"Welcome to the show where everything's made up and the points don't matter," Drew Carey was famous for saying at the introduction of the hit improv comedy series, Who's Line is it, Anyway? Lately, I've thought that this same phrase could apply to the that niche-within-a-niche in the boardgame market: complex Eurogames. Afterall, the exotic themes often have much less to do with the mechanics than simply to add a little color to the graphic presentation, and the points...well, there's so many of them to be had, that I can often hear Carey's voice in the back of my head each turn, exclaiming with a smile, "A thousand points for everyone!"
In the comment section of a review of prolific game designer Stefan Feld's newest gamer's game, Bora Bora, Ben McJunkin of the Opioniated Gamers used the term "Point Salad" to describe what has become a popular scoring mechanism in these complex games:
