@aekenter:
The game goes from 1850 to 1920. Each decade is represented by one turn and each turn is divided into three phases. Each country has unique objectives that it attempts to accomplish throughout the game. At the end of the game, each player reviews the objectives for his or her country and is awarded points for the objectives he or she has accomplished. The player with the most points wins.
I have a question about this. Does each decade-phase of the game end with an assessment of how many goals were accomplished in that round, with permanent points being awarded for the accomplishment of those goals? Or is there simply a single assessment that takes place at the end of the game, with a single set of points being awarded at that stage? Either method would work, but the rules should be clear about which method is being used.
On the one hand, if the game uses the final-assessment-at-the-end method, then the winner isn’t determined by what happened “throughout the game” – the winner is determined by the final status of the territorial holdings on the game map. In this method, the players don’t have stage-based intermediate goals, they simply have a final goal.
On the other hand, if the players have stage-based intermediate goals, then the question becomes whether accomplished goals can be “undone” by subsequent game events. To pick a concrete example: the player who’s quoted by you says “In 1850, Germany was not yet unified. As such, an important German objective is to unify Germany by conquering the remaining German territories that it does not own. […] Unification completed the German player looked to his other objectives.” The question this raises is: what if later in the game Germany loses some of the territories it conquered to achieve unification? Does this reverse German unification? And if so, are there consequences in terms of points?
In other words, there are two possible models:
Model 1: Germany has the goal of conquering territories x, y and z at any phase of the game to achive unification. If at any stage of the game it controls those territories in addition to controlling its original territories of a, b and c, Germany is immediately given a certain number of victory points, which it retains throughout the game regardless of whether or not it manages to hold on to these territories for the rest of the game.
Model 2: Germany has the goal of being in control of territories a, b, c, x, y and z at the end of the game. If at the end of the game it controls all of those territories, it receives a certain number of points; if it only controls some (or none), then it receives no points.
Just from a historical point of view, Model 1 probably makes more sense. Method 2 would, in effect, give Germany a goal of achieving its unification by 1920 and maintaining it until that date, without giving it any credit for achieving unification by (let’s say) 1870/1871, as was the case historically.
