A Better Way To Do Victory Point Costs

One of The Great Zimbabwe's most distinctive mechanics is its VR (Victory Requirement) system. Your VR starts at 20, and when your VP count reaches your VR, the game ends. Several actions, such as claiming a god or building a new craftsman, increase your VR up to a max of 40. At first glance, this just seems like a victory-point cost in disguise. Is there truly a difference between increasing your target by 3 points and losing 3 points? As it turns out, there is, and the benefits make me wonder why I haven't seen it more often.

Even if VRs were only a framing device, they would still have value. Asking people to sacrifice their hard-earned points is painful in most games. Typically, you want to separate victory points from the in-game currency used to do things. Otherwise, players will feel disinclined to spend anything. When you frame VR costs as different from VPs, costs become more palatable. Gaining obligations feels less punishing than losing progress, even if it is logically the same.

But VR also serves a crucial strategic purpose because of how bidding works. Players bid on turn order in descending VR order. Depending on your strategy, you might want to bid early or late. VRs measure how much a player has bought, a metric other mechanics can use for free.

VRs also naturally limit how many abilities you can buy, since you cannot go above 40 VR. In theory, a player who spends VPs could keep buying things indefinitely. By tracking how much you have "spent," the VR system adds an element of mutual exclusivity to purchases.

One final area where VR costs beat VP costs is that they let players spend even when they have nothing. This lets them buy advantages from the start rather than waiting until they can afford them. This, in turn, helps speed up progression and prevents snowballing. It is a form of debt, but expressed much more cleanly than in most games. Rather than treating debt as a separate system, the game bakes it into every purchase.

The elegance of VRs as a debt mechanic reminds me a little bit of Slipways, actually. Both games allow you to build from nothing by going into debt. In The Great Zimbabwe, the debt is the VR cost of abilities and craftsmen, while in Slipways it is the needs of your colonies. Rather than losing progress, both transactions feel like an investment.