Biting Back

I keep reading how the AT crowd, and especially the people over here at the F:AT blog are generally anti-Euro and how all this is nasty, poisonous to the hobby and generally negative. I just wanted to take a moment to explain why I, for one, sometimes come across as appearing to be anti-Euro. I don't actually like being called anti-Euro because there's a number of solidly Euro titles that I enjoy immensely, but I'm certainly very vocally critical of the design concepts behind the bulk of Eurogames. Maybe sometimes I come across as being more critical and sharper than I intend. Here's why.

Let me give you some background ...

When I first arrived at the BGG site several years ago I found lots of people raving about a whole bunch of games that seemed to be from a paradigm I knew nothing about. In particular I picked up that these games shied away from random mechanics or excessive length and that this was a good thing.

At this point I'd not played any of these games. But on BGG there were so many people saying how great these games were, and how fantastic it was that they were short, analytical and non-random that I did a silly thing. I started to presume that everyone was right and that these new games were totally superior to all the old, crappy random ones that I'd been playing and enjoying with my friends for years and years. I took this attitude on board to the point where when I first started using the 'geek facilities to rate my collection I was deliberately criticising and marking down some games I'd enjoyed for being overly random and too long because I just assumed all the new games, which had transcended this old fashioned approach, must be so much better. This attitude even came across in a couple of my early reviews.

Of course I was excited to try a few of these games, so I got my first two: Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne. Settlers was first to get played and boy, was that a blast. Although it had random mechanics I could see how it was different to the games I was used to because to be successful you really had to play the game system rather than relying on luck, or negotiation or some attempt at real-life tactics like you could in the games I was used to.

Then I played Carcassonne and that just fell really flat for me. I lay a tile. Then maybe a meeple. Then another tile. Then I might get to complete a city and get some points. Wow. Big deal. I was playing it multiplayer at the time and of course the two-player version is slightly more interesting because of the screwage element, but not a whole lot. I really couldn't see what the big fuss was about on this one.

But hey, not everyone likes all the same games, right? So I got myself a couple more - the Knizia Lord of the Rings design and Ticket to Ride: Europe. I found LotR, with it's pathetically chummy co-op element and puzzle-like play to be tedious in the extreme - we won our first game and in the second we ended up competing to see who could finish the game with the ring just to inject some life into the damn thing and Sauron ate our little hobbity souls. I thought it so poor that I gave it away to a friend who thought his kids might like it. TtR:E was definitely better and I could see how it'd make a great family/gateway title but although we enjoyed our first few games it just got old really fast.

And so the Euro revolution really passed me by and I went back to playing and enjoying all the old titles that I'd loved so much in the past. And then a strange thing began to happen. Because my cyberspace peers in the gaming world just kept on telling me how brilliant these Eurogames were and how outmoded and dull the sorts of games and mechanics I liked were I started to feel like the must be something wrong with me and my taste in games. There was obviously something I just wasn't getting - perhaps I wasn't smart enough, or socially adept enough to play these games. I began to feel bad about myself and ashamed of the fact I liked older games.

Eventually I got really fed up with feeling bad and posted my Seven Reasons to Hate Eurogames list. That made me a feel a lot better because it generated such a great response. It got lots of thumbs, huge geekgold tips and best of all a bunch of comments from people I'd never heard from before who were basically saying "yes! Me too! I like games like this too!". Sure we were in a minority on the 'geek but at least there were others out there who, like me, had felt for a long time that they couldn't put their heads above the parapet and say how much they loved the games they loved for fear of attracting ridicule from the majority on the 'geek. Because saying things like that did get ridicule, no matter how nice and friendly the majority of the Euro crowd were, there were a small minority who preferred to stick the knife in. The other interesting thing about that geeklist was the fact that a number of Euro fans thought it was an ironic humour list and others, having looked at my game ratings, were posting in shocked disbelief that there were old-school gamers like me still around. Both those things go to show just to strong the pro-Euro bias on BGG was at the time.

A while later we had the first Ameritrash list, and Robert Martin coining the term and the AT fans, suddenly having a name to give to their obsession, really started coming out of the woodwork in droves. I started to appreciate that I wasn't being stupid for not "getting" Eurogames but rather I sought out different challenges than those offered by Euros that were no more or less difficult. We got a very vocal champion in Michael Barnes who wasn't afraid to stick the knife right back in to those people who'd been giving our taste in games so much grief over the years and, unfortunately, also into those people who'd been a lot nicer and even-minded about the whole thing.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

The point of all this rant is to illustrate the fact that for a long, long time - years in fact - there were a small crowd of AT gamers on the geek who spent all their time there being told, indirectly and in most cases completely unintentionally, that there was something very wrong with the games they liked and something very right with games that they felt were boring and over-analytical. That sort of suppression and pent-up negativity generates a whole lot of negativity and bad feeling. And when I criticise the Euro paradigm, that's what I'm getting out of my system, and that's why it sometimes looks like I've got a strong anti-Euro bias. I'm well aware that this makes me every bit as guilty as the people who were chewing out my taste in games in the first place. It's not an excuse - just an explanation.

The other reason that I'm sometimes overly venomous about Euros, especially on the 'geek, is because I want to counter the pro-Euro bias over there. I'm well aware that BGG is a site by and for Euro fans so it's bound to have a pro-Euro bias and usually I wouldn't have a problem with that. The problem is that BGG is such a great site that it's basically eclipsed every other boargame resource on the internet - most of the other sites out there are spin offs maintained by people who are very active on the 'geek and even on those that aren't people refer to themselves and each other by the BGG usernames and use BGG articles and resources as reference points. Even wargamers, who have their own site in consimworld, often seem to prefer to hang around the 'geek. Those of us who don't always see Euros as such a great thing find this terribly exasperating - the premier gaming site on the net seems stacked against us - so inevitably, we overcompensate when we end up posting our own opinions.

So next time you want to slam the boot in to an AT fan for being overly nasty about your favourite Eurogame stop a moment and think why they might be doing it. And then slam the boot in anyway, 'cos secretly we all enjoy a good fight.