It was never my intention to make this blog just about 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons.  Neither was it my intent to have long winded articles and so few of them. I always assumed to some degree I would write one or two shorter articles each week but to be fair when I find time to write about games I’m usually wondering why I’m not playing them instead, a classic dilemma.

Starting today I’m going to push out a few board gaming articles.  Its strange that I haven’t already given how much more often I play board games compared to role-playing games.  My goal with these articles is to be less a reviewer, and more an informer about some of the great board games to fill the needs of different types of player.  Now they will be reviews on some level, but generally I’m going to focus on games I have a positive opinion on because frankly, I tend to not play games I don’t like and so there really isn’t much to say about it.  That said I might use other board games I don’t like as references of comparison when talking about good board games as that is often a good way to keep things in perspective.

I will also use some terminology which I think is important to define up front.  Words like Euro Game and American Game for example or Euro Gamer/American Gamer.  These are commonly used terms, sometimes intended to be derogatory, but they do help to define elements of game play.

Euro Games to me are typically games with certain types of common mechanics in them.  Worker placement, area control, most tile laying games tend to be mixed with other Euro Game mechanics.  Euro games tend to use a lot of un-thematic components (cubes), or be considerably lighter on the connection between theme and actual game play.  Euro Games very often have extremes on the scales of luck, either leaning completetly in one direction and having no luck or random elements at all to the other side of the spectrum having insane amounts of randomness and luck.  Good examples of that are like Puerto Rico (Almost no randomness at all) and Carcassonne where you draw one random tile each round and put it in play (lots of luck).

I think the main feature of American games is that they usually very theme heavy and themes tend to have a strong connection to mechanics and sort of run the game.  American games also tend to have a moderate amount of luck elements, its rare that an American game doesn’t have dice to roll and cards to draw.

In any case its not often easy to differentiate the two and there are a lot more ways to define either type of game, but there are sufficiently familiar motives where most gamers will identify themselves as either preferring Euro games or American games.

In my discussions of the games I’m not going to score them, nor will I spend too much time defining the game mechanics.  I may link some videos if I find them of people doing that, I find its much easier to learn “how to play” games visually.  I will spend most of my time trying to get to the heart of what makes the game fun and what sort of gamer might or might not enjoy it, with the why’s and how’s of it mixed in.

Board game articles incoming, enjoy!