Visualizing Multiple Paths to Victory

If you're making a game with different strategic approaches or "multiple paths to victory," there can be various ways to make progress in your game (how you score points). In Puerto Rico your sources of points are Shipping goods and Building buildings, and because of this, I refer to a game's "SvB". In Eminent Domain it's Planet flipping, Research, and Trading.

To visualize these strategic paths, you could imagine a set of tracks, where you're going to go up some of the tracks a lot, some maybe just a little, and potentially some not at all, but you get a certain number (or range) of total track advances each game. In this way, you could end up with several very different player profiles, for example:

|-|

|-|

|----|

|----|

vs

|-----|

|---|

|--|

||

vs

|--|

|---|

|---|

|--|

vs

|--|

||

||

|--------|

etc

A hypothetical version for Puerto Rico might look like:

S |--|

B |--------|

vs

S |-----|

B |-----|

vs

S |--------|

B |--|

Importantly, I think it's good design to discourage or disallow zeroing out all but 1 track and super-specializing, because that's boring. In Eminent Domain, each time you choose a role, you go up a track for that role (your deck gets a little better at it, or more specialized towards it anyway), but in order to succeed, you can't just do the same role all game long, you have to manage your deck and pivot at the right time.

Let me know if this visualization helps you think about strategic paths, or designing games with multiple paths to victory!