Kingmaker problem

A common problem in games with more than two players, but don't have a 'team win' condition: You have a player who cannot win, but who can choose which of the other players will win. If he can't be a King, he can at least be the man who makes the King.

This also means that if you pissed off the Kingmaker on the way to the top, you're about to get a short sharp dose of karma to the kidneys on the cusp of victory.

Some games compensate by either making everybody play Solitaire or hiding who's winning. Some games don't, in order to maximize backstabbing.

Examples include:

• Monopoly players offering their property for a song in a trade.
• Strategic games (like Risk or Civilization if you want to go /v/) players going kamakazi on one player to tie them up in order to aid another.
• Diplomacy, just Diplomacy.
• Dune, AKA Rex: Final Days of an Empire, like Diplomacy, embraces the backstabbing potential of the Kingmaker problem. Both games even have team win conditions too!
• Survivor (the TV show), although not directly /tg/ related, is still fairly close to a board game, and actually has this as part of its mechanics: The final 7 or 9 players eliminated vote for the winner among the final 2, explicitly making them as a whole the Kingmaker.
• Twilight Imperium is a special case. Since the game can be said with an academic term to take fuck-long time to play, exhaustion sets in when the game reaches its eight hour. The snacks are gone, the Monster has been drunk and the meatbread thrown into the trash where it belongs, the players who know they propably won't win may as well make the king to end the game before you all pass out from oxygen deprivation. Since the game runs on long-term plans and agreements between players, this can be what makes or breaks the game for the finalists; if you backstabbed your way to the top, there's nothing sweeter for the others than to give their Support for the Throne to your rival.

See also

Wikipedia on Kingmaking Scenarios