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by aidenn0 1279 days ago
A lot of those games suffer from a kingmaker issue: where a player can't realistically play for first-place but can advantage or disadvantage players who can.

Catan is particularly bad at this; if you have 6 points and someone with 9 points offers you a trade, your decision will choose who wins.
1 comments
vintermann 1278 days ago
It's bad in this dimension for being a popular "eurogame". All it has to avoid it is a few hidden points from development cards. But most of the non-eurogames are far worse in this regard (e.g. in monopoly, this is far more common), and Catan would never have gotten away with it today. It's from 1995 after all.
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aidenn0 1278 days ago
True that non-eurogames are pretty bad here; Vinci suffered from this problem so badly that its successor (Smallworld) made every player's points private.
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