I've played probably more than 50 "modern" boardgames at this point, and several of them have specifications that the scores of the players during the game should be hidden. At first I was strongly opposed to this idea... now I can see where it would make sense, but there are some games that don't need it, and some that could use it. Mainly, I think they should be hidden for a reason. Here are some reasons why they should be hidden.
The hidden points are an integral aspect of the gameplay. The best example of this is Dominion. Your score is hidden, quite literally, inside the deck you are building. You can try to mentally keep score, and it's easy to have a feel for who is ahead, but the game would drag horribly if players were constantly riffling through their deck to count the green cards. Similarly, the development cards that grant victory points in Settlers of Catan give the game a little bit of bluff, in a good way.
The victory points don't mean much until the game is over. An example here would be Through the Desert. You gain victory chips from water holes and oases, but much of the game's scoring comes from enclosures and the largest caravans which are tallied at the end, so if anything, face-up victory points could easily give you a false sense of who is winning, which would be detrimental to the gameplay. Any game with heavy end-game scoring would benefit here from hiding the in-game points.
The game plays more smoothly with them hidden. In a game like Tigris & Euphrates, where your victory cubes are rather complicated, it can be enough work to keep track of your own victory points, let alone total up everyone else's. Even so, in that game you still usually have a feel for who is winning (which is important). Another example would be the simple card game Loot, also by Knizia. In this case each "victory card" has a different value, shown by the number of gold icons on the card, and constantly totaling everyone's values would be cumbersome.
Here, on the other hand, are some reasons why they shouldn't be hidden.
Who's winning affects the strategy, and it should. This is my primarily complaint about Small World. The coins are hidden, and maybe they would be cumbersome to calculate, but that's only because of the method used for scoring - there's probably a cleaner method if you want the tokens to be face-up. However, in such a game, it is a logical strategic decision to hinder the currently winning player, and that strategy is inappropriately hindered by the guesswork required to tell who is winning. Maybe this guesswork is meant to be part of the gameplay, as an answer to the "bash the leader" problem, but I've never thought of it as a problem and this part of the strategy seems unrelated to the rest of the gameplay. Another example would be Reiner Knizia's Samurai, where which figures you go after is largely affected by the amount of figures of each type each other player has. This is made even weirder by the rules that they are not hidden only in the 2-player version of the game. Again, I'm assuming this is just to stave off analysis paralysis, but isn't analysis supposed to be part of the "strategy" of a strategy game?
Who's winning really doesn't affect the gameplay much. This is how I feel about Lost Cities: the Board Game. While the interaction is there, what you are trying to accomplish in a particular round relates only a little to who the current leader is, so the points being hidden is somewhat pointless. In fact, we first made the mistake of playing with them face-up, and now that they're face-down, it really hasn't changed the game at all, which makes the rule superfluous at best.
I'm sure I could write more on the subject, but my basic thought is that an extra rule like this needs to have a darn good reason.
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