They feel more complicated, but it’s all to a good end, not for its own sake, and they all make perfect sense once you get how they work. The themes work too, in relation to all the mechanisms. I haven’t yet tried teaching them to anyone who hadn’t played the West Kingdom games.
The proviso is that they’re all still quite new to me, so maybe I’m being dazzled by novelty.
I still quite enjoy Architects, but it doesn’t really excite me any more. I never got on with Paladins - it felt too much like playing a spreadsheet - and moved it on. Viscounts I think is the most fun of the three. But then I’m a sucker for an actual castle in the middle of a board!
I’ve ended up keeping one of the first (North Sea) trilogy (Raiders), two of the second (West Kingdom), and at the moment I can’t see me getting rid of any of this third trilogy. Very much looking forward to the fourth trilogy!!
PS: Ooh, you gotta like dice. If you don’t like dice you won’t like the South Tigris games. Although you don’t actually roll them very much.
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Sprawly games that come to my mind:
- Mindclash (both Septima and Voidfall. I have not played others)
- Darwin’s Journey
- Unconscious Mind
- On Mars (I was going to write Lacerda but I have only played On Mars)
- SETI
Various interlocking mechanisms that are hard to teach and keep track of
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Just saw a link for some reviewers six favorite Eurogames. This reviewer gave a suitably vague definition for a suitably vague term. But, as with what we’ve been discussing (Euro in 2025), it felt about right (bolding is mine):
"Catan introduced me to a new kind of game – one with more choices, more pieces, and more depth – the Eurogame. I have never looked back.
So, what is a Eurogame exactly? Eurogames normally involve a lot of indirect player interaction. They are typically very heavy on theme with a hefty amount of competition over resources or victory points. These types of games tend to focus more on skill and strategy while trying to downplay the role of luck. Many Eurogames are also well known for their components; very detailed, great in number, and often crafted out of wood.
While the exact mechanics of the games will differ greatly, there is always a sense of having to make difficult choices and never being able to do everything that you want to do.
I enjoy the brain-testing challenges that these games bring. I enjoy formulating a strategy and then putting that strategy to the test, and I particularly enjoy it when my strategy is successful. Playing heavy Eurogames brings me a sense of joy and satisfaction that I just can’t find anywhere else."
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I get (what you describe) from Advent of Code and it might be that my interest in super-heavy games dropped off, as I returned to more intense code writing in my spare time? It definitely tickles the same part of my brain.
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Coders seem to slip into gaming quite well. I have a coder friend and we went straight to Brass Birm for his first game night.
Both disciplines give you an artificially constrained world and a set of arbitrary tools which you must use exclusively to accomplish an assigned goal.
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Hmm, interesting thought! Certainly many of the people I play with are techies of some sort (to be fair, that’s a lot of the people I know); but that feeling is not what I’m primarily looking for in my gaming, because I get it from coding.
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It’s interesting indeed. I dislike Euros because learning them feels like my daytime work.
I grew up on Chess and 2 player CCGs and those seem to heavily influenced on what I like to play.
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Definitely agree. We have a lot of techies (most are no longer coding in their daily work, I am more of an exception) in the local circles and there seems to be a big overlap between an affinity for games and tech jobs. You start with one and add the other and that goes both ways…
Affinity for numbers is also helpful as evidenced by our banker friend 
And the many mathy people I know who love boardgames.
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I’ve given this a lot of thought. I think there are social and cultural influences at play that are more complicated than I care to think about.
I do think that programmers and tech-enthusiasts are more likely to want to engage their brains for leisure; but also that the reverse logic may be equally or more likely-- a person with a pattern of using their brain for leisurely activities may be drawn to tech and/or strategy games.
Due to the nature of some of the places I’ve worked in the past I collaborated with a lot of very talented people in technical careers who barely use technology outside of work. It’s literally just a job and when they leave the office, they’re more likely to go hunting or fishing than sit down and do a jigsaw puzzle or trade sheep for wood around a table.
I’m sure many of those people would do great at strategy games and likely enjoy it, but their social and cultural backgrounds have them busy elsewhere.
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