Old-school Euros belatedly forgiven

I keep having to dig up this geeklist.

I’ve said before how I used to hate this kind of game for how kingmakery they are. But these days a lot of boardgaming is dominated by games that are just as kingmakery, but also:

• Overly complicated, with rules that would’ve made more sense as an unpolished MS-DOS game of a magazine cover floppy in the pre-CD era than a board game
• Surly and isolationist, with individual player boards that makes it feel more like we’re all playing on separate boards than on one board game
• Ameri/Euro hybrids that bring all the tedium from eurogames but all the violence and hurting each other from American Thematic games
• Bogged down with a thousand special cards and special powers that makes the game feel more like playing Magic than a board game
• A lot of the variety comes from expansions and special cards instead of emergent combinations of fewer, more versatile components

I realize that not every game can be Baduk or Turncoats, who are both almost magical in how every single game feels different even though they have very limited components and moves. Or maybe because of that; the Unix philosophy in action? The more general your ludemes are, the more varied the emergent experiences can be?

I mean, I’ve said in the past how Bottle Imp was great fun, but “only” for the first 100 plays compared to the modern classic tricktaker Ninety-Nine which has endless replayability and challenge (and with a Ninety-Nine deck you can play millions of other games since it’s just a normal card game).

Well, those 100 plays are still a heck of a lot better out of what you can get from one kingdom of Dominion, which most people would only wanna play a couple of times at the most.

Now, Old-School Euros are never gonna be my very fave compared to story games like Fiasco or Untold, or to hidden role games like The Resistance, or to basically any game with two or fewer sides like co-op games or 2p games.

But they’re a lesser evil than new-school board games. Many of these Old-School Euros are nostalgic, they’re interesting, they’re emergent. Knowing me you’ll guess that I like games to be as simple as possible while still being difficult. Not every game can be Baduk, and Baduk is no Euro, but it is a platonic ideal, a beacon to strive for; one corner of design space that I truly appreciate. I want games to be clean, simple, endlessly replayable, and a shared experience.

There’s another reason I’m giving Euro games a second chance these days: I’m not as spiky as I used to be. A “spiky” player is a player who wants games to be as skill testing as possible. Well, the entire kingmakingness of most boardgames are a disaster for that! But now that I’m valuing other aspects of gameplaying more highly than just trying to win, I’m looking at Euro games more kindly.