Of course, it is obvious! The game is named with:
- normal words
- foreign words (relative to the target market)
- made-up words
- name of a person or place
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Sorry for not getting back here earlier. Spiel interrupted. Then a combination of having a cold and a deadline.
So my mission statement:
I want to be able to describe a game at a high abstraction level to
- compare games (why do I dis-/like a game),
- advertise them on my table for potential Mitspieler
- figure out quickly if I might enjoy an unknown game without having to read a lengthy description first.
So really the usual. Of course this comes up after I spent a lot of time prepping for Spiel by scanning a 1000+ new(ish) games (the games I selected for our group to play were all pretty cool though so my prep was good). Secondly, my collection is getting too big again and needs to lose extra games.
For a lot of you this seems to be easy (see all the variants on “Trains vs not trains”).
For me… not so much. For example I only figured out a couple of weeks ago that there is a mechanism (or is it mechanic? BGG is not consistent in this) on BGG called Tags and I noticed that a lot of my favorite games have those in various implementations: Terraforming Mars and Ark Nova are obvious as you collect them and they are even called tags in the TM manual. But Spirit Island is a little less obvious. Or Gloomhaven (probably the elements, weakly).
If the BGG mechanisms were hierarchical (as taxonomies often are), Tags might be found somewhere in the same subtree as “Combos” but that one doesn’t even exist and so I never quite figured out how to find “combotastic” games from the BGG attributes.
Last night when thinking about SETI, I found another common thing between Terraforming Mars and Spirit Island: epic cards. The big expensive ones in TM cost lots of credits and the epic ones in SI are just called “Major Powers”. Epic moments in games are epic. And I love them. How do I find more games that have this? Beyond asking here?
Why did it take me years to find out the commonalities between these games?
I am a tech nerd, so I always fall back on techie solutions to perceived issues. One of these is of course developing my own “improved” description model.
So here are some of my ideas what interesting information we could be collecting about boardgames, some of which would have to be community/vote driven like complexity is now:
I’ve left out most of the objective information that BGG already displays like designers, artists, publishers, official player counts, etc. Just things that I would really want to add or change:
- Game logistics: weight, box-size, setup/teardown, insert + type, box-air, fits expansions up to…
- Teach / Rules / Play Complexity–who says there can be only one?
- Theme–possibly hierarchical with
- history, war, fictional, nature as some examples for meta groupings
- Strength of theme expression as a rating?
- Is there a separate place for Genre/Category and Type (BGG uses only Type which is extremely broad and Category which includes themes but not only and it’s really confusing)
- Mechanisms–definitely hierarchical: Mechanisms need some additional datapoint like
- How present/relevant is it
- Hierarchies could solve stuff like deck/bag building, or fixed markets vs random markets etc.
- I would like to deduce from mechanisms
- interactivity
- amount of luck
- strategy vs tactics
- Components–I would really like to see certain types of components removed from the various places they are now listed in (mostly “Families” and “Mechanisms”). Examples:
- cards,
- tiles (hex, square, irregular),
- main board (type),
- player-boards,
- meeples,
- dice,
- timer,
- app,
- minis
- Giving (estimated? T-Shirt-sizes) amounts of each could help search for certain types of games.
- Type of Solo
- Two Player rules: extra rules?
- Type of Win Condition which is also where cooperative and semi-coop games would be indicated
- Player aids: yes/no
- Errata: yes/no
- Rulebook: good / bad / ugly (or just a quality rating)
- Digital Implementations: a list (this exists already but not very streamlined)
- AP Potential / Length of turns / Parallel Play
And I have no idea how to describe or deduce those three really.
I am considering writing myself a piece of code or an excel to do this for my own collection. Because geekgroup.app tags are getting me nowhere really fast.
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Beware of the subject matter explosion problem. I knew someone who worked on the (UK) Police National Computer for a while, and they wanted a way to tokenise witness statements so that they could check whether two crimes at opposite ends of the country had similar methods; but essentially anything can be a relevant part of a witness statement, so you have to build a system to describe the entire world. Even Isaac Newton backed away from that problem.
I know people who like to distinguish “theme” from “setting” but I can’t find details.
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Well, describing the world is kind of what Ontologies strive to do, don’t they?
But yes, of course, the explosion could be an issue.
On the other hand it is already happening on BGG: check out all the stuff that is being added under the Families heading in the sideboard. It’s the Wild Wild West of information. Especially components are being added there, Gametrayz and various crowdfunders are families of games these days. Digital implentations for all the various types… etc.
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For me,
Theme = the story that the game tells
Setting = the background in which the story is set
The theme of Agricola is that of sustenance farming in the Middle Ages. The setting of Agricola is that of sustenance farming in the Middle Ages; so far, so good.
The setting of Terraforming Mars is being a corporation vying to position themselves to colonize Mars. The theme of Terraforming Mars is matching colors on cards with other cards. Okay, I exagerrate a bit, but that’s the idea of how theme and setting can disagree.
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I’ve thought about this and I found that I prefer to use [rules weight + duration] as my classification on dividing games. As this is the most practical to me in everyday life. I don’t show up on a games night and think “I want to play an auction game”. Often, I think about the crowd and how long are we gonna play - ergo rules weight + duration. From there I filter by the number of players.
It is the most useless categories nowadays. I’ve read a comment on how JoCo is a “heavy Euro”. They just call anything Euros these days.
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This is why I really like Rosenberg’s farming games even though these are the sort of games I would avoid, usually.
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I would like to add that in many ways I was thinking of having a tool where people could define their personal ontology. Like in profile settings where you could just filter out information you don’t want to see. For example: I don’t want to see sub-mechanisms of auctions. I am not interested in the details. Just let me know there are auctions.
People uninterested in solo or two player play wouldn’t need any of the information that pertains to that.
Or maybe the only component someone is interested in is “hex-tiles” (because bestagons) and they would favorite those and filter the rest…
(I know I know not realistic but let me dream a few electric sheep)
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That is why in my second post I reverted to “how strong is the theme expression”
I haven’t quite figured out how to rate euro-y-ness. Because yes everything is apparently a euro now.
Seems theme + setting are lumped into category currently along with a bunch of things that are probably Mechanisms.
I might actually have put setting = genre in my head.
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I started using either “modern/contemporary Euros”. There’s no way you can lump Catan and El Grande with TFM and Spectacular and call all 4 of these Euros.
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Unless the definition of “Euro” has devolved to mean almost nothing. Which is my perspective
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it’s probably mostly defined by what Euros are not it seems
- not pure abstracts
- not war games
- not dominantly thematic
- not party games
- not … there is probably a bunch more stuff Euros are not.
Subtract all these and if you can’t find anything else, it must be the elusive euro.
edit: I’d probably say it’s a medium-thematic strategy game with low amounts of luck (or luck hidden in huge stacks of cards). So from my above proposal if thematic strength and amount of luck are measures, those could be some indicator for euro-y-ness there. Max Player count is probably 4, 5 or 6 (rarely)
edit edit: Chat AI mentions some other stuff most of it useless or previously mentioned. The only addition it made is that Euros tend to be games that feature several victory conditions and love their VP 
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I think the Ameritrash / Euro distinction was still useful by 2010 or so but even then it was creaking a bit. Now that there are, in the American market, lots of different sorts of games that clearly aren’t Ameritrash (which to me tends to mean troops on a map, lots of dice, special case rules to reflect some historical nuance, direct conflict, A and B fight C wins) the definition as “those games that aren’t Ameritrash” is less useful.
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I think I disagree with this. I have listened to a lot of metal music and if you look at what now is in the genre it’s fragmented in to so many sub genres which can sound radically different. They are all metal but over the years they’ve evolved along different threads so can sound and feel unrelated to those outside. I think it’s the same with euros, people all like different bits so ficus on them and they get iterated on. Are the games that result similar? Probably not. But compare Black Sabbath’s first album to Meshuggah, Darkthrone or Blind Guardian. None of the last 3 would exist without Sabbath but none sound like Sabbath. Same with euros. I also think like music genres they are tricky to define in terms of technical aspects but are still useful within there limitations. Some euros are thematically successful in the evocation of the action feels to the theme. Some ameritrash are mechanically tight and a long history of cross pollination has also blurred boundaries. However as a short hand for some hand waving chat with fellow enthusiasts euro still communicates a something even if it’s not rigorous. I feel confident everyone here would have something they could feel about Teotihuacan that would make sense when we describe it as a euro. It’s really different to El Grande. We’d also probably have some accurate enough feels about El Grande if being told it was a euro. Can I describe it? No. Can I tell you technical differences between hardcore and metal? No. Damn well know it when I hear it or play it though. And Metalcore has metal in the name but owes much more to punk and pop despite the sheer amount of bands ripping off At The Gates riffs. Unhelpful to taxonomy but such is the way.
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I can still tell you which metal sub-genres I enjoy more than others.
As I can probably tell you which euro-sub-genres I like more than others.
But good comparison that. I like it 
One part of why I am thinking about this is because the old categories are now so very broad. Saying “I like/dislike Euros” doesn’t tell me much.
Of course “I am so done with Euros” actually means: “I now play trains and trick-takers exclusively.”
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(I am so done with euros, and I know what that means for me, even if no-one else does, so I find the category useful.)
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I think I understand what you mean when you say that.
But in a broader sense, I think a lot of people are growing weary with “Euros” because it’s been weaponized by marketing; which means not only does everything get labelled as a “Euro”, because, you know, that sort of game is what sparked this hobby into insane growth 20 years ago and have been a mainstay ever since, but also established publishers are becoming (or already are) hesitant to stray too far from proven formulae. Resulting in a rather uninspired new crop of “Euro” games each year, a pastiche of the year before, and that a shallow copy of the year before it.
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A bit like film trailers perhaps? I watched all the trailers I could find for several years, and the abiding impression I took away from them was that the primary message is “this film fits in this genre”. You like romcoms? This is a romcom, it has standard romcom stuff in it, you’ll like it, go and see it. Since what I was looking for was more “how is this film distinct from all the [genre] I already have”, this wasn’t terribly useful; that stuff was deliberately hidden away.
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Quite on point, game #2 on the geekbuzz list this year at SPIEL was Saltfjord which is a remake of Santa Maria (from 2017 I think). Saltfjord was actually the best of the Euro-y games I tried at at the fair.
I only use Euro now to designate those mechanism soups of a very particular style. Mostly overly complex. Prime examples from my recent disappointments list are:
- Darwin’s Journey
- Unconscious Mind
I am also thinking about common Euro attributes:
- big central boards
- player boards are “nu euro”, no player boards like El Grande are “new wave of German Euro Games” (NWOGEG, to stick with the metal analogies ) and don’t need those
- VP–often with Kramerleiste (now that I learned it is called that…)
- have a theme. “nu euro” tries much harder to evoke it but only manages to stir cream into the tea making it opaque
- neither sub-genre likes a lot of random,
- For replayability “nu euro” favors randomized setup, while NWOGEG favor player interaction leading to different outcomes
- In this analogy Vital Lacerda is Yngwie Malmsteen
And this guitar perfectly represents On Mars
(sorry can’t help being silly today, reasons…)
And one more because I can.
This guy (Steve Vai) probably represents Unconscious Mind because I think he might need some help from Sigmund Freud
Note: I’ll get back to my own topic eventually, no worries. Still brooding over a good model to describe games. This is actually helping that.
And Partygames are like German Mitsingmetal (Blind Guardian, or more recently Powerwolf)–everyone gets to participate even when the “game” has long since left the building, people still sing the Bardsong.
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I have a handful of rubrics or wishes for how I do / want to classify games.
The Recommendation Rubric - good for Mitspieler
- How many people?
- How long do you want to play?
- How much tolerance is there for rules at this table?
- Do they want to fight, laugh, or excel?
Fighting is things like El Grande or Tash Kalar. The laughter path leads to Quacks, Bohnanza, Flamme Rouge…reveals, schadenfreude, big bets, table talk, etc. Excel leads to the puzzley games, where I’m trying to do something better than you, and at the end one of us has done better (or finished first).
These are the questions I ask when someone asks for a recommendation for their family/friends, or if I have a group to plan for.
Dynamics over Mechanics
This is probably the heart of my personal taxonomy. Many mechanics are just a means to an end - I don’t care if we are placing workers or selecting actions, what I care about is what kind of game or puzzle these mechanics present. So I think along three axes:
- Enigma - What level of puzzle is in this game. Low might be Tash Kalar, there’s little mystery in what you are trying to do, it’s just about executing well. High we can say On Mars, you ain’t solving that any time soon.
- Maneuver - What level and kind of interaction is between players. Low end is base Dominion, where you are simply watching a game timer. High end is chess, where winning means dismantling your opponent.
- Luck - What level of chaos or disruption is the game throwing at you (apart from interaction). Low end now is chess, high end might be Backgammon where even an expert can only beat an amateur 60% of the time.
I like this more than mechanics because it is more useful. If people ask Dominion vs Arctic Scavengers vs Star Realms vs El Dorado vs Arnak, becuase they are all deckbuilders, you have to shrug.
But let’s compare Dominion and Istanbul - both are moderate on Enigma, with a variable setup meant to provide a simple efficiency puzzle for that game. Both are light on Maneuvering, where someone may grab a resource before you or mildly disrupt your most efficient path but you’re mostly just watching for when to switch your engine to points mode. And both are light on luck, with a random setup forcing you to approach the game in a tailored way and a few variables like draw or occasional dice rolls. Those two share almost no mechanics but to me are two sides of a coin, if you like one you are likely to enjoy the other.
I have not taken the time to fully define 1-5 scales here or rate all my games, but a few forays have been pleasing when I see which games end up similar or dissimilar.
Skills over Mechanics
Not all mechanics are created equal. Some do feed into game defining aspects, and I think it’s those that are skills. Is a game math heavy, does it require planning multiple actions ahead, does it require multitasking (multiple simultaneous goals, not multiple paths to victory which is more of a early game choice), does it require valuation of actions or commodities… these skills can tell me more about what a game is like and who will likely take to it.
Putting it all together
If I were king of the database, I’d want a frame that addressed these elements:
- Teaching complexity - Possibly minutes, but I prefer number of concepts | number of difficult concepts. Something like Waterdeep has like 5 concepts - place worker to collect resources, pay resources to finish quests, new buildings/ownership/owner benefits, intrigue cards, role bonuses. That’s 5 | 0. Something like Brass might have 20+ distinct concepts to teach. Things like when you have to build in personal network vs anywhere, coal moving via connections vs iron moving freely, loans and income - these tick up that second number. It’s an heavy amount of work to classify games this way, and the definition of “concept” is fuzzy, but a guy can dream.
- Playing complexity - generally how hard I have to work here
- The Grok / Expire plateau - essentially, how many games to fundamentally grok the game and how many games until you’ve played it out. Raiders of the North Sea is something like 1 / 2. Nations might be 5 / 30. Tigris & Euphrates might be 3 / 300. These are also subjective (what’s the grok threshold?? And I read a review from someone who played Ingenious 1,000 times which is clinical) but sometimes you want to prioritize first play and sometimes you want to invest in something you can play for a lifetime. It also helps you calibrate a first impression, if the game has a 1-2 grok value your first impression is likely reliable. If something is up at 4-5 you know it’s worth a few more tries.
- Duration - reported, not published
- Player Count - with best count, BGG does this well
- Dynamics - expounded above, Luck / Enigma / Maneuver ratings with a clearly defined rubric
- Audience - what’s the feel of the game? Fight / Laugh / Excel?
- Skills Required - Tagging system
- Mechanics - This is still helpful if less important. I like the idea of a mechanic tree with types and subtypes. For both these last two, the tags need to be regularly moderated to maintain categorical boundaries, etc.
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