About “Smooth Popularity Track” Scoring

ScytheKick was born in 2016 as a Numbers spreadsheet. I was playing with a spreadsheet to implement the Popularity Track that was on the game board. Mainly I was looking at the choice of the three tiers on the Popularity Track and how that meant that scoring would be the same for different popularity levels.

Obviously, on the board, it makes a lot of sense to simplify the tiers to make the final calculations easier. But with a spreadsheet, I could implement what I was calling a linear scoring algorithm. That is, rather than assigning fixed coins per star, territory or resource pair, the scoring would change linearly as the popularity level changed.

Looking at the Popularity Track, I chose 3, 9 and 15 as mid-points of each tier, spaced apart by 6 levels of popularity. The coin rewards in each category differ by one coin in each tier (for example: 3, 4 and 5 coins per star), so that made it easy to come up with a formula.

For each level of popularity above or below the center point, you gained or lost an additional 1/6 of a coin for every star, territory and resource pair.

For example, if you had 6 stars, and popularity levels 0–6, you would normally get 18 coins. With this linear, or Smooth approach, at level 3 you’d get 18 coins, but at level 4 you’d get 19 coins (6 * 1/6 = 1 coin), 20 at 5, 21 at 6, 22 at 7, 23 at 8, and 24 at 9, which is what you’d normally get for 6 stars in the second tier.

You can see the results of this linear scoring in the graph. The blue line shows the normal scoring for stars, and the green line shows the linear scoring. Extra coins are even awarded above Popularity Level 15 and penalties are given below Level 3.

Since you’d often have fractions left over, the remainders from each category are added together, including any fractions caused by odd resources.

Once I came up with the equation, I thought it would be fun to put in a little calculator app, and then added Automa cards, the faction and mat picker and ScytheKick was born.

The Smooth Popularity Track option is available in the app Settings and you can toggle it back and forth and the Scoring tab will update and you can compare how it works out.

That said, I’m not sure its a perfect idea. I’ve chatted about this with the game designer on the BoardGameGeek and Facebook groups, and the Smooth option does reward you for intermediate levels, but by removing the tier boundaries, it changes strategy. For example, at level 6, you might spend a turn choosing an action that gains popularity. Or at level 7, you might want to avoid choosing an action that costs popularity. Take an example of 5 stars and 10 territories, which would score 50 coins using the standard scoring at level 7, and 35 at level 6. You might not want to attack a worker on your last move and lose 15 coins. With the Smooth option, you’d drop from 45 to 43 coins, a loss of only 2! That’s not much of a disinsentive.

In any case, try it out and see how it affects your gameplay. You should probably agree before starting on which scheme will determine the winner. Have fun Scything.