Calico: Place your final tile, gather up your tokens, and you’re done with the game… But the board’s complicated layout hides its final score. Have you forgotten a tiny grouping of matches? Did you miscount one of those design goals surrounding the center tiles? With this little scorer, that visual clutter translate back into simple … Read more

Arithmetic panic happen in the final minute of every Everdell session. You glance around your city, tallying up its victory point total on your buildings, only to recall that there is also Newleaf. And then you’re frozen, contemplating whether building one more red critter would net you an extra dozen points from waiting visitors, which … Read more

In Pearlbrook, you’re balancing short term gratification against long term sustainability. With the new expansion, Everdell introduce sparkly pearl tokens that entice you into pursuing easy, fast wins. You build out a gorgeous-looking city. Then, when scores are tallied at the end, you realize you didn’t really consider what all those little points here and … Read more

When you finally score your game of Wingspan, it’s often quiet. It is not out of satisfaction but anxiety. Because everybody knows that this is there last chance to repeat everything. The beauty of these birds take a back seat to the drudgery of adding up victory points. You have eggs on cards, food in … Read more

Few games of Twilight Imperium ever end quietly in the final round. Typicaly it concludes after one player realizes he miscalculated exact moment his opponent pulls past him. Sure, maybe you’ve had control over most systems at any given time. Maybe you held strongest IOUs. Perhaps you won all arguments on strategy. But ultimately you … Read more

Finally, you have finished building your Verdant house, laid down the tokens like confetti, and looked it over. You say, “Okay! Time to do math.” That’s when you remember the elegant-but-messy rules. Add up some printed-out numbers? Check. Count how many things is unique? Check. How many green pairs? Check. Adjacency of room? Check. And … Read more

And then there is that last round of Cascadia when it always freaks you out. You’ve played your 20th tile. You’ve run a big forest corridor through the middle. Now you need to account for all those nature tokens, elk herd, and bear pairs before anyone else catches on that they goofed. Scoring doesn’t just … Read more