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The Death of the Mid-Weight Euro (from BGG)

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08 Feb 2017 03:29 - 08 Feb 2017 03:30 #243648 by Thrun
what does it matter if its farming or space ninja pirates, thats not the problem, the problem is the pretence that games dont boil down to manipulating a handful of numbers. That is why Knizias games still piss on modern euros from a great height. He wasnt ashamed of it, in fact, he embraced it. Like Sackson he designed games built on the interaction of a few numbers, and let the players dictate how and where and why the game developed. Now, in the desire to "innovate" (put a unique twist LOL), designers just throw 4 or 5 games together, then add several layers of obfuscating bullshit in order to promote the idea of deep and varied gameplay, when in reality its just adding needless mindless hours decoding the fact that instead of A and B do this, its A and B go to C via D and back to E, and if you have F you can go to G, or otherwise to H. Modern Euro games fucking suck, as a general rule. Knizias 1990s catalogue on its own could replace the entire Euro catalogue and nobody would be any worse off, and in fact, most normal people who dont spend their lives on internet gamerz forums would probably have had better access to better games.
Last edit: 08 Feb 2017 03:30 by Thrun.
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08 Feb 2017 08:34 #243651 by Motorik
Wadenels & Bojack nail it, IMO:

wadenels wrote: For me the great medium-weight Euros are of the "do one thing (or two things) and do it well" variety.

Once you start adding mechanics and tweaks you probably slide out of medium and into heavy-weight on my scale. Reason being that if I have to explain how different systems and subsystems interact then the game has already lost that intuitive appeal and starts wandering into mechanical interaction territory. This is when things get puzzley and more opaque.


Bojack wrote: Now, in the desire to "innovate" (put a unique twist LOL), designers just throw 4 or 5 games together, then add several layers of obfuscating bullshit in order to promote the idea of deep and varied gameplay, when in reality its just adding needless mindless hours decoding the fact that instead of A and B do this, its A and B go to C via D and back to E, and if you have F you can go to G, or otherwise to H. Modern Euro games fucking suck, as a general rule. Knizias 1990s catalogue on its own could replace the entire Euro catalogue and nobody would be any worse off


Yup! Contemporary Euros are crappy engine-building puzzle exercises consisting of a half dozen unrelated mechanics awkwardly grafted together, like some kind of board game Human Centipede. Or, in this case, it's the Stefan Feld Centipede, except apparently some people actually choose to sit around the table shitting in their neighbor's mouth and tossing the point salad.

Looking back on my favorite Euros (all of which are 15 years old or older), they all do a maximum of two things well. Ra, Adel Verpflichtet, Torres, Samurai, Taj Mahal, T&E, El Grande, Wyatt Earp, Traders of Genoa (shaddup, I really like that one). Knizia alone made something like 6 stone-cold classic games out of marrying an auction mechanic to set collection, and each of those games still manage to feel very different from one another.

I'll put in a good word for one recent Euro-style game, World's Fair 1893. It's the first new Euro I've played since sometime last decade that manages to feel like a throwback to the good ol' days. It's kind of like Web of Power or Attila (think dirt-simple, yet interactive area control) married to endgame set collection scoring straight out of Ra. It's also very nice to look at and has cool educational flavor text on every card. Extremely simple rules, a surprising amount of strategic depth, old school style mechanics, and it feels like it could've come out in 1999 instead of 2016.
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08 Feb 2017 08:45 #243652 by Legomancer
The book The Road is a gripping story of a man and his son trying to survive in a land where some kind of apocalypse has happened. There's a lot going on in it, but the thing that nerds seem to fixate on is: "What was the apocalypse?" The author never says, and it absolutely doesn't matter, but still they must figure this out. Nerds see this as a puzzle to "solve".

This is how I feel about a lot of current boardgames. They aren't presented as games to play but puzzles to figure out. As someone said, the many layers and gears and levers are all just obfuscation of whatever the underlying mechanism is. They're as fun for me to play as doing a crossword puzzle -- I enjoy doing crossword puzzles, but that's a solo activity. Doing one in a group just isn't a whole lot of fun. These days I like when I find a newish game that sticks to the formula of doing a couple things well instead of throwing everything into a pile.
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08 Feb 2017 10:16 #243661 by Thrun
yes, a good test of this would be, how much fun would the game be if you printed on a player aid all the resource conversion chains and how they translate into the end game points or score. Because thats what a lot of these games are. Relying on the fact that some people dont want to / cant / dont realise what the optimum moves are because the designer hid it as much as possible and pretended that this part should be the focus of the game. When people talk about how well some of these games work as solo experiences, that should tell you everything.

But on a more general level, whats the point of a shelf full of games all doing basically the same thing (working out a bit of maths in your head). It would be like being friends with Usain Bolt and saying hey dude, lets not just race for 100m, lets add some new events like the 99m and the 98m and the 101m and the 102m etc etc. Youre still all doing the same (mostly damn boring) stuff, why are you pretending that this is a varied experience. This and that turn into that and this times X, add Y, oops I took that spot first. "interactive". It makes me laugh when people get so upset when games are compared and they are like "this game is nothing like that". Erm, dude, yes it is. A huge proprotion of games are, when you get down to it, EXACTLY the same thing. Juggling a set of numbers around and ending up with a number at the end.

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08 Feb 2017 10:45 #243663 by san il defanso
Last night I had some guys over and we played Knizia's Beowulf. Now I like that game more than the vast majority of gamers, but I was struck at how NOT calculating it felt. I felt like I was actually playing the other players, even though the game is actually pretty mechanical. It's the same kind of joy I get when playing something like Five Tribes (which is actually a pretty heavy game). I've learned in the last couple years that I actually DO like Euros, and even some heavy ones. I still like Agricola, Le Havre, and Argent. But there are only so many games of this weight that I can have in my collection, and I happen to already like the ones I have.

Someone made the comment about having the same problem with AT games, and I totally sympathize with that. My favorite AT games are older classics like Talisman and Wiz-War, and of course Cosmic Encounter if you want to call that AT. (I think it transcends the genre, myself.) I don't need another monstrous game that takes hourss to play. Like euros, AT has the ability to instantly entice someone, but the advanced gamer generally seems to feel like the things that make such games enticing are all liabilities to be overcome, not something to lean into.

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08 Feb 2017 11:06 #243665 by charlest
I think the mid-weight Euro is seeing a renaissance in the Hybrid field. Blood Rage, Inis, Kemet, Assault of the Giants. I'm all for this.
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08 Feb 2017 14:25 #243673 by san il defanso
But the thing about those hybrids is that most of them are essentially territory-conquering games. While integrating euro design elements has helped the conflict genre immensely, there's something about conflict like that that seems to pull away from the roots of the genre. It's hard to define precisely, but the only two classic German games I can think of that really capture the feeling of map-based conquest are El Grande and Tigris & Euphrates. Both of those go about it in a very roundabout way too. Hybrid games can be amazing, but overall I think they tend to pull away from the things that attracted people to Euros in the first place.

It's very possible that I'm speaking for myself here more than others, because I'm actually not that big a fan of dudes-on-a-map as a genre. The things I liked most about German games when I was first getting started was that they were so different from that sort of game.
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09 Feb 2017 00:25 #243690 by dave

san il defanso wrote: the only two classic German games I can think of that really capture the feeling of map-based conquest are El Grande and Tigris & Euphrates.

Map-based conquest was a huge feature of that classic German game era (okay, maybe not as much as "the auction" was...). Domaine, La Citta, Evo, Ursuppe, Magna Grecia, Wongar, Through the Desert, Clippers, Entdecker, Tikal, Java, Tycoon, even Catan to some extent. Then at the next tier of complexity were a bunch of Martin Wallace games, Serenissima, Mare Nostrum, etc. Easily my favorite style of games. Games like Kemet, Blood Rage, and Cyclades are more along the lines of that second tier.
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09 Feb 2017 03:26 #243692 by southernman
I arrived here with party hat and streamers only to find that the reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated ..
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09 Feb 2017 09:55 #243700 by san il defanso

dave wrote:

san il defanso wrote: the only two classic German games I can think of that really capture the feeling of map-based conquest are El Grande and Tigris & Euphrates.

Map-based conquest was a huge feature of that classic German game era (okay, maybe not as much as "the auction" was...). Domaine, La Citta, Evo, Ursuppe, Magna Grecia, Wongar, Through the Desert, Clippers, Entdecker, Tikal, Java, Tycoon, even Catan to some extent. Then at the next tier of complexity were a bunch of Martin Wallace games, Serenissima, Mare Nostrum, etc. Easily my favorite style of games. Games like Kemet, Blood Rage, and Cyclades are more along the lines of that second tier.


You are of course right. My comment was showing my own bias substantially.

I wonder if what we are seeing is less a disregard for a certain kind of Euro, and more a disregard for a certain level of play. As has been mentioned this is a problem in AT games as well. It's starting to feel more and more like casual means VERY casual. Anything mid-weight now comes encumbered with a LOT of expansion content, or maybe just promised content. Not that a standalone experience is required for a game to fall in the spot where we're discussing, of course. But a lot of content can increase complexity, or even just footprint. That can be enough to push a game into gamers-only territory.

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09 Feb 2017 11:00 #243704 by JEM
La Granja might be the epitome of remix gaming, but I really like it. That might be because (outside of poking some Android apps a little) the only Rosenberg games I ever played had "Bohnanza" in the title, and the only Feld I played was Luna (miserable). For someone like that, coming into the hobby it may be more appealing to play a newer game that repurposes some tried and tested mechanisms, than to seek out the original.

I generally prefer games with more going on than one or two core concepts. I played Monad once, and I could see through playing it the way it worked as an engine building kind of game, but it was too bare-bones for me to engage with.

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09 Feb 2017 13:39 #243708 by Motorik

dave wrote:

san il defanso wrote: the only two classic German games I can think of that really capture the feeling of map-based conquest are El Grande and Tigris & Euphrates.

Map-based conquest was a huge feature of that classic German game era (okay, maybe not as much as "the auction" was...). Domaine, La Citta, Evo, Ursuppe, Magna Grecia, Wongar, Through the Desert, Clippers, Entdecker, Tikal, Java, Tycoon, even Catan to some extent.


Man, finally someone dropping some knowledge in this thread. A lot of these titles are a blast from the past. La Citta is hugely underrated, and gets quite nasty/messy with four players. You could also add Carolus Magnus to this list, Web of Power / China, Schmiel's Attila and Trias (which, since it was published in 2002, is arguably just about the last gasp of the classic area control era of German games. That, or, of course, Wallenstein, I guess.)

I don't think newer gamers (and by that, I mean, people who got into the hobby ca. 2005 or later) realize 1) how good and 2) how conflict-driven the classic German games were. It hasn't always been miserable Feldian bullshit.*

*although, to be fair, Wolfgang Kramer (despite being one of my favorite designers) really initiated the beginning of the end with Princes of Florence. That's a whole other topic though.
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09 Feb 2017 17:11 #243724 by RobertB
The middleweight euro is far from dead, but the new, high-BGG-ranked middleweight Pure Euro is. The middleweight games in the Pure Euro category are obviously being designed, sold, played, and liked. I get to buy some of these, because something like Scythe is a tough sell at the house because of the fighting (minimal as it may be), and something like Terra Mystica is a tough sell because of too many moving parts. A lot of them are hiding in the BGG family games rankings.

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