If you’re designing a game, here’s a short list of five things that you shouldn’t do:
Don’t Reward the Last Man Standing. This is one of the things that Eurogames do right, so it scarcely needs to be said any more. However, it’s still an important point. Unless your game is really short, you shouldn’t allow player elimination, and you especially shouldn’t decide who wins your game based on the same. After all, what are the eliminated players supposed to do until the game ends?
Although, as I said, most Eurogames don’t use last-man-standing mechanics, there are nonetheless some that allow players to be effectively eliminated. Mare Nostrum is an example of this from the warfare side of things: you can get to a sufficiently bad state that you just don’t have the resources to come back. Likewise there are any number of games where you can look at your score and quickly realize that you have no chance of winning.