Evangelists: new scoring concepts

A game of mine, Evangelists, was returned by a publisher after about 10 months.  I haven't worked on the game at all while it was under evaluation, but in the intervening time, I have been thinking about trends in gaming, and wrote this piece, in which I argued that there are two core gaming preferences that seem to be, if not at odds with each other, at a minimum, quite different.  These are, namely, those players who prefer puzzle-like gameplay problems to try to solve, vs. those who prefer games that let them try things out to see how their opponents respond and react.  I determined based on this that I lean strongly to the latter preference, both in games that I like and games that I design.

But I realized after writing this that Evangelists is actually rather puzzle-like, and am not sure what to make of that, and am questioning whether I should leave it that way.  Now that the game is coming back to me, it's an appropriate time to think about such questions.

The gist of the game is that we are the authors of the texts that have come to be known as the Christian gospels.  We travel around the Roman world gathering tradition cards which represent stories about Jesus of Nazareth, then we place them onto page cards (kind of cool, actually: to record a story in your book you physically place a little card onto a bigger card, and each big card has two slots, the 'front' and 'back' of the page).  We try to arrange the pages in such a way that symbols on the tradition cards give us literary devices, and we also interview eyewitnesses to gain attestation to our stories.  Scoring at the end game comes from eyewitnesses that we met, literary devices we've constructed, and having tradition cards that match our gospel's theme (which is assigned during setup).  

The gameplay works well, although it's a bit prone to analysis paralysis.  On your turn you receive four cubes, one in each of four colors, with each color signifying a kind of action you can take: travel, gain a tradition, interview a witness, or use a special power.  These cubes then seed the event cup, you pull some out and add them to event tracks, and when a track pegs the event associated with the event happens: an eyewitness dies, Rome institutes a persecution, etc.  Thus we have a nice little action/event system rolled into one.

But as one can see, gameplay is rather heads-down, and because turns take a while it's not always the good kind of heads-down gameplay.  And then at game's end, we tally up our scores and see who had the highest.  It really is more puzzle-like than I'm entirely comfortable with, and while players' actions affect each other, there's not much opportunity to harness this in a purposive way.  You're not really interacting, just affecting each other.  But, it is reasonably well balanced and it works, so is it wise to tinker?  And moreover, the gameplay seems to fit the theme.  Direct attacks or interference or blocking wouldn't make thematic sense.  But it may be that changes to make the scoring system more relative wouldn't affect the rules of the game but would certainly change the strategic landscape, and maybe that's a way to get interaction more prominently featured in the game.

I think there's at least one thing that's perhaps worth a try.  There are, essentially, six ways of getting points:  eyewitness points, four literary devices, and theme points.  What if, instead of scoring for all of those things separately, you scored for each one relative to how you did compared to your opponents?  The obvious thing is rank-based scoring, i.e. "Most inclusios = 10 points, 2nd most = 7 points", etc.  But I am interested to try something a little more dramatic than this. 

The idea would be that if you have outright most of X, you get (say) 10 points.  If you're within 1 X of the person who has the most, you get (say) 7 points.  Within 2 X's, you get 3 points.  Further than that, you get nothing.  But, if there's a tie for most X, these all bump down one click.

This means, effectively, that you're in six separate simultaneous races, and you have to decide in which ones you're going to try to keep pace, in which ones you're going to do nothing, and in which you're really going to try to skunk your opponents completely.

I think it could be interesting, but the problem is tracking.  It seems that to play well you have to be paying attention to what your opponents are doing but this may be hard if you're supposed to just look at their gospel at a glance and see what it looks like.  Thus we may need to introduce some tracking discs for each scoring category, such that you move your marker up on that category's track each time you achieve one of that thing.  E.g. when you form an inclusio, move up one on the inclusio track.  Thus our relative standing is always transparent.  

This is complicated a bit by the fact that the game lets you rearrange your cards, which could mean in some cases that you actually lose some scoring.  But in the previous iteration this is always a matter of simple arithmetic: if by giving up an inclusio I get a better chronology whose value is more than the value of the inclusio I give up, it's worth it.  Now the matter would be much more dependent on what my opponents are doing and how I'm doing in each scoring category relative to them.  And the decisions might feel much more painful as a result of wanting to keep pace.  

I think that this scoring concept has potential beyond the scope of Evangelists as a twist on majorities scoring.  It's rank-based, but the absolute position of our possessions in each ranked category matters, and putting a big gap between yourself and your opponents actually is worthwhile, sometimes.