What is an 'eurogame' in today's scene?
What is an 'eurogame' in today's scene?
How would you define an eurogame today? Or do you think the distinction has become meaningless?
What is an 'eurogame' in today's scene?
How would you define an eurogame today? Or do you think the distinction has become meaningless?
You can put me down in the meaningless distinction camp. Back in the day, it was a useful designation to separate "American" board games like Sorry, Monopoly, Scrabble, and etc from "European" board games like Catan, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, and etc. As a whole, though, the hobby has moved on. Today, it's more useful to define games in terms of specific mechanics and level of interactivity, with similar games being grouped in genres. A few examples would be trick takers, deck builders, worker placement, auction games, and cube rails, though there are many more.
I think it's still a useful term there's always some outliers for individual points, but a eurogame hits most of these.
It may not necessarily mean a game is European or German as much anymore, but it's useful to denote the experience you can expect from a game.
It still has meaning, but the lines have become a bit blurred. They used to all have more toned down art and dry themes like Castles of Burgundy, Hansa Teutonica, Tigris & Euphrates, and Medici to name a few. Now many have better visuals and themes while still maintaining the core aspects:
More contemporary bgg top 100 games that I think still fit firmly in the euro category even if they have more interesting themes:
I still use it as a contrast to thematic games. In a thematic game, the rules and mechanisms are in service of presenting a theme. In a euro, there is a strong emphasis on clean rules and focused mechanisms even if they are only tangentially related to the theme they are trying to represent.
I don't like the term because it's not descriptive and it's not useful when speaking with more casual players who are not that familiar with the hobby. I'd rather mention the game mechanics, like "resource management".
I still consider eurogames those who focus less on dice-randomness and direct conflict and more on correct decision-making and passive conflict.