The Long And The Short Of It

When I was young and freshly unleashed upon the world of boardgame columnists, burning with points to prove and issues to argue, one of the concepts that I did to death was the idea that Ameritrash games owe a huge debt to Euros. In spite of my flogging the subject to death, I still feel it’s worth resurrecting from time to time. Not least to remind people in the Ameritrash camp that no matter how many times we justifiably chant “boring Euro-clone”, it’s a self-evident truth that back in the early 90’s, AT games were in very much as bad a state as Euros are now. The market was glutted with tedious, unimaginative game which all copied stale mechanics from one another. It took exposure to the first wave of German games to hit the US, with their fresh approach to mechanics, to revivify the genre. That, and the gradual creeping boredom with Magic: the Gathering that a lot of gamers were experiencing after playing it for several years.Indeed so great is the mechanical debt that the games I love owe to the games I hate (generalisations, obviously) that I wouldn’t think it was that much of a step too far to think of virtually every successful thematic game released in the last decade as a form of hybrid. The trick has been borrowing mechanical innovations from the European paradigm and re-shaping them - and in some cases improving them - in order to fit a more demanding and rigid thematic mould.