I can’t believe we’ve had people listing Eurogames and no-one’s included Brass Birmingham or A Feast For Odin yet.
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I’m mostly on board with your three eras.
The list on BGG is interesting. At least for me, as “euro” has meant five different things over the last 30 years, I see bullets on there that correspond to one definition but not another…still it’s a good attempt at unification.
As I mull on what it means today (the marketing era) I think it may be simply “low interaction efficiency based game (with likely combo or synergy opportunities driving said efficiency).”
And I’m also puzzling on what is NOT a euro (under that definition)? Apart from very specific things - like map-skirmish, dungeon crawler, 1v1 confrontation - maybe all is Euro today. And maybe that’s fine. We have achieved unification.
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For the real definition of “Eurogame”, check the history of that wiki page. Users arguing what is and isn’t a Euro game.
All along, “Euro” has just meant “the games I like and not the games I don’t like”, but to different people.
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I think if one wanted they could write a definition of euro to include monopoly fairly easily.
Having said that what I like in most games I consider of the old euro style is you basically have this unashamed art where the decision list per turn is small and constant.
I think on some level worker placement has gone out of control and doesn’t really contain the sensibilities and qualities I like most in euro games.
The kinds of euro games I think are cool and I can see in my eyeline are
- castles of Burgundy
- ticket to ride
- spectacular
- cascadero
- Thurn and taxis (I think this shares a fair bit with Archeos society and Ethnos)
Here are some games that could be called euros but I don’t think they have what I really like when I think of euros
- fromage (too heads down)
- grand Austria hotel (too much to choose)
- river valley glassworks (too flashy and a bit too simple but some similar qualities)
- altay (I like deck builders but deciding the order of doing many things feels too much).
I don’t believe there’s a grand consistency here which is in part to illustrate I think it’s an impossible concept to crack. But also I probably think of euros, think I like them, then cast out a whole bunch of games.
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Euros are like art: I know it when I see it.
Overall, though, when I think of Euros, I tend to think of indirect conflict, no player elimination, a strictly limited selection of options on your turn, usually a pasted on theme that could be swapped out with no real impact, and little to no randomness.
I do agree that the term is losing (has lost?) any real meaning as Euro and Ameritrash has commingled over the years. But yes, I think there were eras of Euro, and I think @pillbox broke it out pretty well, or at least close enough for my opinion.
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Well we already live in an Uwe game, working hard, scrimping and saving to feed our family. That’s no fun.
Carcassonne? I reckon I could cope with getting paid to lie on my back in a field in the south of France all day every day.
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Oh, you don’t get paid for that. And you never get to leave.
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I think the big problem with the term euro game is something others have mentioned more in passing: the term originated as a contrast to Ameritrash. From the start, there was a built in idea that every game must be one of those two. That’s obviously a bit of an exaggeration as there were also things like “classic” games (chess, anything using a standard deck of cards you learned from your grandparents, etc.), but I really think for a couple of decades of gaming, anything new was either euro or Ameritrash and even at the start no one agreed on the dividing line. It was like a spectrum and everyone agreed on the extremes, but put the ultimate dividing line in different places and put the same game in different places on the continuum. The dividing line got even further muddled as euro seemed to mean prestigious or higher level and Ameritrash had trash in its name, so there was an impetus to claim euro status for every game (@pillbox at the very least has already mentioned this same idea).
I find euro basically useless at this point. Classic German-style strategy games is maybe kind of the original euro starting point and there’s something to that. Point salad engine optimization is maybe something close to what I think a lot of people include within euro today even though the original euros weren’t that. Tons of games are completely different beasts entirely but still sometimes get called euros because they are strategy games and not “trash” in the eyes of the designers and marketers. I would be happy completely dropping euro and Ameritrash in favor of more nuanced terms. There are too many games to need them all to be one of two things.
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Oh, you’re one of those people who thinks fish are real, are you.
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I’ve read some of this but have not had time for a lot of processing of what everyone wrote. So without quoting each and every one…
Eras Tour (disclaimer: not a swiftie)
- “Games are for children” Era (roughly 80s) looking at popular (here) games before Catan f.e. via SdJ it is notable that everything seemed geared towards children, kids. This changed in the 90s → with:
- The Catan Era (90s to very early 00s): (often) beige colored, rules-light but strategic, theme-poor, “controlled randomization”, passive but aggressive interaction (Carcassonne is the best example of this) on a shared board (also: El Grande, T&E) .
- The Oprah Era: “you get a board, you get a board and you get a board, everyone get’s their own board”. This is Most of the 00s and into the middle 10s. I could also have called it the Feld-Rosenberg South-North Axis and I’d name Castles of Burgundy and Agricola as prime examples. Personally, Prince of Florence (2002) was the first of these I encountered. The interaction gets more passive, the game systems get more aggressive (see Agricola). Players are now fighting against the game more than the other players. It’s ever more competition and less fight. This culminates in the arrival of coop games in the latest 00s). Point salad games must have been invented here. And Sheeples.
- The Death of the Meeple Era (late 10s to early 20s, overlap with nu-euro): the mathmatical models for both the rules systems and the profitability of a game are getting more complex. The success of games from the previous era have awakened the Marketing Departments to the Power of the “Euro” currency. Meeples are replaced by plastic minis, standees or at the very least screen-printed wooden figures. More emphasis on theme and a beautiful production. Interaction is an afterthought when you are struggling to understand the 40 pages of rules for your new beautifully kickstarted Lacerda game. (I am picking on him but he is not the only one). This is also the age when Euro has completely lost its meaning for me. Everything is euro-style now.
- Age of the Solo Gamer or Nu Euro: (2020 onwards) interaction has finally been binned. Games get solo modes or they don’t get made. Also who wants to teach these monstrosities… ? Theme gets ever stronger because without other players at the table… who would still want to play an abstract? My favorite bad example of this is Darwin’s Journey (now in the BGG Top 100). What still sticks: the tightly controlled amount of randomness in the game and the adherence to strict systems (one would call this railroading in RPGs, but railroads are a different genre of boardgames). But seeing how games are just remixing all the separate genres these days labeling something as Euro is almost useless.
I might find time to write something more serious later. This is what my brain spits out when I try to handle two thinky work-projects at the same time 
edit: So the remaining signposts that I’d say something is a Euro-y for me:
- more strategic than tactical
- random elements exist but don’t dominate the systems
- systems before themes
- interaction is not “fighty” and mostly indirect
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Posting that article again
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I’m very gullible; I fall for all the scams and hoaxes. Even the fish one, I’m afraid.
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Well, under the arbitrary and personal definition:
- Mechanics-first design
- Slender/elegant ruleset
- Competition over conflict
- Nonreliance on variable setup / powers / goals - the game supports itself
Variability is fine, as long as it’s an “extra mode” or a little spice, as opposed to fundamentally supporting the game. This set seems to define a category of games that I have enjoyed and seems sufficiently distinct to qualify as a genre. I put it here just as what is useful to me, nobody needs to get on board. However, within those criteria, here’s my hall of fame for what made this word once-beloved (not ranked).
- Brass
- Castles of Burgundy
- Kanban EV
- Concordia
- Hansa Teutonica
- Agricola
- Le Havre
- El Grande
- Tigris & Euphrates
- Ra
- Troyes
- Inis
- Lords of Waterdeep
- Keyflower
- Quacks of Quedlinburg
- Dominion
- Great Zimbabwe
- Cyclades
- Carnegie (notable for being a 2022 design. I was a bit horrified by the lack of variable department setup and variable donations boards but… the game does in fact support itself without.)
- La Granja
- Ginkgopolis
- Isle of Skye
- New Frontiers
- Pipeline
- Caverna
If I had to live in one, Clans of Caledonia seems like a good life. Just some cheese and whiskey and a lot of fresh air.
And, interestingly, some euro-ish games that I disqualified based on my criteria:
- Gaia Project (over-reliance on race powers)
- Great Western Trail, Feast for Odin, Fields of Arle, Teotihuacan (too large of a ruleset)
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I don’t know what “nonreliance” means, especially regarding setup. Take Catan for example. Without the variable setup, the starting positions could be “solved” and become static. What about the starting routes for Ticket to Ride?
Personally, I love me some variable setup and wish more games would have it.
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Some people would say that Catan isn’t a “Euro” – and the variable board might be part of their argument.
Other people might say that variable setup should be minimal, if present, in a Euro.
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That doesn’t seem a terrible place to live. Esoecially if you’re ill and people compete to cure you.
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If we agree that Euros can have randomness during play, I don’t see the issue of having randomness at setup.
Or to put it another way: Any game that has multiple boards/maps to choose from (like Hansa Teutonica) would be excluded from the Euro-club. That’s silly.
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Burgundy has tonnes of randomness! Not just the dice but the crates and what yellow pieces show up!
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I was trying to be succinct but I see I fell headfirst into vague!
As with everything, its a spectrum. Even Puerto Rico has random plantations that seed the game.
Scientifically, I’m blocking off games where the variable setup itself is the game’s raison d’etre.
Poetically, if the game is a mountain and the randomness invites you to take a different path up, the game isn’t “overrelying on it.” If the variable setup gives you a new mountain each game, that’s what I’m trying to segment off.
Gaia Project, Merchants Cove, Cosmic Encounter, Spirit Island, etc.
I know it’s still a spectrum though.
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Just on a whim I filtered my collection for 2021+ to see what kind of games were being made that captured the older (ineffable) ethos. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good round of Ark Nova, but most of my contemporary “euros” fall into the Individual Efficiency Game (IEG) category or the Complex System Wrestling (CSW) category.
I pegged Carnegie, Furnace, First Rat, The Wolves, and Great Plains. While I like these games and they can fit, they still feel a bit fringe. And most make a pale comparison against the likes of Hansa or Troyes or Concordia.
Others were all reprints or derivatives of older games: Splendor Duel, Pollen, Bruxelles 1893 Belle Epoque.
Are the good times over?
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