I just played Fossil for the first time the other night. At some point fairly early in the game, the other couple we were playing with didn't think we'd have time to finish, so we decided to limit moves to 5 seconds. The winner won by a huge margin from silly mistakes made by his right hand opponent.

This got me to thinking about a comment I heard about the game, that you needed to be very careful that you don't leave your left hand opponent with an easy score. Even though this is an implicit "rule" in Fossil, I wondered how the game would be if the rule were explicit. In other words, suppose that instead of the winner being the player with the most points, the winner was the player that outscored his left hand opponent by the most points. This would turn multi-player games into a set of linked two player games (somewhat akin to multi-player Magic using attack left rules, or V:tES). I think that this would work very well with Fossil. So then I looked at my collection of multi-player games, and tried to think of which games it would be possible to change in this way, and if the change would be an improvement. The nice thing about the change, I think, is that it mitigates the kingmaker problem of some multi-player games. The bad thing is that one bad player can hand the game to his left hand opponent, and it might be difficult for other players to counter- balance.

Here's what I came up with: Fossil, Manhattan, El Grande, Medici, Medieval Merchant, Samurai, and Acquire could all be changed to differential scoring. I think that it would be a clear improvement for Man- hattan, but I don't know about the others. Opinions? And does anyone know of any game that already has this rule explicitly?