Wittgenstein famously believes that no definition of “game” is possible, because so many human activities are called games. This is nonsense, of course – but there is an underlying truth. Because games are so diverse, players of one kind of game often have trouble understanding why players of other game styles enjoy them. As a trivial example, the players of first-person shooters rarely enjoy board wargames, and wargamers rarely like shooters. The aesthetics of the two styles are very different.
The problem of aesthetic diversity is true even in so restricted a form as the boardgame. Even if we focus down from the vast universe of all games to the apparently small subset consisting of games played on a printed surface by people seated around a table, we run into a diversity of tastes. There are multiple boardgame aesthetics. My intention here is to explore them.
The Abstract Strategy Game
Let us consider the serious player of Chess or Go. He (less commonly she) will have spent long hours pondering the strategy of the game, quite possibly reading books on the subject and studying games played by masters. He will have a conception of the game as a clean, utterly non-random contest in a purely mental sphere. He is likely to believe that this is how games should be – that games of this type are pure, cerebral, by nature the noblest of games, and that the sort of froth that appears on the shelves of toy and department stores is degraded piffle, perhaps suitable for children, but unworthy of study by any sophisticated person.
The very abstractedness of abstract strategy games is itself a virtue; Go is nothing but stones and a grid, and while the shapes of Chess pieces have historical value, the game is in the forces they project, with their variable movement capabilities, and it matters not a whit that one is shaped like a horse and another like a castle. The abstract strategy gamer is likely to believe, with Parlett, that modern commercial games:
“...rely for their underlying mechanics on well-established formulae, the least imaginative being variations on a theme of Goose -- roll dice, move there, miss turn, get home first. Being designed for family fun rather than for genuine game enthusiasts, procedural originality is irrelevant. They rely entirely on their theme for whatever sales potential may be squeezed out of them, and their own makers do not expect a shelf-life longer than the topicality of the theme in question.”91
In short, to an abstract strategy gamer, the very theme-ness of “theme games,” with their reliance on thematic color, is a suspicious attempt to distract attention from the mechanics and strategy of the game itself, which from the aesthetic of an abstract strategy gamer are really all that matters – and a game that does not focus relentlessly on these elements must do so because it is not really very good as a game qua game.
An abstract strategy gamer may find the occasional modern title that holds some passing interest – a game such as Randolph’s Twixt or Tavitian’s Blokus that eschews theme for strategic clarity, and that avoids randomness in all its forms – but will view virtually everything else as commercial dross.
The Board Wargame
The board wargamer is at heart a simulationist. To the wargamer, wargames are interesting because they portray the color and pageantry of the past; men pitted in terrifying and bitter struggle – ”Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance,” as Patton said.
To a wargamer, wargames are not abstract, time-wasting pastimes, like other games, but representative of the real. They show history, or hypothetical conflicts that are nonetheless grounded in a real understanding of military affairs and the complexity of combat. You can learn something from wargames; indeed, in some ways, you can learn more from wargames than from reading history. A work of history can only tell about the events it depicts; a wargame can show the events, and give insight into why the commanders did as they did, and provide the player a gut understanding of the forces at play and the factors that influenced the outcome.
To an abstract strategy gamer (or for that matter to a Eurogamer), the idea that the outcome of a game might be determined by factors that the players cannot control is anathema; to a wargamer, it is a virtue. “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy,” as von Moltke said. No commander can be certain of the outcome of any battle, or there would be far fewer battles, just as there would be far fewer horse races if horse racing were entirely deterministic. To a wargamer, randomness is not something to be viewed askance; indeed, a degree of randomness is almost essential in any game that purports to be a simulation. The easiest way to represent factors over which opposing sides have no control is with the roll of dice. Sometimes, indeed, this means that one player or another wins “by luck,” something that an abstract strategy gamer would find intolerable – but a wargamer shrugs it off. C’est la guerre.
In other words, one of the chief aesthetic values of the wargame is its value as a simulation; a wargamer understands that there is sometimes a tradeoff between the “playability” of the game (its value as a game qua game) and its “accuracy” (its value as a simulation), and accepts this tradeoff as a necessary part of the genre – but a wargamer will tolerate, and even appreciate, a game that fans of other game styles might view as mechanically or strategically uninteresting, so long as it imparts an accurate and insightful understanding of the conflict it simulates.
To a wargamer, complexity is understood as a requirement of simulation. Complexity is not a virtue in itself; if two systems, one simple and one complicated, simulate the same things equally well, the simple is preferable. But complexity does not daunt the wargamer; wargames are the most complex tabletop games of all, and a wargamer may take a macho pride in his ability to master even the most complicated of systems. A Eurogamer may blanch at rules of more than a dozen pages, but the wargamer assumes that any game with fewer is simplistic, in all likelihood a poor simulation, even if perhaps an enjoyable game. The wargamer may play it, just as he may play Lamorisse’s Risk, but knows full well that this is not, by his standards, a real game.
Games such as Chess and Go are, to a wargamer, musty relics from an almost prehistoric past – suitable enough mental challenges, no doubt, but devoid of color or any intrinsic interest. Supposedly Chess began as a sort of simulation, and supposedly Go teaches something about the strategy of maneuver, but they are so far divorced from anything real as to lose all meaning. The players of abstract strategy games learn nothing from them, other than how better to play a game – and what, ultimately, is the virtue in that?
And the Eurogame is hardly any better. Eurogames are completely divorced from their themes, the mechanics shaped for the demands of their market rather than by the demands of simulation. You can take a Eurogame and reskin the theme entirely, and it would be no different; by contrast, if you take say, a World War II game and reskin it as Napoleonic, the players will at once realize that something is amiss. Armor does not play the same role as cavalry. The concerns of commanders in the two eras are quite different. It will be quite a strange Napoleonic game indeed.
Despite the complexity of the games he plays, and despite their inherently strategic nature, the wargamer is paradoxically less concerned with the kind of strategy that abstract strategy gamers and Eurogamers find essential. In a European Theater of Operations game, there are really only two strategies for the German player – Russia first, or Britain first. The wargamer doesn’t care, so long as that is realistic. The game is in the execution, and in the simulation’s portrayal of the real, not in the ponderous pondering of strategy and goals that are typical of more deeply strategic games.
The Eurogame
The Eurogame is so called because the instances to which most gamers are exposed were first published in Germany. Paradoxically, however, the game style owes its origins to games published by the American conglomerate, 3M, in the 1960s – the fabled 3M games, in which Sid Sackson and Alex Randolph, acknowledged by Eurogame designers as the inspiration of their form, came to prominence.
Like abstract strategy gamers, Eurogamers prize strategic depth; if you listen to Euro-gamers talk, again and again you will hear the phrase “interesting choices.” They expect games that provide a limited number of options each time the player has an opportunity to act, but which make deciding among those options interesting, and non-trivial. If the best option is obvious, there’s really no choice at all; but for the choice to be meaningful, there must be ramifications expanding from it. Choosing one option closes off some avenues and opens others. This requires a system of sufficient complexity, with a degree of uncertainty in terms of outcome – and yet, perhaps paradoxically, Eurogamers dislike games where “uncertainty of outcome” depends on random factors.
This dislike of randomness applies only to randomness that can dictate outcomes; that is, a Eurogame would never contain something like a wargame’s Combat Results Table. But randomness is commonly used in Eurogames as a way of providing variability in outcome, or to break symmetry to ensure that players have different objectives or strategies; Eurogamers accept this, so long as random elements either expose all players to the same opportunities and disadvantages, or else confer no strong advantage on any single player. As an example, distribution of cards at the beginning of play does not confer a strong advantage on any player, so long as all cards are of equivalent power, but do ‘break symmetry’ by giving players’ different starting vantages.
In general, however, to a Eurogamer, as to an abstract strategy gamer, a game that can be won “by luck” is by nature an inferior game – and if luck is a strong element, hardly worth playing, and suitable only for children.
Eurogames are strongly shaped by their market; they are mass-market products in Germany, after all, if relegated to hobbyists in North America. An ideal Eurogame is played in an hour or less and supports between three and six players. It has a low level of complexity by the standards of the wargame (or by the standards of Ameritrash), but somewhat more than is typical of the American mass market game (most of which are marketed primarily to children). Ideally, it is accessible to fairly young players – many Eurogames are played by families together – but rewards the intellectual maturity that older players bring to bear, and the evolution of deeper strategic thinking by younger players.
The Eurogamer prizes clever simplicity; while he will not flinch at a degree of complexity, he admires a game that creates strategic depth with a minimal investment in learning the rules.
By and large, Eurogamers find games that pit players too directly against one another disturbing; such games are “nasty,” hurtful, games that cause harsh feelings. Instead, the ideal game is one in which people injure or aid each other only at the margins, where each is building toward a win, perhaps competing for resources but not stabbing each other in the back. They prefer positive sum games, not zero sum games. Only one player can win, of course, and win conditions are necessary to motivate play, but winning should come from strategizing more efficiently, not crushing your opponents.
Like wargamers, Eurogamers enjoy novelty. They consider themselves followers of an artistic form, and often know the names of the game designers whose work they enjoy, looking forward to new works from these “spieleautoren”. They too typically have large game collections.
Eurogamers enjoy the themes of the games they play, though they know the actual gameplay is divorced from the theme, that the theme is a mere marketing appendage on what is at heart an abstract strategy game. They view games as more than their mechanics, but as objets d’art, products whose art style, component value, and graphic design affect and inform the experience of play. Just as digital game players have problems divorcing an understanding of mechanics from the visuals to which they are exposed, a Eurogamer’s judgment of a title may be as much informed by its production values as its actual gameplay.
For this reason, Eurogamers view traditional abstract strategy games as – well, historically important, no doubt, and undeniably excellent games in their own way; but curiously colorless, without texture, and because they’re not involved in an ongoing tradition of artistic evolution, less interesting than modern games. As for wargames – they are simply not worth playing: far too complex, far too lengthy, nastily competitive, too random, and without that tasty sense of strategic depth that Eurogamers prize.
Ameritrash
“Ameritrash” is a back-formation from “Eurogame,” and is used to describe games, not all of them created by Americans, that hearken to titles published by Avalon Hill, Hartland Trefoil, and some others in the 1970s through 1990s. Perhaps originally intended as insulting, the term has been adopted with perverse pride by fans of the form.
Just as Sid Sackson’s Acquire – first published in the US by a US publisher – is among the most “Euro” of “Eurogames,” so many “Ameritrash” games are by no means American in origin: Hostettler’s Kremlin is Swiss, Lamonisse’s Risk is French (originally La Conquête du Monde), McNeil’s Kingmaker is British, and so on. Ameritrash games are not limited to these older examples, however; publishers like Fantasy Flight continue to produce excellent Ameritrash games today, with titles like Arkham Horror and A Game of Thrones.
What, then, makes a game “Ameritrash?” First and foremost is a tight connection between theme and mechanics. To Ameritrash gamers, Eurogames are oddly colorless precisely because their themes are irrelevant, mere marketing drapery for games of abstract strategy. Ameritrash gamers like games where the mechanics emerge from the themes, where railroad games have a historical connection to the 19th century, where zombies eat the brains of their victims and gain some game benefit therefrom, where goals are related to what people in the situation of the game would actually try to do. Ameritrash gamers are not as fanatic about simulation as wargamers, but think that if a game is set in the Stone Age, it should have clubs in it. Obviously. Dinosaurs optional.
Ameritrash gamers like to plan and plot as much as Eurogamers, but they also like to bounce dice. In real life, shit happens, and sometimes you roll snake eyes. Sucks, but there it is, and you’re playing the game to have fun, not to demonstrate that you are the True Mastermind whose clever stratagems render all opposition futile. Ameritrash gamers don’t like games with random, arbitrary outcomes, but they tolerate a far greater degree of randomness than Eurogamers, particularly when the randomness is for the sake of color – random events cards, for example.
Ameritrash gamers also like games with conflict – games where you go head-to-head with others, where you can elegantly screw your opponents – where you can crush your enemies, seize their cattle, and hear the lamentations of their women. They view negotiation, trading, backstabbing, betrayal, alliances, and just general tabletalk as strong positives, and find the “niceness” of Eurogames somewhat irritating. If only one can win, why shouldn’t the game let you screw up your opponents? “Nice guys never win” – surely an American sentiment.
Ameritrash gamers, like Eurogamers, are a kind of hard core; but because Eurogames are designed to appeal to one kind of mass market, and Ameritrash games are designed for a hobbyist market, Ameritrash games tend to be geekier. They often take multiple hours to play, rules complexity is tolerated, and classic geek themes (sword and sorcery, space war, monsters) are more common.
An Ameritrash game, like a Eurogame, is typically designed for 3 to 6 players, but has a far tighter connection to theme, a higher degree of reliance on randomness, and pits players more directly against one another.
The Beer-and-Pretzels Game
The phrase “beer-and-pretzels game” was originally coined by wargamers to describe relatively simple, quick-playing wargames, the implication being that they were less intense games with fairly simple rules that did not require extraordinary focus to play. Or sobriety, for that matter.
It’s since been adopted by gamers in general to mean casual, short, fun, simple, easy-to-play games, often with light-hearted themes. You might play beer-and-pretzels games at a party, or after a long and more intense gaming session, to relax. They do not require deep thought, but may not be entirely devoid of strategy; and a high degree of randomness may prevail. Classic examples include Rosenberg’s Bohnanza, Jolly’s Wiz-War, and Cayce’s Pit. Virtually all US mass-market boardgames geared toward adults fall into this style: Osterhaus & Kirby’s Apples to Apples and Alexander & Tait’s Cranium, for example – no great surprise, given the reflexive anti-intellectualism of most American adults.
There’s no real stereotype of the beer-and-pretzels gamer; typically, people who play games like this are either hardcore gamers of one type or another, or people who do not self-identify as gamers but are happy to play a simple, fun game for social purposes.
Beer-and-pretzels games tend to have a set of common characteristics, however. The rules need to be explainable in just a few minutes, possibly to inebriated people. Turns must pass quickly so no one gets bored. Humor – something virtually non-existent in Eurogames – is common. There cannot be elaborate board layouts, because no one can be bothered, and in the quick, frenetic action typical of such games, pieces would probably get knocked over anyway.
In beer-and-pretzels games, fortunes often reverse quickly, with one move or the turn of a card launching a trailing player to the lead. They often end suddenly and unexpectedly – a stark contrast to Eurogames, which tend to build slowly and inexorably to the end-game. Randomness, either in the form of cards or dice, or sometimes both, is almost essential. Hidden information is common. Scoring never requires anything more than the simplest calculation.
From a design stand-point, beer-and-pretzels games are actually non-trivial to create; despite the “anything goes” feeling of the form, the games have to have enough depth to encourage repeat play without a stiff learning curve, and need to be enjoyable in quick sessions.
Conclusion
From Metacritic to Boardgamegeek user rankings, people tend to try to cram all works into a single scale of merit. While it is unquestionably true that some games are bad and some games are good, it is equally undeniable that tastes vary -- and that a games-literate and nuanced view of games makes such unitary scales questionable. For reasons both of culture and personal preference, people bring different aesthetics to games, and the virtues they find in the games they play are often quite different.
From a design perspective, it’s useful to understand what audiences exist for games; and how diverse the form actually is. And while success can be achieved by catering to the aesthetic of a particular audience, games that break the mold are often the most interesting. Still, it is worth contemplating what pleasures gamers draw from the games they play, and why they enjoy them.
91 David Parlett, The Oxford History of Board Games, Oxford University Press, 1999; p. 349. Note that Parlett is not describing all modern games this way, but “games at the lower end of this market.” He is himself an eminent board game designer.