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Comment by Closi | Hacker News Reader

> More importantly, your opponents help dictate your tempo. The goal isn’t to score as many VPs as you can; it’s to have the most VPs by the end of the game. How your opponents play affects how the game ends, and which of the game-end conditions you should pursue.

I’ve been curious about if this is actually a thing - it definitely happens in real life when playing, but why? Surely absent of interaction cards (which some games don’t have) there would be a strategy to optimise and reduce the number of turns to getting the required victory points regardless of how fast your opponent is going.

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The more victory cards ("green") you buy, generally the less effective your deck becomes (because most victory cards don't do anything other than count for points). This means that buying VPs makes it (generally) harder to buy more VPs. The smaller your deck, the more pronounced this effect.

All of this taken together means that you end up having to target some point along the continuum between "get points quickly but fizzle out early" and "long slow burn to getting a lot of points." If you go for the "quick" strategy but the game doesn't end quickly, your opponent can take the extra time to pass you in VP, and vice versa if you choose the "slow" strategy but the game is short. And it's not just two options — like I said, there's a whole spectrum of choice.

Sorry if I wasn't being clear, what I meant was isn't there an optimum tempo between being 'too quick' and getting choked with VP cards and 'too slow' and not getting choked, regardless of what my opponent does (excluding the effect of interaction cards).

Like - does what my opponent do significantly change my strategy? (other than balance your deck to respond to attacks). Surely the best tempo is still the best tempo.

The game length is significantly different depending on whether all players are following the same strategy (so buying the same cards) or not. So you have to adapt to that, and there are meta questions about that.

The length of a game varies according to what the players do. If your opponent plays a slow strategy, and you a quick one, not only will your deck become useless to do anything with, but you will lose your power to control game length (as it is tied to buying cards), so your opponent will be free to extend the game length.

It's more obvious in games with platinums and colonies. If your opponent is going for colonies, you can win by getting all the provinces for yourself. You have to make a quick read on if they're going big or not, to decide if you can play fast or not.

333c's answer is excellent. The other consideration is that "the required victory points" aren't fixed; they are 1 + your opponent's VP.

Some boards do have a dynamic of "there are roughly X VP we are fighting over; get more than half in the fewest turns". On other boards, if someone were to green too early, they would hopelessly clog up their decks. So players build for as long as possible and gain VP only on the same turn as they can end the game.

There's a wide spectrum between these extremes.

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