Monocular Vision

One of the passions in my life is the playing of board games.  And one of the reasons more people don’t play board games is that most of them stink.

Well, most of the ones we play in this country do.  You see, in Europe, playing board games is done by more people, more frequently.  Why is that?  It’s because they have some pretty awesome board games.

Typically, when people analyze board games, they might place them on a continuum with one end having games that are heavily chance based, while the other side has games that are more skill-based. While this analysis can be useful, I think it misses a more fundamental factor: the ability for the player to affect the outcome by choosing from different strategies.  Yes, this may sound like I’m simply taking the side of skill-based games, but I’m not.  Games that have a large chance factor can still be enjoyable if the player can alter their play to continue to be competitive.

As an example, let’s compare two games.  One of these games is Monopoly: a game I’m sure you are familiar with.    In Monopoly, players take turns rolling dice, moving around the board and buying properties in an attempt to take away their opponents cash.  For the most part, the only strategy in this game is to purchase every property you land on and upgrade them with houses and hotels when possible.  The victor is often determined by who happens to land on which properties first, or who draws the best cards.  If you happen to keep landing on already purchased properties, especially earlier in the game, there isn’t a lot that you can do.  The game quickly gets boring as you find yourself unable to keep up with your opponents.  The fun factor is only reduced when it take hours to finish this horrendous game.

However, let’s look at another game called Ticket to Ride.  In Ticket to Ride, players take turns drawing cards and claiming routes on a large map of the United States to score points.  This game, originally from Germany, is one that many board game aficionados find too dependent on chance because of the heavy emphasis on drawing cards.  However, it’s been our experience that this game continues to be a hit, even though one might get frustrated by poor card drawing.  The simple reason for this is that Ticket to Ride gives you something very important: options.  Yes, you score points by claiming routes, however you can also get additional points by connecting cities.  And you have the ability to choose between scoring a lot of points by connecting two distant cities, or perhaps connect closer cities to score a smaller amount of points, but do so more often.  The choice in strategy is yours.  I’ve seen some games turned around midway through because a player was able to adapt their strategy to what was going on in the game.  Now, Ticket to Ride is far from being a perfect game (more on that another time), but the point is that Americans who play this game are often awoken to an entirely new type of board game:  Games that don’t suck.

Board games that contain a large number of strategies, in addition to deemphasizing chance are common in European style board games.  For this reason, they are often called Euro-style or just Euro games.  In my next blog post, I’ll discuss a few of the more popular Euro games that have made their way to America.