I was just reading a thread on Board Game Geek and noticed someone use the term “Eurobore.” There are two large classifications for games based loosely on things like theme, strategy, luck, and other gaming factors. The Ameritrash games have players relying on luck and have strong themes. Euro games tend to have little luck involved and are strategically deeper.
Of course, these classifications are rather arbitrary and meaningless these days with games landing all over the Euro-Ameritrash scale. A label might tell you where a game trends on the scale but it’s not a black-and-white labelling anymore.
The “Eurobore” term was used in response to suggestions and hints by others that Euro-style games are generally better. Generalization is bad since no one plays a bunch of games all at the same time. When you’re playing a long boring game, it won’t matter at all if the game is Euro or Ameritrash.
So what things make a game suck for me? Any game that does not let me move to the space where I want to be, is a game that sucks. Rolling dice or picking cards and discovering where I landed on the board is depressing at best. “Oops, I landed on Boardwalk and you have a hotel there, dang.” The luck of the move means there is absolutely no strategy that can be used to alter when or where I end up giving up my hard earned money. Parcheesi, Sorry, and a slew of other games are just like this but target children and adults with low IQ’s sine there is not much else to do besides see where you land. I think the game of life is the worst of these games where there is almost no strategy to the game. Have a kid or not? Doesn’t seem to matter. Get a job or go to college? Doesn’t seem to matter.
When I play Monopoly, my strategy is to buy every property I land on. if I don’t have the cash, I mortgage something to pay for it. What’s better, having a property that is mortgaged or letting another player have that property? it’s so obvious that me having it mortgages means they can never collect rent from me on it. So now Monopoly is nothing more than a game of Chutes and Ladders.
A member of my board game group wants to play Clue. That’s a game that many people classify as a puzzle game. There’s no worker placement or resource factories to build. There’s no roll-and-land-on-a-bad-space mechanics. It’s mostly about deducing who, what, where. Pandemic is supposedly this type of game where it’s not a highly luck-based themed game from America and it’s not a worker-placement strategy game from Europe. it’s a puzzle game.
I have no point to this post. I was thinking about games and strategy and about how I played a 1-on-1 game of Terraforming Mars a few nights ago that lasted over three hours.
There is no black-and-white way to classify board games these days. Some are clearly luck-based Ameritrash games that rely little on skill or strategy, and some are Euro games that have almost no luck involved and players need to adapt their strategy to meet what other players do. Many just fall somewhere on a multidimensional scale of game features. me, I like games without luck or with the luck affecting all players identically (like what cards are available in a market being luck driven but apply to all players).