Good & interesting BGG blogpost on 5 Schools of Design

So in the current day how would you describe AT then? The grain is very accepting of designs like Zombicide, Mage Knight, and Firefly it seems the AT movement and the AT design ethos are being mixed together here, and I feel like what you did was drama. Being part of a movement that goes against the norm is dramatic, starting your own website is dramatic, referring to bgg as tos is dramatic, showing up to cons and giving out DX crotch chops is dramatic, because you were making a statement, and your statement seems to have been heard as there's greater acceptance of games derived from those you listed.

But because there's acceptance doesn't mean AT is dead, so I'm wondering what you consider it today from a design standpoint.

Mad Dog wrote:

Consider a game like Eclipse (which I think is almost entirely AT).

Eclipse is practically the poster child of hybridization. I mean that in a good way. 90% of my forever shelf is hybrids and family games.

A lot of what people consider "modern AT" is actually hybrids. TI3 and most of the other FFG games are remakes/re-imaginings of older games but influenced by the Euro mechanics of their time.

I don't think mechanics can inherently be Euro/AT/German/whatever.

Bull Nakano wrote: Every stupid game you listed has drama in ways German games like Settlers, TtR, and Ra could never have.

Maybe I define "drama" differently from you, but I love old-school German games *because* of the drama, something that most VP accumulation Euros lack (and make Princes of Florence and Puerto Rico look good in retrospect).

Settlers - feast; famine; monopoly; road cut off; trade tension; in-hand VPs

TtR - route cutoff (which is why I hate hate hate stations in Europe)

Ra - set collection competitions; end-of-round Ra race

That's a fair argument, I find those things to be tension, and a game without tension isn't worth the time of day.

The pictures are saying some things that are not explicitly mentioned in the article. The only person clearly having fun is the girl in the first Ameritrash picture. The people playing the German Family Game don't look especially engaged or entertained. The guys in the EuroGame picture are completely disengaged from each other and are all lost in solitary thought. They look like they are at a meeting at work and just received a complex report.

Bull Nakano wrote: So in the current day how would you describe AT then?

Bloody and wild, like ScrumBrawl or Cave Evil. These days Ameritrash to me has ridiculous and possibly horrible situations that piss me off in the best possible way. Rules overhead is OK if the rules make sense in the context of the game and don't get in my way as equalizing measures.

These terms lose more and more meaning as time goes by and designers are influenced by what has come out, and has succeeded before. Especially as these terms become outgrown and splinter - Like German vs Euro, the way FFG-Style is breaking off from AT.

Barnes, back then, what did you classify Magic Realm as?

Mount Everest.

Bull Nakano wrote: I don't think mechanics can inherently be Euro/AT/German/whatever.

Design philosophy might be a better term than mechanic. I don't really care though. These topics have been analyzed non-stop for the past decade on BGG. The truth is Euro, AT, and German games are just labels with no real meaning. Since everyone in the hobby has different definitions of them and because nobody outside the hobby gives a shit.