The French guy had just finished his game of one of ARKHAM HORROR designer Richard Launius’ elaborate, ridiculously over-produced prototypes that he somehow prints up using some secret feature of Microsoft Word that make everything look awesome.
He came over to the Atlanta Game Factory table to look around a bit at what I was selling and I asked him how the game went. “Eet was fantastique!” he replied. “Eet was not like zees ozer games you see zeese people playing. Zees Eurogames are all alike, so boring. Zere is no player eentooractshun, there is only mechaniques, there is only zee GAME.” To emphasize that last word, he held his hands in the air in mock veneration as if zee GAME were something magical from on high descended to walk among mortals. It struck a chord with me that led me to realize how differently some people play games, and how some people don’t play games as a means to interact with other people at all.
The irony wasn’t lost on me, of course, that a French guy was one of the first people I ever heard openly criticize and dismiss the Eurogame design idiom and in particular the emphasis of mechanics over interaction. Later that same night I wound up playing zee GAME. I was locked up in a now legendary five hour game of DAS ZEPTER VON ZAVANDOR that found me alternating between staring at a player mat and a bunch of numbers that meant nothing to me, watching my buddy Robert over at another table having the time of his vampiric life playing FURY OF DRACULA, and glancing over at the French guy as he held a bright orange squirt gun to Launius’ head in a game of GANGSTERS. I couldn’t tell you what the people I was playing DAS ZEPTER looked like, let alone remember their names. All I know is I had a bunch of counters that were supposed to be magic gemstones and a pile of fairy dust that I was supposed to bid to fight a frog statue. I think.
The most interaction I had with these people was listening to the rules and saying “I’ll go three” when it was my turn to bid in the auction. The balance of the five hours I tried to stay awake while these people I was supposedly playing a game with did some kind of algebraic gymnastics routine in their minds to prorate their amortized return-on-investment for buying a red gemstone or whatever. Every now and then someone would cluck about how clever a particular mechanic was or to chirrup a few polite comments about a particularly “brilliant” play. I couldn’t tell if I was at a wine tasting or trying to have fun playing a board game. They sure seemed to enjoy zee GAME well enough though.
That was all sometime in late 2004, right before American-style games made a roaring comeback after damn near a decade of being discredited, mocked, and ignored by online board gaming forums and discussion groups who had become enamored of the supposedly more sophisticated and elegant family game designs coming predominantly out of Germany. And there were some good ones back then, no doubt- SETTLERS OF CATAN may as well be the Elvis, Beatles, and Rolling Stones of the canon all rolled into one. But somewhere along the way the kinds of player interaction and involvement that characterized games like SETTLERS, not to mention any number of games of both the American and European design idioms before it, became so devalued that all that was left were mechanics, rules processes and structure. Zee GAME became everything.
Once ruthlessly mechanical and procedural games without real competition like the fascistic PUERTO RICO, its predecessor PRINCES OF FLORENCE, and their bastard child GOA started appearing and concepts like indirect conflict, the abolition of geo-spatial relationships between player holdings, and the introduction of charts thinly disguised as player mats became popular, it seems that what player interaction there was in the Eurogame design paradigm suddenly took a nosedive. The emphasis shifted from playing games with people to just playing with games while other people are at the same table. It became more about experiencing the mechanics than experiencing how other people played the game or good, old-fashioned friendly competition. In short, zee GAME became the main attraction- encountering and exploiting game mechanics became more important than socializing and interacting with friends. You’re just there to act out the rules. The best performance wins based on an arbitrary measure of victory points.
Lately, games like RACE FOR THE GALAXY and AGRICOLA have been extremely popular and have met with rave reviews in the hobby community yet have remained almost entirely obscure out of enthusiast circles- in other words, in the places where games are played primarily as an interactive social activity and the idea of “game mechanics” doesn’t even exist. I liked AGRICOLA and thought RACE could have been good but completely failed because it wasn’t necessary to play the game with other players at all, but both are almost completely devoid of any real interaction barring any help you get setting up or taking down the game.
