Good Game, Good Game

There's a couple of places that I'm aware of that do a ranking of popular designer games. One is boardgamegeek and the other is the internet top 100 games list. If you look at the two listings what immediately strikes you is how similar they are - six out of the ten are the same. Those that are the same are all German-style boardgames.

So what conclusions can we draw from this? Well probably the obvious answer is that the voting on both lists is dominated by fans of German-style games. This is interesting in itself because I'm not aware particularly that these sorts of games outsell other kinds of mass-produced (to differentiate them from niche wargames) designer games. There's plenty of publishers for other game styles (Fantasy Flight, many Days of Wonder games etc) and I'm not aware of any game store owners who are suggesting they sell a ton more Eurogames than other styles of game. Fine - the lists are dominated by people that like Euros - why should we care?

The easy answer is because unfortunately they beguile people into believing that these sorts of games have become the one true grail in the gaming hobby. A new visitor to one of these sites isn't likely to stop and think about the possibility of a certain fan type dominating the voting, or about the statistics involved in building up these profiles or indeed about the self-re-enforcing nature of "top 10" lists of anything. They're going go to look, and believe that games like Puerto Rico and Tigris and Euphrates are just way ahead of the competition in terms of design and enjoyment. I know this because I've been there and done it and bought some games I didn't care much for as a result. Not, I hasten to add, PR and T&E which are both fine games. But are they really such fine games as to justify their exalted status in the gaming community?

This point also allows Euro-fans to justify their belief that the German approach to game design is better than other approaches (look, it results in the best games ever made!) again without recourse to analysing the mechanisms and sociology that got them there. It leads to the top ten lists being completely dominated by games of the same style because the biggest voters are fans of those games whereas I'd suggest what most gamers are looking for is a good mix of gaming goodness.

This is a great shame because I firmly believe that a good game is a good game, no matter what style or genre it comes from. In the past, before the advent of German games we only had Ameritrash games and wargames to choose from. A lot of crap got published and justly forgotten. But a few games have survived the test of time to become out and out classics. Give it a few years and I reckon exactly the same thing is going to happen to the Euro phenomenon - the very best of them like PR will stay up there in peoples collections and memories and keep getting played whereas the rest, many of which are currently highly ranked and regarded, will get forgotten and gather dust in attics. If you look at the 'geek top ten you can already see some evidence of this happening. Crossover games that appeal to large sections of the gaming community like Twilight Struggle and Battlelore are starting to make an appearance.

The point of all this is to justify why we get angry when we get told that our favourite style of games are outmoded by modern Euros. They're not - you just happen to think that they are because they don't conform to your stereotype of game design. It's also why some AT fans accuse some in the Euro school of being more interested in design purity than having fun, because they're denying themselves the opportunity to try out some really different games that would offer new and exciting play experiences. I'm pretty confident I'll still be playing Ra and Titan ten years from now. Can you really say the same about Caylus?