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× Talk about Eurogames here.

Atlantic board game article

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22 Jan 2018 08:55 #261666 by Michael Barnes
I posted a reply in the comments-

Phil Eklund was sitting off in a corner by himself, apart from the rest of the thriving tabletop games business, because his games at the time were horribly written, esoteric, cheaply produced, and visually nightmarish. Not to mention inscrutable, very long, and occasionally rife with questionable political agendas and proselytizing ideology. While he was sulking about no one wanting to play his overcomplicated games, plenty of folks were playing D&D, Magic, Warhammer, Avalon Hill games, all kinds of non-computer tabletop fare. To position him as a spokesperson for the accessibility and appeal of modern games is quite frankly ludicrous. I pity the newcomer that reads this and tries to dive head first into Greenland or High Frontier.

I mean, seriously...why not interview this year’s SDJ winner, Bruno Cathala, about Kingdomino- a truly accessible and universally appealing game? Or Alan Moon, who is one of the people who architected American interest in German games? Or Jacob Fryxelius, the designer of the hugely popular Terraforming mars? Or even Teuber? But you went with Phil Eklund...

There is also the fact that this “gee whiz, German games!” tone is over 20 years too late- or that most of the popular games of today bear little resemblance to Catan or the classic designs by Knizia, Kramer and others working in Europe during the 1990s. What’s more, American hobbyists were already aware of what was going on in German design by 1990- Avalon Hill (not mentioned anywhere in this article) brought over Teuber’s Axel Verpflichtet years before Mayfair hit paydirt with Catan. And there is also no mention that designers like Sid Sackson, Alex Randolph, EON and Richard Hamblen were already doing a lot of the things that would form the European design idiom.

No mention of Reiner Knizia...really? In an article about “German games”? Will the Atlantic run a history of punk rock and not mention The Clash?

But there again, there’s no mention of the fact that many of today’s top designers are Czech, Polish, Japanese, English, French, American, etc. either. Germany’s primacy in the hobby game design field has been dilute for many years.

Further, the dismissive tone of this article toward mainstream games and games of conflict is something that hobby gaming should get over. Monopoly, Risk and others are seminal, timeless, and historically important games and are in fact most people’s first encounter with more complex, simulative gaming beyond the most simple childhood games. This whole “These Games of Ours” (as opposed to “those games of yours”) is a notion that should have died out long ago.

The smug appraisal that games of conflict are for children or are somehow less valuable or sophisticated is exactly why I, along with some other malcontents, hijacked and popularized the “Ameritrash” term as a genre descriptor back in 2005-2006. Why does this article not address the fact that most of the top grossing Kickstarter games have NOTHING to do with German design? Cthulhu Wars, Kingdom Death, Zombicide, Gloomhaven...yeah, “adult” games about building a medieval library are really leading the charge here. And some of the more “sophisticated” games out there are very much about taking your opponents’ pieces off the board. Witness any number of GMT games- Here I Stand, Twilight Struggle, Volko Ruhnke’s work, whatever.

I’m sure the editorial staff at The Atlantic had no idea that this seemingly innocuous piece was so riddled with errors, oversights and misrepresentations. But perhaps future articles on the subject will avoid positioning this writer’s personal prejudices toward or against certain types of games to serve as the guidepost for readers.

“Everything you are familiar with sucks” is a really crap way to get people interested in anything.

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22 Jan 2018 09:03 #261668 by Gary Sax
Good post. It's like, there are so many weird asides in this that it's hard to even make a single critical post that isn't just a list of strange misses in the article.

I especially like the closing sentence.

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22 Jan 2018 09:11 #261672 by drewcula
I continue to subscribe to the Atlantic because people like Michael Barnes leave excellent comments.
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22 Jan 2018 09:43 #261678 by SuperflyPete
Worth noting that the author hasn’t heard of Go or Chess, both games about direct confrontation and both games ancient and prolific beyond any other games ever envisioned by any modern idea.

Chess and Go were around prior to the invention of gunpowder and antibiotics, yet are still the most popular games in the world. Nations devote resources toward excelling at them. AI of incomprehensible cost and resource have been developed to best humans at them.

Yet, confrontational games are out of vogue?

Meh.
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22 Jan 2018 09:50 #261680 by Legomancer
Barnes, that was a great response.
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22 Jan 2018 13:34 #261706 by RobertB
Replied by RobertB on topic Atlantic board game article
That article wasn't horrible. I think the first comment hit the nail on the head: "Board game article written by someone who doesn't play board games, for people who don't play board games." If you want to see a truly bad one, try this: The List: Definitive ranking of board games

Barnes' letter is spot-on, but I don't know if I'd lambaste a possible ally because they're currently not very knowledgeable on the subject. Pretty much any hobby has rank beginners that are introduced by other, slightly less rank, beginners. Ask me about fishing sometime to see what that looks like. :)

For me, the sad part is that if this is what The Atlantic's articles look like for subjects that you're an SME on, what does it look like for subjects that you're not?

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22 Jan 2018 14:51 #261725 by DukeofChutney

Msample wrote: Eklund will nonetheless enjoy a surge in interest. His Kickstarter for Greenland/Neanderthal is closing in on $150,000 which frankly is a lot of money for some pretty esoteric subjects and game mechanics.


Wow, thats going to be a lot of disappointed people. Greenland is ok, but not thaat good.

It's been quite some time since Phil has actually made a new game. More or less everything he has done in the past 5 years or so has been either a new edition or someone elses design he has done the dev for. He is more of a publisher these days but i guess that is where the money is.

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22 Jan 2018 15:03 #261727 by stoic
Replied by stoic on topic Atlantic board game article
The author of the article in the Atlantic is a fascinating personality. Take a glance at his Wiki page. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Kay#cite_note-29

Regardless of the merits of his article on board game culture in the Atlantic, what I find more interesting here is the author's own position on Global Warming, i.e., its cause being anthropogenic. Given his opinion on that, it's more than amusing and ironic that he chose to feature Phil Eklund in his board game article in the Atlantic. I wonder if he knew about Eklund's own very vocal and divergent opinion on global warming as expressed to the board gaming community?

Anyone remember this amusing and explosive upward tick on the warming thermometer caused by so many people peeved online? boardgamegeek.com/thread/963706/phil-ekl...iew-and-science-game

I find the dichotomy between Kay and Eklund here even more amusing than the merits or lack thereof of the article, but, maybe, they've encountered and chatted with each other about that topic and board gaming too?

I know that I'd personally love to meet, have lunch with, or a beer with Eklund to hear any of his thoughts, whether I agreed with them or not, because I know that would be an interesting and unforgettable experience! I'd probably enjoy chatting with Kay too. I hope that he responds back to your post to his article on the Atlantic.

Finally, I was a subscriber to the Atlantic since high school and college for a decade because the writing was some of the best in the industry. But, somewhere along the line, it became crap. I haven't heard about it in years. Thanks for that.

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22 Jan 2018 15:59 #261739 by SuperflyPete
That’s where I was.

Now I’m an Economist guy. Dumped WSJ and New Yorker too. Everything is becoming trash.

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23 Jan 2018 15:35 - 23 Jan 2018 15:36 #261875 by Michael Barnes
Ha ha, I have the top rated comment now.

This dude is not some kind of newbie...he knew exactly what he was doing. He wanted to do a board game article, wanted to get Eklund for an interview, wanted to promote a specific view of gaming.

I mean, “invasion of the German games?” That was 20 fucking years ago. Maybe The Atlantic can do a feature called “God Save the Queen: English Punk Rock Makes Music Scene Waves” next.

Aside from that, what does the Kickstarter trend have to do with the “German games invasion”?
Last edit: 23 Jan 2018 15:36 by Michael Barnes.
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23 Jan 2018 17:16 #261889 by NeonPeon
I feel like about bimonthly there's a new "DAE know about German games" article that circulates social media and the interwebs... They're usually called something like "Board games - not just Monopoly anymore!" and talk about Catan etc. I swear I keep seeing this over and over.
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23 Jan 2018 18:09 #261899 by Michael Barnes
Ha, yeah...I've been seeing a variation on this article about once a year for at least 10 years.

Which is still ten years past the "German Games Invasion OMG" stage.

I mean...who really talks about "German games" anymore? It's not really a "thing" like it was. That was the whole point of the ERP, to make German games a "thing" again!

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24 Jan 2018 02:18 - 24 Jan 2018 02:31 #261914 by scissors

Michael Barnes wrote: Ha ha, I have the top rated comment now.
This dude is not some kind of newbie...he knew exactly what he was doing. He wanted to do a board game article, wanted to get Eklund for an interview, wanted to promote a specific view of gaming.


I get a strong sense of that too. All the signposts are there: as a journalist it seems he started with Eklund, maybe met him somewhere "Oh cool, you moved to Germany - board game paradise!" or was just intrigued by his games, and wrote the article to fit around him, even if he is the wrong choice for the reasons you stated.

it won't make a difference for most mainstream readers who won't give a fuck, but the article is a disservice to designers who have been the centre of it all as well as publishers who broke the ground and for all of us who enjoy the hobby and take its history at least somehwat seriously. The record should be set straight, not twisted.

Most of my friends who play games but don't buy or collect them and certainly don't read about them on a regular baisis, wouldn't care otr notice that the article is skewed, they just want to play some games. After 10 years, and I don't mean this is a criticism, it's normal, most of them have never noticed that there was even a designer's name on the box (!). They won't remeber the name of the game (let's play the Mars game (Mission: Red Planet) or the Zombie game (take your pick), although they connect the dots on some design styles which helps when learning a new title (Knizia or Faidutti for example). I don't blame them for not giving a fuck. They just want to play some games.

But for the rest of us: if someone is going to write a mini-history of modern board games and invasion, they should get it right.
Last edit: 24 Jan 2018 02:31 by scissors.
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24 Jan 2018 02:38 #261916 by Colorcrayons

Michael Barnes wrote: Ha ha, I have the top rated comment now.


Reading Barney's comment about how your avatar didn't add anything made me spit out my raisin Bran. Meta.
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