Spirit Island's scoring is binary — you win or you lose — and this is deliberate and correct. Cooperative games with point scoring create optimization goals that interfere with genuine cooperation. When the question is 'did we survive?' rather than 'how many points did we score?', every decision contributes to a single clear goal.

The victory condition — remove all settlements and cities or trigger enough fear to force retreat — creates a binary outcome that feels appropriate to the theme. You are defending an island. You either succeed or you do not. The difficulty settings create gradation within that binary through adversaries and combined invader scenarios.

For groups that prefer point-based cooperative games, Pandemic's scoring by number of cure discoveries is the best alternative. But for groups that enjoy the cooperative experience as a shared narrative, Spirit Island's binary win condition is the superior design.