What caught my eye about Iceland: Settlement to Independence? 

Hey, thanks for the video! From experience, what happens a lot of time is that the players will have a pretty good idea when they have reached the independence threshold, and after that there is a lot more intensity to the competition. Especially for the special victory point cards (which are like Longest Road in Settlers of Cataan), since taking one thing from another player can cause ownership of the special victory point card to shift. And of course, turn order is -really- important in that case. So the last couple of rounds are often where the most intense competition happens. But since there can be a chance of a volcano up to the next to last round, you will occasionally have a situation where there is a big natural disaster while players are competing, dropping them -below- the independence threshold, and they have to collectively scramble to get the game back to where -someone- can win, while at the same time trying to make sure it is not -someone else- who does. There's a lot of nuance and a combination of playing the game and playing the table.