Tzolkin is utter shite

This is exactly what's wrong with euro games these days, Complete and utter tripe, a big fat bloated nonsensical pig with gears as lipstick, just another jumbled together puzzle of, yes, you guessed it, stone, grain, wood, gold, whatever. Just a horrendous and pointless exercise in tedium, but seemingly something that's aligned with the average gamer, at least based on its reception at BGG. Don't know if any of you lot have gotten to play it. The thing is, I've never been comfortable with this whole either/or undercurrent that floats here, I'm not really that interested in most "AT" style games (though a handful of them I'd love to play, and in general I am beginning to understand more and more the utter vapid pointlessness of many euros), but I've had a growing feeling in recent years that something has gone horribly, horribly fucking wrong with euro game design, and I wanted to out this as a prime example of it. I had the misfortune of playing Oddville afterwards, Irondale ish but yes, you guessed it, more wood, stone, clay and fucking crystal and pointlessly stupid "theme" on top that doesn't hang together at all with the game, like Tzolkin's doesn't make any sense either.

Started playing Container, fascinating. Probably not going to float your boat (haha) but at least its honest about what it is, economics with shipping boxes. If it were a euro game christ only knows what shit would have been thrown on top of the clean rules and mechanics this game has.

I had a heads up the Tzolkin was utter garbage, Infarkt the same. Have had the same heads up, on the AT side, that Metro 2033 or whatever it's called, is garbage too. Two - for Czech designs and 1 minus for the Russians, apparently

I had that same sort of reaction after I played Castles of Burgundy. I know I harp on it a lot but it was sort of a defining moment for me where I realized that for a pure Euro style game it was just more of the same. Squeeze this cube into that cube and then squeeze that cube into victory points blah blah blah.

I haven't played a full on Euro since. I just don't see the point.

Really the new Hybrids are where it's at as far as I'm concerned. At least for newer games.

Also I find myself drifting towards war games again. Something about chits and NATO symbols...doesn't make a lot of sense but they were my first true love in gaming.

Yeah I played it on Saturday and while I won't quite go with utter shite, (it's a perfectly fine, basic worker placement thing you'll probably like if worker placement is your thing) the gear mechanic adds so little to the game. If there were more ways to manipulate the gears it could actually be pretty cool, but as there's only one way to do it, and you can only do it once per game, it's pointless.

I haven't played Tzolkin, but it looks like a cardboard box filled with an enormous headache.

San Il Defanso wrote: I haven't played Tzolkin, but it looks like a cardboard box filled with an enormous headache.

HA! Can I quote you as a "Noted F:AT Feature Writer" on the copy of 18AL I have coming from Print&Play games? I want to put this quote on every 18xx game I own like a critic's blurb on the back of a book dustjacket or movie poster (it'd be a real selling point for train gamers).

With some notable exceptions (Archipelago one of my few recent non-wargame purchases) but I've yet to sit down to figure it out) I think the Euro side of the hobby has finally hit a place wargames have been for years: they're running out of ways to innovate in terms of mechanics and approach. Wargame designs seem to get around this some simply because the wealth of subject matter available means designers have some flexibility to tweak the underlying game engine and/or add/remove chrome and thus end up with a superficially "different" game. Since theme/subject matter is a distant second to the mechanics for most Euros, it's hard for me to justify buying more than 1 example of any given style. E.g., I own Agricola and Le Havre, so I just can't find any reason to buy another worker placement resource engine game ever. (Deckbuilders are probably worse. I own Nightfall, Resident Evil, and Sentinels of the Multiverse and that's probably 1 or even 2 too many for the genre. RE works as a solo game pretty well [and, after 5 boxes, the rulebook mostly doesn't suck nearly as much as did version 1.0] and I like the Sentinels theme. Nightfall could probably go but I got the whole set for something like $40 and there's $40 worth of fun in that consolidated box. So they all end up staying on the shelves)

Quote away. I only wish I'd saved it for a review of one of these "headache" games. I have the same response to Terra Mystica.

I think that's actually what I find exhausting about heavy Euros. It's not abstract gameplay, it's not low interaction, it's the relentlessly circuitous way of accomplishing anything. And it's not even that I don't LIKE it. I enjoy a lot of heavy stuff. I liked Dominant Species pretty well, I really enjoy Die Macher and Indonesia. But those all have some thematic stuff to fall back on, and even then they aren't everyday games for me.

And there can be enormous pressure to figure that stuff out early, because they are often efficiency games. It really requires time to tinker, but those tinker games really don't offer much fun for people in that stage. I know a lot of people get a charge out of figuring out a game like that, but if I'm floundering I want to still see the greatness of the game. When a game's greatness is entirely strategic that's very difficult.

I think a worker placement 4x game could be pretty cool. Oh yeah, StarCraft already did that.

Worker placement is so stale. It's even worse than all the lame AT zombie games published in recent years. Somebody should design a 2-player game featuring a labor strike.

Yeah I think there's so many things wrong, I mean, I liked a lot of euros and WP games, I still love Agricola, and I still really enjoy Le Havre. Somehow this game just feels so utterly pointless, theres no cohesion with theme, nothing to really hang onto when deciding where to put your workers or wait to take them off, it's like they knew this is just ANOTHER optimisation game, another one where they added as many resources and point scoring salads as they could, then jumbled it up as much as possible and tried to make it have a theme. Bollocks. Its just utterly boring obfuscated nonsense. It's not that I can't sit down and work out complex chains of placements, retrievals and goods conversions, it's just that it feels like pulling teeth out, there's nothing to invest in, but this came AFTER Le Havre and its ilk, so it's like enough already, it doesn't count as innovation just to throw in a bit of Caylus, a bit of Agricola, a bit of Le Havre, munge it together with the same old boring resources, same old retarded and nonsensical "rules" like how the grain and wood wheel works, and pretend it's "deep and complex", yeah, so is if I throw a thousand different coloured marbles in a fucking bag and ask you to sort the twats out into individual colours. I'm sure as hell not wasting my time "fixing it". It's just an optimisation puzzle that scratches an itch that unfortunately seems popular, I say unfortunate because I think it's just smoke and mirrors. Adding a bagful of goods, and including 10 different ways to convert 1 to the other and back and to points and back and then slapping half a dozen areas on a board to "do shit" is just, aargghh, it's just SHITE!

I think you're right, they've reached a wall and the only way people are trying to go further is just to throw more garishly coloured shite on a board, add a dozen more tiles, cubes or goods, and just draw a big spiders web of this to that to this to that. FUCK OFF. The thing is despite the odd good game coming out each year (or some years), this is the new default WOOOOO gotta have it game, and it just rewards itself by encouraging more kitchen sink Feldian bollocks design.

I mean, that's OK. The masses have spoken, they can keep lapping it up, but since I'm posting as me, and thus voicing my own opinion,I can't help but be a bit depressed about it.

i haven't and probably won't play Tzolkin. This is still an interesting thread though.

Did Uwe Rosenburg, complete the Euro, and for the Euro is it all downhill from here?

When i say euro im talking explicitly a certain model of euro, efficiency/resources/workplacement/action selection, not area control or Knizia style abstracts.

I've played Agricola, and whilst it doesn't do a lot for me, i can see that its probably the best rendition of the euro i have come across, and like Dogmatix has suggested, short of a 'new mechanic', that grail of modern boardgaming is the euro done?

Certainly in terms of popularity it seems to be waning. the new cool on bgg is hybrids and i see this reflected in the gamers i know.

I just Googled "too many worker placement games" and got 2.99 million hits.

The Cult of the New needs to play a new meta-game that I just made up. It's called "Potlatch." Each player brings a bunch of new boardgames, ideally worker placement and zombie boardgames. Then they take turns destroying the games that they brought, and whoever runs out games to destroy last is the winner.

But ... but ... it's the 24th-best game in history!

goo.gl/fgsG8

I know. It's utterly depressing. I mean, I can dig that games are well liked and well rated even if it's not my thing, but this. and its ilk

no, just.... no