Lost Treasures of the Eurogames Reclamation Project

Colorcrayons wrote:

Michael Barnes wrote: There is so much JUNK coming out now, not only can I not keep up with it I also don't WANT to keep up with it.

I think this is the truest boardgame related statement I have read in the past 4 years.

As the hobby grows, so does the negative side of signal to noise ratio in game design. I blame Kickstarter for a lot of this, showing the industry that you can make a lot of money off of anything, especially if there is a good license or lots of dollies (I do love me some dollies though...).

I'd argue the signal to noise ratio has always been about the same. It's just both sides of the ratio have increased. And the perception of the past is skewed because time has allowed those crap games to disappear from both the shelves and the mind.

And it has nothing to do with Kickstarter. "A fool and his money are soon parted" predates Kickstarter by many, many years.

Way back when I played a friend's copy of Stephenson's Rocket. I liked it, saw it was very much like Acquire, but no one else at the table did. The friend gave it to me. I brought it to my other group and tried it there and it also fell flat. So I had a free game I liked that no one else was interested in playing. I ended up getting rid of it. That's a sad story.

As for the current climate, here's what I'm noticing, and I'm sure it's not just me. There's a lot of junk coming out now, as there usually is, but that's not the issue, it's the stuff that's getting high praise. Tzolkin, Russian Railroads, Trajan, Splendor, Steam Park, these things are racing up the charts and I seriously don't get why. To each his own and all, but I don't know why you would play any of these things over something else. Even the ones I think aren't that bad: Terra Mystica, Concordia, Glass Road, they're fine, I'd play 'em, but I don't know why you'd choose them over other stuff. You even have one designer who's made a name for himself fitting interesting new mechanisms onto the same tired boats-and-spices junk over and over. And none of that is Kickstarter, that's all from major publishers. Is this the comics-of-the-90s era of hobby games?

Yes. Cool Mini or Not is the Image Comics of it all. Stretch goals are the foil covers.

Legomancer wrote: As for the current climate, here's what I'm noticing, and I'm sure it's not just me. There's a lot of junk coming out now, as there usually is, but that's not the issue, it's the stuff that's getting high praise. Tzolkin, Russian Railroads, Trajan, Splendor, Steam Park, these things are racing up the charts and I seriously don't get why. To each his own and all, but I don't know why you would play any of these things over something else. Even the ones I think aren't that bad: Terra Mystica, Concordia, Glass Road, they're fine, I'd play 'em, but I don't know why you'd choose them over other stuff. You even have one designer who's made a name for himself fitting interesting new mechanisms onto the same tired boats-and-spices junk over and over. And none of that is Kickstarter, that's all from major publishers. Is this the comics-of-the-90s era of hobby games?

This was my reaction to the post-Byrne X-men. It rapidly became apparent to me that Claremont was a wordy bastard of limited imagination who benefited greatly from his collaborations with John Byrne and also Dave Cockrum. Without Byrne, the quality took a hard hit. And yet the sales continued to climb, as many new fans jumped on board. They heard that X-men was a great book, but they were getting excited about second-rate crap because they had no clue about the better issues they had missed.

And so it is with boardgames right now. The hobby has grown in popularity in recent years, but the new gamers are gravitating towards what is readily available right now, which is a mixture of some classics, a lot of second-rate new games, and Kickstarter stuff. So even though I personally loathe most Eurogames, I respect the intent of this thread to give attention and respect to neglected eurogames and german games of yesteryear.

Hope A.R.M. gets here soon... must not give up... must... not.... g...




Fuck it, I qualify for the ERP with Manila, Tobago, Lost Valley, Evo, Mission Red Planet at least :/ ...Somebody gimme the lowdown onthese newer euros pls: Endeavor and Engizia.

scissors wrote: Hope A.R.M. gets here soon... must not give up... must... not.... g...

I do think this is a valid statement. There have been some AT games that I think fall under the radar that capture the ERP spirit. Again, what I feel captures the ERP spirit, are those family style games, the ones that play quick, Pull-and-Play games - So I'm not talking about StarCraft:TBG, TI3, Android, Earth Reborn...Or even Merchants and Marauders and Chaos in the Old World for that matter. I feel those fall more under the Gamer's Games category.

And I'm sure around these parts everyone knows the staples such as NexusOps, DungeonQuest.

But what would be some of those forgotten or overlooked AT games?

Top of my list is Monsters Menace America. Yes, there is the dice-fest end game. But everything leading up to it is gold. Simple rules, running around destroying things, controlling the military to throw up obstacles to your opponents. All around a great game, except of course that end game. But, that said it keeps the game from going too long and it is one of the more exciting dice fests since the winner/loser does hinge on it.

The thing about the ARP is that there wasn't that explosion like there was euros. So I don't think there were titles that were overlooked by this crowd. There are very few hidden/forgotten gems I think. I could be wrong though.

Legomancer wrote: As for the current climate, here's what I'm noticing, and I'm sure it's not just me. There's a lot of junk coming out now, as there usually is, but that's not the issue, it's the stuff that's getting high praise. Tzolkin, Russian Railroads, Trajan, Splendor, Steam Park, these things are racing up the charts and I seriously don't get why. To each his own and all, but I don't know why you would play any of these things over something else. Even the ones I think aren't that bad: Terra Mystica, Concordia, Glass Road, they're fine, I'd play 'em, but I don't know why you'd choose them over other stuff. You even have one designer who's made a name for himself fitting interesting new mechanisms onto the same tired boats-and-spices junk over and over. And none of that is Kickstarter, that's all from major publishers. Is this the comics-of-the-90s era of hobby games?

Splendor and Steam Park would totally be games people were talking about in this thread if they were 5 years older. Both are going to be with us a long time.

Splendor scales from 2-4 better than most games in the featherweight class, takes 45 minutes, looks gorgeous, can be explained to ANYONE in 5 minutes, has a really small table footprint and starts to become less a euro and more an abstract strategy game the more you play it with the same group, as players get locked into certain patterns depending on the cards that come out.

Steam Park does real time dice rolling, I'm not sure there's too many games that do that (the only other one I can think of is Space Cadets Dice Duel, which doesn't even compare) so that's a huge plus right off the bat, then you have a really cool setting that doesn't turn anyone off by being too trope-y, and all of it bolts on to key mechanisms of space/area management and color matching which are simple enough for anyone to understand. The game has just enough variance added through the booths (I forget exactly what they're called, the little one 1x1 things you can build) that there are multiple strategies and paths to victory.

Terra Mystica is a much heavier game than could ever be considered family but that game is awesome too. It is very puzzle-y but it presents a different puzzle every time based on the way the round payout tokens come out. I think the biggest fault of TM is that they didn't really do anything to balance the map to make it tighter for when you have less than 5 players (either printing a second smaller map like Small World or just blocking out sections of it.) When you have 5 players and space is much tighter the game becomes far more tense.

VonTush wrote:

scissors wrote: Hope A.R.M. gets here soon... must not give up... must... not.... g...

But what would be some of those forgotten or overlooked AT games?

The Adventurers: The Temple of Chac
Battleball
Catacombs was never talked about until the new Kickstarter
Duel in the Dark
Hour of Glory
Race to Adventure
Road Kill Rally

VonTush wrote:

scissors wrote: Hope A.R.M. gets here soon... must not give up... must... not.... g...

I do think this is a valid statement. There have been some AT games that I think fall under the radar that capture the ERP spirit. Again, what I feel captures the ERP spirit, are those family style games, the ones that play quick, Pull-and-Play games - So I'm not talking about StarCraft:TBG, TI3, Android, Earth Reborn...Or even Merchants and Marauders and Chaos in the Old World for that matter. I feel those fall more under the Gamer's Games category.

And I'm sure around these parts everyone knows the staples such as NexusOps, DungeonQuest.

But what would be some of those forgotten or overlooked AT games?

Top of my list is Monsters Menace America. Yes, there is the dice-fest end game. But everything leading up to it is gold. Simple rules, running around destroying things, controlling the military to throw up obstacles to your opponents. All around a great game, except of course that end game. But, that said it keeps the game from going too long and it is one of the more exciting dice fests since the winner/loser does hinge on it.

The thing about the ARP is that there wasn't that explosion like there was euros. So I don't think there were titles that were overlooked by this crowd. There are very few hidden/forgotten gems I think. I could be wrong though.

I love Monsters Menace America.

Granted, I'm more of a eurogamer, I may have a different definition of Ameritrash than the rest of you. That being said: the Hasbro Avalon Hill line (1999-2005) was the last great thrust of True Ameritrash. The joyous amount of plastic in those games, the heavy boxes, the pull-and-play feel, the heavy emphasis on classic Ameritrash themes of militaristic domination, of crushing your enemies, of pew-pew laser battles. All of it bankrolled by a colossal international toy conglomerate.

Here's the thing. Here's the dirty little secret about Ameritrash. There's something that nearly all classic mass-market Ameritrash had: extremely well-written rulebooks. Rulebooks that reek of multiple drafts by multiple technical writers, rulebooks that have been rewritten and re-edited until they've been whittled down to contain only the clearest, most concise instructive language possible. With only a couple of exceptions, Hasbro Avalon Hill had great rulebooks. Hasbro AH had rulebooks that revealed their pedigree; these weren't just hobby games; these were hobby games being produced by a massive multinational corporation, being designed by folks who also designed mass-market games for the Targets and Wal-Marts of the world. And these rulebooks showed the same concise, incisive clarity that you'd expect from a mass-market game.

One of the many, many things that prevents Fantasy Flight Games from claiming the Ameritrash mantle? Their rulebooks. FFG's sprawling, poorly-organized, overwrought rulebooks that are -- without fail -- two or three times longer than they need to be. They're circumlocutory, they're counterintuitive; they're a chore to read and parse. That's not Ameritrash. Ameritrash is corporate. Ameritrash is plastic. Ameritrash is great shit like Risk: Godstorm and Star Wars: The Queen's Gambit. It's wonderful mass-market corporate shit like Heroscape and Star Wars Epic Duels. Ameritrash has lean, mean rulebooks that have passed through the hands of a half dozen technical writers, compressing the game down to the purest rudimental elements, then expressing the mechanics in clear, unambiguous, didactic language. Those lean rulebooks serve to reinforce the fundamental pull-and-play feel of the best Ameritrash.

Yessss.

Lets derail this thread and start talking about proper games not beard scratchy cathedral builders that we've all, quite rightly, forgotten about.

Fuck ARM, ARP, FART, ERP or whatever

VonTush wrote: So Stephenson's Rocket has popped up a few times now. By the time I was getting into the hobby around '04 it was already out of print and I remember thinking "Damn, people are paying upwards of $50 for this game?" The times they have a changed.

What are some thoughts on the game? It sounds interactive, but it also sounds a bit heavier than what I'm looking for as ERP contenders. That's why I'm passing on Amun-Re and Taj.

I certainly wouldn't call Taj Mahal heavy. The scoring is a bit arcane, but it's no worse than Ra I think. Now it's kind of an unforgiving game, which maybe edges it out of the "family game" category.

charlest wrote: Hour of Glory

I believe this isn't talked about because it's not easily available in the States (right? at least I've never seen a copy and every time I look it's Euros only to purchase). It's been on my radar forever because it sounds cool...anyone actually play the damn thing?

As far as the ERP I nominate Perikles, an oddly uncomplicated Wallace game that is pleasingly clever and confrontational without getting overcomplicated.

...oh and also Vegas Showdown which I know we had a thread about not long ago but is a textbook ERP thing. You get to build your own casino, you get to mess with people, your little numbers pleasingly go up and it all is easy to grasp and not long to play.

VonTush wrote:

scissors wrote: I love Manila but I never heard much to like about Container.

Container is one that I never really heard much about either when it was in print, but for whatever reason once people couldn't get it, the price skyrocketed. I think Franz-Benno Delonge's passing put a lot of his games in a permanent limbo and Valley Games disappearing I think means it'll never see print again and likely that's a big factor for the inflated price. I think Chris Farrell likes it a lot.

From reading the rules and reviews, Container always sounded very fascinating and incredibly dry (in case that was not already clear from the name/cover). I enjoy plenty of dry games, though; I don't need hootin' and hollerin' to have a good time. I think my old economist gamer-buddies would've gone apeshit over it.

I loved Black Inferno's recent post, about Hasbro/AH Ameritrash (though I think the recent D&D games were very much in that pull-and-play, plastic-filled tradition)...though, to me, it's not that FFG's rulebooks were problematic, it's that their games were overwrought. What tradition did that come from? Other than Magic Realm, where were the non-wargame Ameritrash games of the past that were as overwrought as FFG games?

How about Traumfabrik/Dream Factory? It's obviously better in the original German release, because they were able to use real silver screen actors and movies, but the English version with terrible pun names would still be good. Granted, I might have a particular love of this thing because I was a film major in college, and there's something hilarious about having Alfred Hitchcock direct Marilyn Monroe and Cary Grant in Bambi. Still, I've played this with a ton of different groups, and it always goes over well. It's under an hour, it's all auctions, so there's interactivity and bitching back and forth, and the mechanic where the winning bid gets split up between everyone else adds a good amount of depth to it. I dig it.

Stonecutter wrote: Splendor scales from 2-4 better than most games in the featherweight class, takes 45 minutes, looks gorgeous, can be explained to ANYONE in 5 minutes, has a really small table footprint and starts to become less a euro and more an abstract strategy game the more you play it with the same group, as players get locked into certain patterns depending on the cards that come out.

Yeah it's easy an fast, but so what? It's just there. You just sit there and do the thing an then it's done and you play something else. Or you play it again and do the thing again. I don't doubt that it will be around for a while, because a lot of shit is around for a while, but that doesn't make it a quality, memorable game. I have plenty of things I can teach to people quickly that take no time an still have a sense that something is going on other than "look, we're playing a game".