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[luser]

Ideally, you would want someone with 1 first, 0 seconds, and 99 thirds to be rated better than someone with 0 firsts, 100 seconds, and 0 thirds; while someone with 99 firsts, 1 second, and 0 thirds is rated better than someone with 99 firsts, 0 seconds, and 1 third.

Thats silly, one reason that I don't like bsw.

As mathematican a correct system would be something like use trueskill and objective would be maximize expected gain to qualify value of second place depending on opponents.

Main problem that winner takes all isn't boring endgame, its that it takes skill out of game. In dominion a 1-0-99 player would be newbie that only learned to play treasure-map bm and one win comes from baker board where he collided his maps on turn 3.

On other hand 0-100-0 player is much better, he didn't win just because he plays versus Stef.

That gets worse with number of players, on 5 player game where winner takes it all everybody would open treasure map if present. Then depending on luck you would early see one who first connect these as winner.

That indeed leads to more boring games as winner is decided early by risky gambit and in rest of game its hard to overcome early lead.

[scott_pilgrim]

Man, I could make exactly the opposite argument.  Rankings are weird in Dominion.  The BM player who has no chance of winning will usually come second against two megaturn engine players (on a board where the megaturn engine is going to win), because he's steadily accumulating VP, even though it's not enough VP to win.  Both engine players are playing correctly, but one of them is doing slightly better than the other.  That's why first place is really what matters.  If second place matters too, the strategy of the game is completely different (that could potentially be a good thing, but I don't think it is in this case).

I think you should play riskier with more players.  In poker, you're a lot more willing to play hands like 7-6 suited in a pot with lots of other players, because even though it's unlikely to payoff, when it does, it will usually beat everyone else (contrasted with a hand like pocket Aces, which usually beats 1 or 2 players, but can get into trouble against lots of other players).  Same thing in Dominion.  If you're playing against a lot of other players, you have to take risks, because you need to get lucky to win.  If you reward second, third, and fourth place, you just take strategies that steadily accumulate VP (i.e. big money).  I think knowing when to take risks and what risks to take requires more skill than playing big money.

And, well, I'm not a fan of multi-player Dominion anyway.  I was mostly talking about competitive "free-for-all" games in general (and like I said 5 million times, it depends on what game you're talking about).  I think in most cases though, a "first infinitely better than second infinitely better than third etc." is best.

[funkdoc]

oh hey, lots of discussion here!  it's been pretty well-covered so i'll just say that power grid happens to be very well-suited for the type of kingmaking rules i talked about.  reason being, it's a game where you usually aren't out of the running until the end.  Step 3 is the great equalizer with all the monster plants that become available, and one drop can singlehandedly vault you from worst to a potential winner.  thus, there isn't normally a long period of being dead and playing out the string - basically everything i mentioned only comes into play on the final turn.

i definitely see how it could be bad for a lot of other games, though