Well, take Agricola - Agricola is basically a quintessential Eurogame in the sense that it’s very much about maximizing value for actions, building engines, and generally exploiting the mechanics to a numerical score. But it’s arguably very thematic in that the scoring and the actions are all tied to medieval European farming village life. And, you know, at that core, it’s a solid enough game that I would be vaguely interested in playing. But it’s when you add in the decks of occupation cards and minor improvement cards, which you get sets of randomly at the start of the game that it directly appeals to me.
So, I mean, I guess I don’t think a railroad game is ever going to be a fantasy dungeon crawl (though I’ve seen a couple that add fantasy elements, and if that wasn’t just gloss, I’d possibly be intrigued), but it would be possible to make one that was, at the very least, asymmetrical in interesting ways with things like per-player fixed special abilities, event decks, randomized ability decks, and similar. As opposed to being raw business simulation, which is how the hardercore train games have mostly struck me.
Funkula
2002
Dungeon Lords is an interesting case. It’s got an excellently realized fantasy theme, yet it’s a worker-placement game with take-that style interaction being almost impossible. It’s got elements of building an economic engine, yet the purpose of that engine is to marshal enough force to win two waves of combat (against NPCs). I personally consider it a Euro, but it appeals to several people I know who break out in hives when they handle wooden cubes.
Ameritrash and Eurogame are primarily useful for creating a partisan conflict where more straightforward taste based arguments have failed to generate the necessary drama. In broad strokes, they can be useful short form descriptors but they fall apart under any in-depth analysis.
Percentages of chance in Euro vs Ameritrash? Thematic distinctions based around a few popular titles in either category? There’s really not a lot left there, although there may once have been back in the day.
The distinction is starting to break down, because games from either side of the divide are drawing on the stronger aspects of the other style and so we’re seeing a hybridisation that means fewer and fewer games are “pure Euro” or “pure AT” anymore. But historically there is actually a meaningful distinction. Basically, the evolution of American games for a long time followed the idea that simple games are for kids and that, therefore, more hardcore gamers would want to have games with huge boards, thousands of pieces, long rulebooks and epic playing times. But German boardgames evolved along a different trajectory, because in Germany there’s a much stronger tradition of parents playing boardgames with their children, as a family activity. This produced a market for games which were non-violent, could be set up and played quickly, were simple enough to learn the kids could play them, but also interesting enough that parents wouldn’t be bored witless by the process. This is the tradition that games like Settlers of Catan and Tigris & Euphrates came out of. They were mechanically much simpler than the Avalon Hill games that many Americans were playing at the time, but they weren’t “dumb games for kids” - they required real analysis, understanding and skill to play well.
So… for games from the 1990s, in many cases they clearly fall into one school or the other. Either something’s an American or a Euro, and you can pick straight away which it is by glancing at the rules, the theme, and the number of pieces in the box. Since then the line has become much less clear, but people still tend to use the terms to talk about particular games or their own preferences & the like.
Greed Corp is still $5 on steam for a few more hours.
We’ve been playing this a lot on the mumble server. Very fun board game-ish TBS game.
Eric_P
2006
we got four plays of Betrayal at the House on the Hill and we loved it. We really liked how it was like two different games with radically different concerns after the reveal of the traitor.
We did find however that in games with more players that the traitor has a harder time simply because of the amount of additional actors acting against you.
and everything about the components is really wildly true. i punched them out a few days ago and just from sitting in the box for a short period of time, every thing larger than a small token or chit was radically warped. I have heavy books trying to flatten them out, but i fear that won’t be very successful.
bought Small World and Ticket to Ride. Really looking forward to giving those a shot
Oh, good, I wasn’t the only one with warped BAHOTH tiles. After that and 7 Wonders’ curving wonder boards, I was starting to think I had some kind of strange humidity problem. (In Colorado???)
Lorini
2008
Empire Builder is a more family style train game, but I don’t know that I’d call it Ameritrash. It’s a pick up and deliver game that was very popular back in the day. It needs a house rule not to be exploited, but it’ll take a few plays to get to that point.
I didn’t mention Empire Builder because 1) crayons kind of suck and 2) the theme is kind of the thin side. Not as thin as Ticket to Ride, but since it’s about moving a single pawn around, it feels like something like Parcheesi or Sorry rather than a real railroad game.
jpinard
2010
I got Pandemic for Christmas and it was a huge hit. My nieces LOVED it, and so did my wife, my sister, all of us. It is amazing that a 10-year old was asking to play Pandemic more often than the Sims 3, Roller Coaster games, Xbox 360 with Kinect, Small World, and a million other things to choose from.
I can see how if you’ve won it a bunch of times it’d totally lose its luster, but for right now - this is the game we like the most. Do any of you have the expansion? If so, is it good?
Funkula
2011
It is excellent. One thing that made the game lose luster for me was that with only five roles, strategies tended to be similar from game to game. With all the added roles in On the Brink you can have teams that operate in vastly different ways. The rules for the purple strain are pretty fun, and the virulent strain adds a lot because it’s another axis to tweak difficulty (if you’re finding four outbreaks too easy but five too hard, for example). Haven’t played with the bioterrorist, because I don’t think Pandemic is a game that needs an adversarial mechanic and the rules for the terrorist seemed lackluster. Finally, the petri dishes add flavor to the game, although that would depend on your opinion of purely cosmetic upgrades. If you’re getting a lot of play out of Pandemic, the expansion will keep burnout from setting in, and I recommend it heartily.
Eric_P
2012
On the Brink is an absolute must have. If only for the new roles.
As far as I can tell, it’s an issue with the entire print run. Hasbro has said they will replace tiles if you send them a request. I emailed them in November and got a reply saying they would send out replacement tiles as they become available, but I haven’t received mine yet.
Eric_P
2014
thanks for the heads up. i just contacted them to get replacements.
Reldan
2015
It’s still a meaningful distinction to people who played before the last few years or so of hybridization between the two archetypes. Certainly the market has evolved to the point where there are less and less new games coming out that are purely one or the other, but each description aptly describes a general style of play that appeals more or less to different board gaming demographics.
The biggest development of late is that the term “Ameritrash” has lost much of what used to be a negative connotation, as there are aspects of AT design that are superior to the traditional European counterpart - notably in terms of the handling of theme, production value, and random elements providing interesting variations on gameplay and solid replay value.
We’re past a point in design where we’re typically comparing games as distinct as Axis & Allies to Tigris & Euphrates. However, if you say you like Axis & Allies then I can think of several other games I’d recommend for you. If you say you hated it then it narrows the field quite a bit (and the same goes for T&E). The newer hybrid games simply provide an interesting bridge that I could see fans of both styles enjoying together - something that was rare in the past for any game heavier than something like Citadels or RftG.
The best analog I can think of is that the difference is like comparing Japanese and American RPGs. Even five years ago I’d say they might as well have been two completely different genres, but I feel that the distinction is starting to blur as a generation of new designers who grew up playing both are incorporating design elements of either into new works. However, there’s still meaning to using JRPG to describe a new game, at least among gamers who have been around the block a few times.
Agricola to me was the hallmark of the birth of a new fusion between the two styles of design. At its heart it’s a resource management optimization game like many other Euros, but it embraces the AT core values of production value, the strong sense of theme, the lack of a discernible scoreboard that constantly translates every single action into abstract “points”, and the random draw of starting cards. At its release I recall it was panned by a segment of the Euro market for being too AT, but it was incredibly successful and critically acclaimed nonetheless.
jpinard
2016
Awesome! :)
The one thing we felt was the Operations Manager felt quite useless, but after reading wikipedia I’m wondering if we were using him wrong.
So I didn’t get as much holiday gaming in as I have in the past, but still got to play a couple of new-to-me games.
Cartagena II was… okay, I guess. My mom always says that every new game is like Risk (if it has a board with a map, like Ticket to Ride) or Monopoly (every other game). I think even my mom would have agreed that this game was like Candyland. And “Candyland with strategy” isn’t the worst idea in the world, but it’s still a pretty thin game.
Twilight Struggle, on the other hand, was great. Unsurprisingly, it plays a LOT like 1960, except that it’s way better – since it’s from GMT, I expected Twilight Struggle to be a fiddlier and more complicated of 1960, but really it was a more streamlined and simpler game. Combine the more elegant gameplay with the more interesting (to me, anyway) theme, and I don’t think I’ll ever play 1960 again. Definitely recommended.
Also got in some more plays of Dominion with Prosperity. I really like Prosperity as an expansion, but I’m sort of ambivalent about Colony/Province in some setups, even ones with lots of Prosperity cards. The presence of those two cards end up slowing down the game, making it so that more games end with a 3-pile victory condition, and devaluing pretty good Province acquisition strategies (a hand with 8 moneys in it is kind of a lame hand with Colonies in the game). I like them as a change, but think I’ll probably leave them out a lot in the future.
One thing about Agricola is that it didn’t embrace the production values issue enough. The discs and cubes aren’t distinctive enough, and it can be hard to remember what’s a cow and what’s a pig. I sprung for the “animeeples” and “vegimeeples” which helped in that regard immensely, but I should have bought similar pieces for the stone / wood / reeds.
Reldan
2019
They have a “goodies” expansion out now that replaces all the cubes with properly shaped wooden pieces. It also comes with 5 replacement farm boards with different design themes, and several additional sets of cards.
JPR
2020
I actually picked up both of these for my daughter, and they offer very different (and both very enjoyable) experiences. She and I thank you for the suggestions.
