Tabletop Games Blog · September 1, 2026 · 11 min
Striving for Achievements - the difference between achievement play and striving play (Topic Discussion)
When I play a board game with my friends, I know that they have the same intention: to win. Yet, they actually all want quite different things. One friend is happiest when they find a strategy that works and keeps working. Another wants to take a game apart until they understand the most efficient route to victory. I want to win too, but as a reviewer, I am usually more interested in understanding what a game is trying to do, how its mechanisms produce an experience and how the people around the table respond. Listening to episode 673 of the 99% Invisible podcast , I found that C. Thi Nguyen , a philosophy lecturer at the University of Utah and author of the book " The Score " , has really well described these differing expectations of wanting to win a board game. Read the full article here: https://tabletopgamesblog.com/2026/09/01/striving-for-achievements-the-difference-between-achievement-play-and-striving-play-topic-discussion/ Useful Links Episode 673 of the 99% Invisible podcast: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/673-the-score/ The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game by C. Thi Nguyen : https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/735252/the-score-by-c-thi-nguyen/ Wingspan review: https://tabletopgamesblog.com/2019/03/16/wingspan/ Music Intro Music: Bomber (Sting) by Riot ( https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/ ) Komorebi by | e s c p | https://www.escp.space https://escp-music.bandcamp.com Birds of a Feather by Purrple Cat | https://purrplecat.com Royalty Free Music by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US Support If you want to support this podcast financially, please check out the links below: Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/TabletopGamesBlog Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tabletopgamesblog Website: https://tabletopgamesblog.com/support/ (Photo by Eunice De Guzman on Unsplash)