ESR on Eurogames

Long before personal computers were common, the board wargaming hobby was a big deal among the geekerati. I had a fair number of wargames in my own collection, and they occupied a fair bit of my spare time (rather in the way that blogging does now, I suspect). Eric Raymond takes a look at the gaming segment that not only survived the rise of the home computer, but is actually thriving: the Eurogame:

I enjoy strategy games. I'e been playing them since the heyday of the elaborate hundreds-of-tiny-counters hex-map historical-simulation wargames in the 1970s and early 1980s. But those games don't get played much any more, largely because they took so long to set up and learn; after 1985 or so younger gamers moved to computer simulations instead, and as the hex-wargame genre stagnated many old-school gamers eventually abandoned it in favor of military-miniatures gaming.

[. . .]

These became signature traits of a huge freshet of new games that hit the U.S. market in the new century. Other standouts have included Puerto Rico, Domaine, Power Grid, Alhambra, Shadows Over Camelot, and Ticket To Ride. Most of these games are imports from Germany, republished in English; the style is generically known as "German games" or "Eurogames" and I've heard it alleged that in Germany these games are a mass-market form of family entertainment rather than being confined to gamer-hobbyists, science-fiction fans, and technogeeks as they still mostly are in the U.S.

I've long thought that the Eurogame is in part a response to competition from computer games. Computers do the detail-crammed historical-simulation game better than you can with counters and a board, so they got steamrollered. Eurogames, on the other hand, do something computer games are poor at — face-to-face multiplayer games — and they do it with furniture that's pleasant to look at and handle.