Euro Roving
July 19, 2019 by Sam
Over the last 20 years there’s been a wave of game designs that are loosely – very loosely – categorized as Euros, due to their tendency to have German or Italian designers. They share other traits too. In a Euro, there’s usually very little interaction between players; in fact sometimes interaction can be inadvertent or indeed, almost entirely absent: a shared puzzle everyone attempts to solve individually, before comparing how well they did at the end.
Euros are often criticised for their lack of interaction and while I understand the argument, I don’t share the disdain. Some of my favourite games indulge in this multiplayer-solitaire paradigm, and if you’re in the mood for it it ticks a lot of boxes: strategy, tactics, logic, chance (sometimes; luck tends not to feature heavily in Euro games) whilst having a kind of gentleness to them where the worst that can happen is someone took ‘your spot’ – and it’s not actually your spot at all, just something you had your eye on. If that kind of thing sends someone into a rage, maybe they shouldn’t be playing games in the first place…
In no particular order then, here are some of our favourite Euros. Click on the box art to find out more info on each title!
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16th century India is the setting for this particular pursuit, where players utilise the twin currencies of workers (little wooden guys) and dice (- dice) to establish themselves as the best Raja. Over an indeterminate number of rounds workers go out to do your bidding before returning at the end of the round. The dice are used to ‘pay’ for some of the actions they take, like building (adding tiles to your player board) improving your points return for said building, or pushing your 16th century yacht up the river to gather the rewards floating there, like curios dropped by the Gods. Rajas’ board looks like a garish explosion of Christmas lights (or something worse) at first, but what emerges when playing is a rapid race, due to the unusual end-game criteria. Unique and ground-breaking it’s not, but this is a more-ish package of Euro loveliness.
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The oft-quoted accusation (by theme-loving gamers) against Euros is that they’re a set of mechanics with a theme pasted on top, and to be frank Heaven and Ale does nothing to negate that here. Allegedly you’re monks harvesting crops with which to make beer, and how successful you are depends on the abilities of your brewmaster… but no. Heaven and Ale is a puzzle, and a damn fine puzzle at that. Not only do you need to move no less than six markers up a scoretrack, you also need to manage your money – which is scarce – choose where and when to plant, optimise your scoring by choosing the right moment, and all this via a board where whoever is furthest back on the path is the current player. Not only nuts, but a bag of mixed nuts. And quite brilliant.
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One of the first games (maybe the first?) to utilise the idea of workers going out to do your bidding on each round, in Agricola you also have to feed your workers, as they all come home shattered after a hard day on the plough. Not only that, you plant seeds, breed animals, bring in the harvest… it’s all very thematic and really intuitive to pick up: everything kind of makes sense. But despite the bucolic theme there’s certainly an edge to Agricola, as there are only a number of ways your family (your workers) can be fed, so the you took my spot! aspect of the game feels more pertinent here than some. For Joe and I, despite the greatness of Agricola, the game has been supplanted in our affections by the same designers’ Fields of Arle, Caverna and A Feast for Odin. But it remains a benchmark of modern boardgames and what it still has over its successors is the huge adaptability (play without cards for a simple game, mix in one or two decks for complexity) and as a result, variety too.
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My favourite game by this designer is actually Macao, but I’ll concede that my many plays of Macao have included the occasional duffer, whereas Castles of Burgundy seems to be more consistent. This is Joe’s favourite too. The theme is barely there – something about Burgundy and castles – but the mental challenge of filling up your board/lands with castles, forests, lakes, animals and, uh, bonus tiles – that’s a head-scratching, chin-stroking corker. Your choices are compromised by the fact everything you do has a number value, and every round you roll your two dice to see what options are available to you. Luck, but manageable luck, and that seam of chance cleverly stops Castles from slipping into a complicated process of heartless optimisation.
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I have to mention Concordia – even though neither Joe nor I really share the same love for it many others do, we can still see why it’s held in high regard. The genius of the game is the card system, where every card you play represents an action, but you can’t play that card again until you play the get-all-my-cards-back card. And because doing that costs you an entire, valuable turn in a game where turns are a precious commodity, every decision feels crucial. Align that with some clever mechanics – such as a card that copies someone else’s just-played-card – and a really interesting scoring system, and the need to literally play your cards right to maximise your chances of success, and you have a Euro classic. For me, what they are powering on the board isn’t quite as interesting as the cards themselves, but I still think it’s something of a board-gaming milestone all the same.
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You might have picked up a recurring theme here – Euro games often tend to be about Euro history too (the continent, not the currency). But the mechanics aren’t confined to the past – the designer of Underwater Cities also thought long and hard about the year 2849 before he came up with this little (read: epic) number about building cities underwater. No submarines or radar, no sabotage or mines: just good honest construction workers trying to out-construct each other over ten rounds where, not unlike Rajas of the Ganges, there is the currency of workers but another currency too: cards, in this case. Each action your workers take has a colour, and must be paid for with a card. If the card colour matches the action colour: bingo! You get the bonus action on the card too. It’s long, but engaging with it, and wears its theme rather well.
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Great Western Trail almost feels like three games in one, there’s so much going on. The story is you are cattle drivers taking your herd to be sold. Much of the game is nonsensical from a thematic point of view. Cowboys stop and build buildings. Cowboys charge levies on other cowboys. Cowboys run off to become train drivers. Most bizarre of all perhaps is the buyers of your beef rewarding you most of all for a diverse herd of cattle – they hate it when you turn up with lots of the same type of cow. Despite the madness, Great Western Trail kind of pulls off the trick of being ludicrously brilliant anyway – it might not have a coherent narrative, but it blends lots of more-ish gamey stuff into whole that had us going “What on Earth was that? Let’s play it again”
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…whereas Terraforming Mars has story in abundance. You can guess the story from the title here; what you cannot guess is how long the game will take, as the other thing in abundance is the multitude of options thanks to the various cards and how they combine. You’re trying to dig lakes, grow forests, establish colonies and up the temperature of Mars to a point where it’s habitable: once these criteria have been met the game ends and the player who’s contributed the most will be the winner. Terraforming Mars outscores most on the list for theme and is maybe the heaviest here in terms of game length too. Maybe too long for some – but if you want an epic in every sense, this is a box-ticker.
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Orleans marries the gentle art of Euro-gaming with the tingling please-please-please of the bag-draw mechanism: no rolling dice or choosing cards here, merely pulling a diverse band of workers out of a bag one at a time and deciding where on the board to assign them. Getting the workers you want can be key, but it’s not a total lottery: you can choose which workers to recruit, which in turn helps you establish an overall strategy that you hope your draw will be kind towards. There’s a kind of simple genius about it that recognises the art of the Euro along with the tiny dopamine hit that comes with plunging your hand into your own personal lucky dip.
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Calimala isn’t quite the dainty offering of some Euro games. It ticks a lot of boxes: vaguely historical, check; mechanics divorced from the theme, check; feels more puzzle than story; check. No direct interaction either, but Calimala is an object lesson in how indirect interaction can feel pretty direct. An interesting system means whenever you choose an action, anyone who’s already done the action before (- including you) gets to do it again! And as soon as any action is taken a fourth time, a scoring round is triggered. I won’t go into what you’re scoring here, but suffice to say after strolling idly along for 20-30 minutes, Calimala takes off like a rocket and before you know it, it’s all over and you’re in last place (other positions are available). A strategists nightmare; a tactician’s masterclass.
Sam likes games. He buys a lot of games, plays a lot of games, and likes talking about games too. Occasionally he dreams about games. Despite this, he is a happily married individual with reasonably well-adjusted children, who roll their eyes at him on a pretty frequent basis.
But they still play the odd game, so it's ok.
Sam's favourite games are a constantly shifting thing that he'd find hard to define, although he's not mad keen on orcs, miniatures, or heavy sets of rules with endless exceptions and special circumstances. He plays the occasional solo game, but feels a big part of board-gaming's appeal is the gathering of friends around a table, interacting with a tangible, physical thing.