas. (rules description in link), but I'm pretty sure there have been examples before.

[popsofctown]

yeah, mancala is apples to apples not apples to oranges

[Watno]

You could also count Basketball and American Football by the way.

[DG]

Do we include card games?  I rarely think of card and board games as being separate categories, but dozens of card games played with standard decks have been doing this for centuries.

Such as cribbage.

[popsofctown]

Canasta definitely has VP

[blueblimp]

This reminds me that I was wondering the same thing about the concept of "Hit Points" recently. It's especially clever because it's not a sensible model of any sort of real-world combat.

[Watno]

Very interesting question as well. As I would have guessed, it has to with Dungeons and Dragons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_%28gaming%29#History

[blueblimp]

Very interesting question as well. As I would have guessed, it has to with Dungeons and Dragons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_%28gaming%29#History

Yeah, and D&D apparently got the idea from naval wargames, where it makes a bit more sense, since (unlike humans) a ship is not typically incapacitated by a single hit of a weapon. It'd still be interesting to know which designer first had the idea to boil down all information about unit health into a single number. That's a genius design idea, given how non-intuitive it is and how ubiquitous the idea is now across all sorts of different games.

[Axxle]

You could also count Basketball and American Football by the way.

I'm sure certain martial arts would count too.

[Axxle]

Quick look at bgg top board games found this one in 1986:

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1/die-macher

[ipofanes]

This reminds me that I was wondering the same thing about the concept of "Hit Points" recently. It's especially clever because it's not a sensible model of any sort of real-world combat.

It is amazing how some people jump at calling a game "thematic" as soon as it includes hit points.

I remember a Call of Cthulhu (PnP roleplay) ref who employed two lists of damage, one of which was "subdual", which did not affect your combat abilities much, and one was "wound", which was damage that actually incapacitates you (no matter how much you go "it's only a scratch!"). Battletech was similar in that respect, you actually had to assign hit points to actual parts of the mechanism.

[ipofanes]

Using a track on aboard to count VP's is usually attributed to Wolfgang Kramer and his 1982 game "Das große Unternehmen Erdgas" (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramerleiste)

That would be Cribbage, wouldn't it?

[ipofanes]

Well, in Mancala you can either capture the opponents stones or bring your own home I think.

As for games that hav an actual board, I haven't found anything older than the above mentioned Das große Unternehmen Erdgas. (rules description in link), but I'm pretty sure there have been examples before.

Bazaar comes to mind, but then the points are tallied on an extra sheet of paper, not with meeples on the board.

[Davio]

VP becomes a more interesting mechanism when you can't calculate it directly from a certain end game state (otherwise it's just a tally).

A regular game of Settlers doesn't have this kind of VP, because you can just look at your cities, villages, point cards and longest road/largest army cards to tally the score. Agricola also just has one end game tally.

But with a game like Stone Age you definitely have the kind of VP I'm talking about since building a hut with 5 Wood provides a different amount of VP than building it with 5 Gold.

I like games where VP is both a mechanic and a goal, like in Mage Knight (Board Game), the VP track (called "Fame" track) is used for score keeping and for leveling up characters. Once you cross a certain VP threshold, your character levels up and you can pick new skills or recruit more units. In Suburbia, you have income and reputation which decrease every time you pass a threshold.

And obviously games which just count money have this as well, Manila for instance, although they don't use a track for it.

[Awaclus]

I like the RuneQuest hit point system with a total HP and a HP value for each body part, and depending on the body part, different amounts of HP left mean different things (for instance, a limb is broken at 0 and severed at -X where x is its max HP, and head makes the character unconscious at 0, and lose 1 point of the total HP each melee round at -X).

[ipofanes]

Normally it doesn't matter much whether VPs are tracked on a sheet of paper or on a lane around the board, or handed out during the game as in Rokoko. There is one exception that comes to my mind. In Ursuppe (Primordial Soup) you have a VP lane, but only one counter can sit on each space while occupied spaces are leapfrogged. I sometimes try to use this to alternate turns that score me many or few points to get more leaps. Don't know if that's a good strategy.

[Davio]

Yeah, some games let the "last player" go first, but if there's a tie, the player whose disc is on the top/bottom goes first. That's easier to track with a track, get it?

[Kuildeous]

Yeah, some games let the "last player" go first, but if there's a tie, the player whose disc is on the top/bottom goes first. That's easier to track with a track, get it?

Yeah, that would be easier to track with physical pieces, because you just look at the last piece. In Primordial Soup, you simply cannot have the same score as someone else, so you skip ahead. The days track in Galaxy Trucker (technically not VPs) works the same way.

On the other hand, you could have simultaneous placement, but the last person to get there is the first one to move. This happens with the movement track in Red November (also not VPs because that'd be worthless in that game).

[qmech]

In the old days they used to be called "points".

[GendoIkari]

In competitive sporting events, "Victory points" are just called "Score". But it's the exact same thing. For any event to be competitive and have a winner; there needs to be a win condition. That win condition needs to be something that tracks how good you are at the event; and for most events, that thing is going to be some form of a score.

[blueblimp]

In competitive sporting events, "Victory points" are just called "Score". But it's the exact same thing. For any event to be competitive and have a winner; there needs to be a win condition. That win condition needs to be something that tracks how good you are at the event; and for most events, that thing is going to be some form of a score.

I disagree. There's something conceptually different about the meaning of points in some sports. Consider soccer for example. There, 1 goal = 1 point, so you're not tracking abstract points, but instead goals, which are a concrete thing. Not only are they concrete, but to track them, you only need to count, not to add. It'd be interesting to see whether older sports favour counting-based scoring over adding-based scoring due to less availability of school.

Also, there are many sports where you don't necessarily need scoring at all, such as races or certain combat sports.

It's true that for certain sports the score is basically the same idea as victory points, as Watno pointed out earlier.