I’ve been jotting down a few notes. I definitely feel that the definition has migrated over time. Here’s a rough outline:
1) The Era of Abstraction
Quinns puts this starting after WWII. All I know is this is where I first met things in the 90’s. The Euro was a term juxtaposed with Ameritrash or American style games. It was defined by: elegant ruleset, abstract gameplay with theme as an afterthought, and low conflict. This does not mean low interaction - there would be blocking, trading, race to a contested objective, etc. But no combat or destruction. Mechanics came first and components/theme came after. Think Settlers, Carcassonne, Samurai.
American games, by contrast, were defined by theme-first design and conflict style interaction. You chose a theme or an ip and then designed mechanics to fit that theme. Lots of rules, edge cases, and errata. And often unhandled exceptions that we just lived with. Player elimination was a thing (Cosmic Encounter, Risk, Monopoly) and winning often meant taking things from other people or wrecking what they had built.
2) The Incursion of Theme and Variable Setup
Theme is fun, and the Euro began to incorporate this. It also discovered that endless variability can be a good way to extend the life of a game. Start with Puerto Rico in 2002. Very old Euro, but also a strong theme that defines the mechanics. Near zero variation. Jump to Caylus in 2005, also with mechanics defined around theme (here’s the wall building mechanism, here’s the jousting mechanism) and now we see a real variable gameboard with what buildings and what order they come out. Last, Agricola in 2009. Still elegant and all but deeply thematic. And a deck of cards for endless variation.
Variable setup existed before, like in Settlers, but this was a different beast. Things left in the box, things might be in or out of the game, and you might not know the actual state of the game until partway through.
3) The Incursion of Conflict
I definitely feel that in the 10’s there was an era of area control. Every Euro had an area control sub-game. Terra Mystica, Troyes, La Granja, Nippon, Ginkgopolis, Keyflower, etc. Not to say this didn’t exist before. El Grande was 1995 and Caylus and Puerto Rico are unforgettably mean. But this bumping people off the board and not just racing for but fighting for a position or resource took center stage. I think the 10’s are where we find the greatest concentration of mean Euros.
Yet, not the meanest. The 00’s experimented with this and gave us most of the harshest Euros. Here, they’d figured out how to give a backdoor so you could be mean on one side but without complete denial. Like Carson City (2015) - you fight over spaces but the loser gets their worker back as an extra action in the next round.
4) Player Boards, Asymmetry, Unlocks, and Solitaire
This is where I think things got bad. A few games did really interesting things with player boards - Terra Mystica (2012) and Hansa Teutonica (2009) come to mind. Great Western Trail (2016) pushed this a little further and then suddenly everyone has a player board with unlockable upgrades. The game moved from a central location to a personal location, the era of subtle conflict died, and the era of solitaire took the throne. With the loss of other players and their actions to drive the game, variable player powers (a bastion of Ameritrash) were hauled into vogue. Also the variability from era 2 became crucial. Euros took on a shelf life as the game was learning all these variations, which is a task with a start and end point.
5) The era of score tracks
Era 3 may have been the best. Era 4 is still often fun. However, we’ve landed in a new era where Euro is defined by a set of mechanics. This is much of what I described in era 4, but that era still had some experimentation and innovation, some lingering tropes from its forebears. Now games need one new mechanic, say a way of drafting dice. But every game requires a set recipe:
- Variable setup
- Multiple or variable scoring goals
- Scoring tracks and opportunity cost, where it is your job to advance along them but each one has different requirements that cannot be pursued simultaneously
- A player board with a mechanism to unlock income or action efficiency
- An explosion of rules/mechanics such that the game has a long enough learning curve to reward skill
This is all generalization. No era is pure, but I feel these five stages characterized the overall offering.
I’m most often delighted by games that capture the era 3 ethos, whether or not they were actually published in the 2012-2018 timeframe.
Edit: And I don’t know why each of these things has to be called the “Euro.” I suppose they do feel similar in my mind, and each is related to what came before. But it would be nice if we had a new word for eras 4-5, Great Western Trail and future. Like “Player Board Optimization” instead of “Euro.”
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