Incremental progress and "Point Salads"

I probably have a lot to say about the term "point salad," but as this is the first time I've ever sat down to talk about it, it may be a haphazard post about some of those thoughts... maybe some day I'll gather them better and write about them in a more official capacity (or at least in a more intelligible blog post).

"Point Salad" is a term in board games that refers to... well, there's an interesting thread on BGG about the definition of the term, but for the most part I hear it used to describe a game that rewards lots of different things with points, and I usually hear it used as a pejorative, to support a straw man argument that "this game is bad because it doesn't matter what you do, you get points for everything."

Just to get this out of the way, in case you couldn't tell by the way I phrased that last sentence, I think that's about the most ridiculous argument one could make against a game. Well, assuming it's not the case (and it seldom is) that playing randomly or arbitrarily could reward you with a winning score, anyway.

Yes, in the type of game often derogatorily called a Point Salad, often times many different actions confer points... but that definitely does not mean that it doesn't matter what you do! The way I look at it is this: in any respectable point salad style game, certain combinations of actions (call them "strategic paths") will result in a larger accumulated score than others, and the better you play, the better your score will be. The fact that the game rewards incremental progress (i.e. awards points for many little things) just gives the player a way to gauge the value of one action over another, a way to compare options and make intelligent choices.

There's a corollary to this that I'd like to mention... many point salad detractors conflate what I just said with "you just do whichever thing gives you the most points each turn." That assessment is also laughably incorrect, as evidenced by the fact that in any respectable game of this type, simply doing the thing that gives you the most points each turn will not outscore strategic paths which use synergistic actions, look ahead, and maybe even engine building. This great article by Greg Aleknevicus (The Games Journal, circa 2004) explains very plainly how simply doing what's worth the most points right now can end up being very clearly a losing play (for the record, Greg's previous article is also very good).

In the BGG thread linked above, Trey Chambers (a game designer in his own right) argued that the problem with a point salad is that a player playing badly is rewarded with "a ton of points" (200 for example), which is too many. However, in the same example, he admitted that in such a game, the winner may well have 400 points. Bryan Thunkd did a pretty good job trying to explain how the actual number of the score doesn't matter, in that example the loser only got 50% of the winner's score, and it doesn't matter if that was 400-200, 40-20, or 4000-2000. I can almost see Trey's point, that he dislikes the idea of bad play being rewarded - like maybe the bad player will feel like they're "high" score implies they weren't playing badly after all.... almost. But no, I agree with Bryan whole-heartedly here... the goal of a game is to win, not to "score a ton of points." If you score 200 points and lose by a factor of 2, then you did not play well, period.

So I've argued against the down-sides people pose for point salad style games, but is there an up-side to rewarding incremental progress in that way? I think there is. And lucky for me, someone in that BGG thread brought it up as well! Phil Hendrickson said:

One thing I like about point-salad games is that all players receive positive reinforcement throughout. Even if you are not doing well compared to other players, at least your score keeps increasing. It can be a small encouragement to keep trying, hoping to achieve bigger scoring plays as you get better at the game.

Another feature that game designers can use in this style of game is to make players decide between short-term scoring opportunities and actions that score less up front but set up later big turns.

Some point-salad games do it badly, and make players feel like their choices really don't matter. Others do it well, providing an array of choices that are challenging, meaningful and delicious.

Which is a pretty succinct way to describe not one, but two good things about point salads. In addition, Tommy Occhipinti said this:

I tend to think of point salad games as being like a race. Everyone is at all times moving forward along the track (the scoring track, in this metaphor) but the more astute racers are moving faster. No matter how bad of a driver you are, your car is moving forward, even if it is barely chugging along spewing out smoke from the engine, but there is a real thrill in making the engine hum and running along at top speed, linking together multiple bonuses at once and weaving together seemingly disparate goals.

In point salad games, when they are going well, I get the closest to feeling that sense of Flow. On the other hand, no matter how poorly a point salad game goes, there is at least a sense of accomplishing something. Maybe I finished my one section that I worked for all game and got a hefty set of bonus points, or whatever it is. This series of little mini goals you set for yourself and accomplish is, for me, very pleasing.

In particular, it is more pleasing (to me) to finish a game feeling I've accomplished some goals and lost than to end the game with everything I've worked towards in a smoldering pile of ash. I (personally) relish neither being destroyed nor destroying other players.

His first paragraph is a pretty vivid analogy, explaining why it makes sense to score points for every action in a game, and his second and third paragraphs touch on some of the good reasons to utilize this type of dynamic in a game design.

I understand not everyone enjoys point salad style games, or games that reward incremental progress, and I'm not here to tell them they're wrong to not enjoy them. Hey, like what you like - you do you! But I think we'd all be better off if we could get rid of some of the lousy reasoning. You don't like math? Fine. You don't like numbers? Fine. You feel like your decisions don't matter because everything you do is worth points? Well, that's just false, and it's logical fallacy... you're pretending that the points you get for each action are equivalent (False Equivalency), like saying "what are the odds the sun won't come up tomorrow? Well, either it will, or it won't, so 50-50!" And then using that premise to say there's no difference between them (Begging The Question).

Not too long ago (circa 2018), there was a much derided talk at SHUX by Scott Westerfeld called Victory Points Suck about how game designers should stop using victory points in games. To me, this feels pretty similar to complaints about point salad from people who either don't like adding up points, or think that doing so pulls them out of the experience of the game. I liked my friend Gil Hova's reaction post to that video. The problem with the idea of removing victory points from games "to make them more exciting" is that that's just window dressing... VP are just a measure of progress toward victory, by definition. You can call them something else, or make them more or less granular, but if you're declaring a winner then you are awarding victory points in some way.

"But Seth, what about a foot race? There aren't victory points in a foot race!"

Well, ignoring the flippant "yes there is, you get 1 point for crossing the finish line first, and it's a game to 1," I'll point out that a wise man once said "victory points a measure of progress toward victory." In a foot race where you have to travel 500 meters to get to the finish line, you could consider that each meter is "1 victory point," and the game is a race to 500 points. Victory points are just a convenient way to measure that progress, but they need not be explicit!