Throughout the 1990s, one of the single most significant events in hobby gaming was the emergence of a type of game originating chiefly from Germany that sort of challenged the concept of what a “hobby game” was or should be. These so-called “German games” from designers like Klaus Teuber, Wolfgang Kramer, and Reiner Knizia were notably simpler than the American examples of hobby games and were often characterized by streamlined gameplay, accessibility, and a more pronounced focus on simple mechanics over simulation or detail, although some had significant levels of theme and interactive elements were not yet shunned in favor of predictability and determinism. Of course, German designers and their European peers had been turning out such games for a more family-oriented market for decades and the German game invasion had more to do with international hobbyists’ increased awareness of these games- thanks largely to the internet- than with anything necessarily “new”.

But looking back to the pre-2000 era of the European board game it strikes me as something very significant that the kinds of games that those early “German games” represent is something dramatically different than the typical modern Eurogame. In fact, I would almost go far as to say that those games- even commonly recognized and widely played titles such as SETTLERS OF CATAN, TIGRIS & EUPHRATES, RA, BOHNANZA, and EL GRANDE- are a practically separate genre than what the modern Eurogame represents in games such as CAYLUS and AGRICOLA. The aesthetics, mechanics, and conceptual paradigms were so different just ten or fifteen years ago that it’s almost impossible to class some of these games alongside their modern antecedents. It’s particularly interesting to go back and play the older “German games” and see how those games had so much more flexibility, interaction, and variety than the rigid structures and processional gameplay of the modern Euro would ever allow. And they were a hell of a lot more fun, too.

So where then is the dividing line between the “German game” and the Eurogame? Is there a point at which the genre effectively split into two separate sets of identifiers? I believe there is, and I think that there is one game that is almost single-handedly responsible for ruining everything great and truly exciting that the “German game” brought to the hobby. There is one game that is a manifestation of almost every single thing that went wrong with the idea of European board game design and lead future designers and publishers away from the fun, exciting, and accessible and toward the insular, esoteric, and rigid. That game is the 2000 Alea/Rio Grande Games release PRINCES OF FLORENCE, designed by Wolfgang Kramer and Richard Ulrich.

The irony here is that Wolfgang Kramer had a varied and interesting career in the pre-Eurogame era, designing a lot of extremely good games like BIG BOSS, WILDLIFE ADVENTURE, MAGALON, and TOP SECRET SPIES. Even what is perhaps his most significant pre-2000 title, EL GRANDE, had more in common with RISK than PRINCES OF FLORENCE had with his earlier designs. But with PRINCES OF FLORENCE, Kramer and practically every party involved in the creation and publication of this game set certain precedents that in a very apparent way changed the aesthetic, conceptual, and mechanical direction of European game design, setting precedents that are still being influencing Eurogame designers today, and I think the game is responsible for the epidemic proliferation of the worst qualities of the genre.

Even looking at PRINCES OF FLORENCE I see how it set a certain standard for how the Eurogame should present itself visually. Games are a visual medium and our first impressions of them are inevitably based around aesthetics. Many modern Eurogames are dramatically, pathetically ugly and seem to be designed specifically to advertise the game’s most boring qualities in an attempt to appeal to boring old men. I can’t imagine anyone under the age of 40 looking at the box cover to most Eurogames today and being attracted to or interested in playing the game, regardless of how good it’s supposed to be.

Many Eurogame boxes feature a dour-looking old man scowling amid some dour-looking Renaissance or Medieval background, probably surveying the outcome of the player’s actions to determine who has impressed them the most or simply just scowling because they’re on such an ugly box. It’s almost a laughable cliché at this point, the “brown and darker brown” color palette of the Eurogame and the oh-so-important “olde worlde” fonts. Even in terms of game contents and components, the aesthetic approach of the Eurogame has become closer to a spreadsheet and sometimes it’s tough to determine if what you’re playing is a game or a flowchart. And lo and behold, the ancestry of this aesthetic approach is rooted squarely in the villa-grids of PRINCES OF FLORENCE. When I heckle Eurogames in a broad way, making fun of how they look so damn boring and brown, PRINCES OF FLORENCE is my reference point.

The format of the game, which is common among all of Alea’s “big box” games is similar to the Avalon Hill bookshelf games and there is a similar appeal to sophistication and a sense that the game is not one to be shelved along with your other board games, but rather to be put on a bookshelf alongside the works of Shakespeare, Plato, and Dante. And I think that really speaks to the overall tone of the game, which is one of dreadful seriousness (despite the presence of jesters) and an attitude that what you are doing by playing the game is not fun but very sophisticated as it is the pursuit of learned men.

It’s a long way from the look and feel of games where the back of the box shows kids throwing dice and cheering, which is likely anathema to most Eurogamers anyway. PRINCES OF FLORENCE seems to be one of the first Eurogames where this aura of self-important, faux-historical gameplay was really fore grounded, and in a way that seemed to put fun second to seriousness.