Eurogames

7 wonders is another development of the tableau-building card game, following on from San Juan and Race for the Galaxy. It's main change is the way the cards are made available to the players. The deck comes in three sections (ages). All the cards for an age are distributed between the players. Each turn they may build one card into their tableau and pass the remaining cards to the next player for the next turn. Each age brings increasingly powerful and expensive cards. This mechanic means 7 Wonders has less randomness than other tableau-builders.

I'm impressed by how well this game scales to more people. Player turns, which are all about deciding which card to build, are simultaneous, so even with 6-7 players the game can go quickly. The mechanics encourage you to interact a good deal with the players either side of you, but much less so to everyone else.

7 Wonders sits in a good sweet spot between San Juan and Race for the Galaxy. If the former is too simple and latter too complex, then this is an ideal game. However unlike most tableau-building games it isn't so good for travel, as there are other components beside the cards.

It's hard to get a more banal and peaceful theme than Agricola's theme of building up a farmstead. Each turn you get a few actions, allowing you to improve your farmstead by adding ovens, ploughing fields, gathering wood, and the like. Steadily these actions allow you to accumulate, in particular allowing to understake "family growth" (another euphemism for sex) which is particularly important as it gives you more actions at the cost of more family members to feed.

The thinking in the game is stringing together a good sequence of actions that allows you to build as impressive a farm as you can. while ensuring you can feed your family with each step of the way. There's lots of different improvements you can do, so there's always lots of choice about which things to aim for. Often you need particular resources to make certain improvements, which involves planning ahead several turns.

Agricola is engrossing, and full of mental effort. I tend to feel more tired after a game of Agricola than I do most Eurogames. There's some variation between games, in that you get a hand of optional cards you can build. However these seem to mainly make a secondary impact on your strategy. Conflict between players only occurs when you want to do the same action - each available action can only be done by one player, so there is some competition to grab actions first. But there's enough alternatives that you aren't left stuck - which is why some people see Agricola as more like simultaneous solitaire.

Alhambra combines card management and tile placement mechanics with a theme of building up a palace (named after the wonderful Alhambra in Granada). Each turn a player may draw currency cards which she then uses to buy palace tiles. You score victory points based on the configuration of your palace. Conflict with others is based around getting hold of the money cards and tiles, both of which sit in open decks.

There's a lot of randomness, with both the cards and tiles drawn randomly, but also plenty of decisions: whether spend cards or keep them for later, which tiles to buy and how to place them when you've bought them. Alhambra remains a popular choice for us and our friends.

In the 80's I played a lot of role-playing games, and certainly at that time Call of Cthulhu was always popular. I only dipped into it a few times (never playing a regular campaign) but there was always something appealing about its atmosphere and its emphasis on investigation rather than combat.

Arkham Horror gets as close to the feel of a RPG that I can imagine in a board game. You start with a character sheet and collaborate to explore the board, collecting helpful allies and items, while trying to find and seal gateways from another world before you are overrun by monsters and demons.

There's a lot of rules to the game, and you'll need at least one person in the group who is familiar with the game (at least to the point of seriously studying the rules). But since it's a cooperative game you can still enjoy it while learning as you are going on.

It's biggest problem, for us, is its length. The BGG time is four hours, but it can easily take six or more. It's not a game you can play in an evening unless you are already familiar with it. This property means it doesn't really fit the characteristics of a Eurogame, I've included it here mainly because it's a game we bought.

(By reading this description you have lost 1 SAN point.)

Each turn a player chooses a travel card from a deck and decides whether to use a card to travel to the next city. The winner is the player who gets around the world using the least days, although I like that this doesn't correspond to turns in the game.

Carcassonne centers around placing tiles. Each round you get a random tile, which you have to place with the other tiles according to simple matching rules (each side must match the sides of the tiles you put it next too). As you place tiles you may also place workers (referred to as "meeples") which then allow you to score points. For instance if you place a meeple on a river, it will score one point each time you extend the river.

The game begins with a single tile, but soon spreads out over the table, each time the draw of the tiles leads to a different shape with different challenges. Much of the art of the game is deciding how to use your limited store of meeples, you only have a few, so you need to place them where they can get the most points.

The simple rules and randomness of the tile draw make this a good gateway game. It's also easy to pack the tiles into a small bag for travel, but you need a clear table surface to play it on (so it's not always a good bar game, and certainly not good for an airplane).

Carcassonne comes in different versions. The original version has many extensions. Hunters and Gatherers is a later version of the game, and many people consider it a better worked out 2.0 version. But if you prefer games with extensions, then you may prefer the original.

This is a rare eurogame with dice, but like Settlers of Catan, the dice influence what you can choose to do, rather than the outcome of your choice. Each player builds up an estate of tiles on a simple hex grid. Each turn you can either take tiles to put into a holding area, or place those tiles onto your estate. The dice and color matching constrain where you can place the tiles, so your decisions are constrained by what places you have available and competition with other players for who gets which tiles first.

We've found this to be an absorbing game, striking an appealing balance between the ease of play of Settlers and the strategic elements of Puerto Rico. Indeed I heard it described as a blend of Settlers and Agricola, which I think sums it up pretty well.

The theme of Caylus is that of a developer in a medieval town. You have a fixed number of workers, each turn you can pay them to either work on the King's castle, or to build commercial buildings in town. There are a limited amount of actions available, once a player places a worker to take an action, that action isn't available to anyone else. As the game continues you gain victory points by royal favors, the buildings you build in town, and various other actions your workers perform.

Caylus is one of those high-thinking, low-randomness games, comparable to Puerto Rico and Agricola. Indeed I find the mechanics very similar to those of Agricola. Each turn you have to decide which actions to take, how to string together a good set of actions to build up a strategy, and keeping an eye on what everyone else is doing.

The biggest difference with this pair is that Caylus has more potential options. You choose which action space to build now that you, and everyone else, will use later. Each action space has its own capabilities, providing different paths to scoring victory points. This open-endedness means there's more effort to learning the game, a property that's very similar to Race for the Galaxy. Like RftG there is a clever ideographic system to describe what each tile does. All the rules are expressed on the board and tiles in this form, which is useful and satisfying once you learn it.

Citadels was the first tableau-building game I came across. Like other tableau building game, each turn a player may draw cards and build cards in her tableau. In addition players take a role for their turn which gives them different bonuses or action choices.

I wouldn't recommend this game as a first tableau-builder as the others all have an advantage: San Juan is better for a simple travel game, Race for the Galaxy is better for a more complex game, and 7 Wonders is the all-around best pick for this type of game unless you need one for travel. But despite this lack of comparative recommendability, it's still a fun game to play.

Dominion is a card game, where you gradually build up a "dominion" of cards. Each turn you have a subset of your dominion in your hand, some of it is in your draw pile, some in a your discard pile. When your draw pile is empty, you shuffle your discard pile and transfer it to your draw pile (similar to Magic the Gathering). The art of the game is to get the right combination of cards that will allow you to gain victory point cards rapidly. But since the victory point cards are useless otherwise, too many of them can gum up your hand.

The game's mechanics are very simple to learn, but there's a lot of subtlety in playing well. There's also a lot of variety. The base game comes with 25 kinds of "kingdom" cards, of which you only use 10 per game. The different combinations of 10 from 25 results in lots of different game-play, even without the many expansions that add more kinds of kingdom cards to choose from. Like many modern games, it's designed from the start with expansions, so I gather they don't feel bolted on when you play.

The length works well too - as a shorter game you can get a few games in an evening, or as a filler with another game. The fact that it's just cards makes it a reasonable travel game - you can also take just a subset of the cards to reduce the size further.

In the theme of Istanbul you a merchant moving around the Bazaar, trying to gain rubies by picking up goods in your cart, selling goods in the market, gambling in a tea house, visiting a mosque, and bailing a family member out of the police station. The bazaar is represented by a game surface of 4 by 4 grid, which you move around. Each tile on the grid represents a different place, and the skill in the game comes from picking a good set of movements that will get your rubies quicker than the other players. The grid is laid out randomly with each game, which forces you to rethink your strategy with each play.

The result is a delightful middle-weight Eurogame, complex enough to be absorbing, but easy to learn and play. The movement mechanic works very well with the bazaar theme.

Metro is a tile placement game where you build up a very surreal Parisian metro system. Each turn you take a tile and place it onto the board, with the fun element that your aim is to build the longest routes, requiring lots of wiggles, in order to score the most points.\

I've tried a few cooperative games (where the players work together to beat the game), but Pandemic is the one that we own and like the best.

Each player plays a health worker who travels around the world trying to find cures for four diseases before they get out of control or you run out time. The players have to balance effort on finding the cures versus fighting disease outbreaks. Each player gets a random specialist role with particular skills that can be brought to bear; each game will involve a different combination of specialists. There's also randomness in where the disease outbreaks occur and how the outbreaks divide amongst different diseases. You have some ability to make the game more difficult as the players get better at the game.

There is a newer edition to the game from the one that we have, although the changes seem relatively minor. We bought the "On the Brink" extension that increases the number players to 5, adds some more rule variations, and provides cool petri dishes to store your disease cubes. (Other extensions can increase the player count further, but we haven't tried them.)

There is another cooperative game by the same designer called Forbidden Island. This has identical mechanics to Pandemic but with a different theme. Our feeling is that if you have of these games it isn't worth getting the other one.

Unsurprisingly, the theme of this game is building up a power generation and distribution company. Each turn you grow the size of your company and supply power to some cities, earning you money to further build your company. As your distribution network gets bigger, you can spend more to upgrade your capability. The game ends once one of the players reaches a certain size.

I like that Power Grid engages three distinct mechanics in the game, which interplay both in your own play and in interaction with other players. Each round these three mechanics come into play:

• A few power stations become available and there is an auction to determine who gets which. You have to decide how important each power station is to you to decide how much of your money to spend on it.
• You buy fuel for your power stations, with prices varying between rounds. You have to decide how much fuel to get, particularly if you want to store fuel for future rounds.
• You extend your distribution network over a map (of Germany or the USA).

You need to keep all three elements in balance by deciding how to allocate your money. You're also in competition with the other players for all of these three resources, so you have to respond to their actions.

I like how the game has just enough randomness in what power stations come up for auction to keep the game flowing with a mixed ability group. There's less variety between games than other Eurogames, but enough richness in the way that the mechanics interact that I keep wanting to play. On the whole the nice balanced elements of the game make me put it on the top of a list of Eurogames to get once you've got into them.

Puerto Rico has long been one of the prime strategic eurogames, spending several years at the #1 position on Board Game Geeks's game rankings. It's a game that rewards strategic thinking, and there's a lot of indirect conflict between players. Although more recent games (Agricola, Dominion) have challenged its leading role as a strategic eurograme, it's still one of my favorites.

The theme of the game is building up a Caribbean estate. Each turn allows you to add plantations, buildings into your town, recruit colonists (a euphemism if I ever heard one), and produce, sell, or ship the resulting goods. Puerto Rico introduced an innovative turn mechanism where each person chooses a type of action to do in their turn, which they and everyone else carries out. There are more actions than turns, so the flow of actions through the game is both varied and subject to tactical choice.

There's hardly any randomness in the game, which increases the value of strategic thinking. There's also a lot of contention: limited buildings you can build, limited slots for selling and shipping goods. The strategy also depends on recognizing that early in the game money is essential to build up your production facilities, but steadily emphasis shifts so by the late stages of the game the focus in on victory points. Managing that shift is essential to doing well in the game.

Race for the Galaxy is a tableau-building card game. Each turn you may draw cards, build cards into a tableau in front of you, and use the cards in your tableau to gain resources to build more cards and score victory points. Its mechanics are much influenced by San Juan, indeed I see it as San Juan with lots more richness, options and thus complexity.

Like San Juan, Race for the Galaxy uses the mechanism from Puerto Rico where each player chooses an action to occur during the turn carried out by all players. The difference with San Juan is that there are many more cards to choose from, and also more actions that can happen. With so many cards, Race for the Galaxy introduces an ideographic system to explain what the cards do. Learning the ideograms is crucial to understanding what to do during the game, this appeals to some players but is a turn-off to others (similar to Caylus).

This open-endedness also means there's a lot of variation between plays. The essence of the game is working to get the best out of the random cards that come your way, forming a strategy to make best advantage of your early cards, but being able to tune that strategy depending on the cards you get later. The card draws introduce plenty of randomness into the game.

Like most tableau card games, this is a good travel game. The cards are easy to carry and you only need space for the tableau on your table.

Race for the Galaxy plays quickly because everyone does their turns simultaneously, at least once people have learned the ideograms.

We got the first two extensions which add more players, more cards, and some more game-play. They seem to work well, although I've not played with them as much as I'd like.

San Juan is a card game whose theme and some mechanics are borrowed from Puerto Rico. It's main mechanic is a tableau-building card game. Each turn you may draw some cards, choose to build some cards into your tableau, and use the cards in your tableau to build resources getting you more cards. At the end of the game your victory points are based on what you have in your tableau. From Puerto Rico it borrows the mechanic of each player choosing an action for all players to do during the turn.

Although the theme and many of the buildings are strikingly similar to Puerto Rico, I find San Juan quite a different game to play. It's a good deal less intense (hence my lower complexity rating), has more randomness (due to the card draws), and plays much more quickly. I don't think that there would be a high correlation between liking Puerto Rico and liking San Juan.

San Juan is very similar to Race for the Galaxy in mechanics, but significantly less complex. There are far fewer cards to learn in San Juan, so you can get a handle on the options more quickly.

San Juan has become a favorite travel game. The cards fit into a small pouch and you don't need much table space to play it, so we've enjoyed it in cafes, bars, and economy class flights.

"Settlers" is the game that introduced many people (including me) to Eurogames. Playing it involves an abstraction of settling an island. Each round players acquire resources, which they can use to build structures, which allow them to gain more resources. There's more interaction between players than in many eurogames with Settlers due to trading of resources.

The game is quick to learn and play well, which makes it an excellent gateway game into eurogames. (Ticket to Ride is a touch simpler.) The island is dealt out randomly, so the various configurations provide replay variety. Resources appear based on die-rolls, which adds an effective amount of randomness to the game.

We've played this game a lot and my rating my well be lower than it deserves due to over-familiarity.

I'm very happy that Jeff Patton gave this game to me (a thank-you for writing a forward for User Story Mapping). It fills that handy spot for a game that plays pretty quickly, is simple to learn, yet is absorbing enough that you usually want to play again.

The game primarily a tableau building game where you build your tableau based on three sets of four cards revealed in a market. To buy cards you use a combination of chips and the cards already in your tableau, the most valuable cards costing more. The chips and cards yield money in five different jewels (currencies) and the art of the game is deciding what jewels to build up in your tableau to both score victory points and to help you buy more valuable cards. The theme of the game talks about building up a jewelry store, but this theme is wafer thin - so would not appeal to those who dislike more abstract games.

This is also a game which is an example of the pleasure of nice components - the chips are sturdy casino chips. Everyone that's played remarks on how they somehow make the game more fun than a functionally equivalent yet cheaper alternative.

The quickest way for me to describe this (assuming you know the allusions) is a cross between Sim City and Alhambra. Like Alhambra each player buys tiles from a common market area and builds them in their individual zone. Naturally, given the name, these zones are suburbs in Suburbia, the tiles are things like housing developments, factories, and casinos. The art of the game is choosing the right tiles to buy, and placing them in your suburb to maximize their impact.

The main difference, for me, between Suburbia and Alhambra is that the there are lots more ways in which the tiles interact. You don't want to place a Freeway tile next to a residential tile, but gain by putting it next to a commercial tile. In addition as the game develops you are increasing both your suburb's income and its reputation, the latter becoming more important as the game goes on. You also have a random selection of tiles for each game, which adds a lot to the replayability.

I like this game a lot for its theme, which is fun, and that it strikes that nice balance between rules that are simple to learn yet absorbing to play.

This is a recent purchase for us, after playing with some friends who had it. What appealed to me was the different feel of this game compared to most Eurogames - with a more central role of direct conflict in the game.

Each turn a player moves either ward bosses or immigrant groups into New York's wards - the immigrant group move giving political favor chips for that group. Every four turns you have an election where player face off in each ward for an election, the winner often decided by who spends the most favors in that ward. It's these periodic elections which provide the unusual level of direct conflict.

The game also has lots of room for dealmaking (I won't go into your ward if..., I'll let you win this ward's election if you let me win....). This dealmaking further adds to the high player interactivity forced by the elections. (Although we have only played it a couple of times and the dealmaking wasn't that high, I feel it would be much higher with players who gravitate to that.)

So although it's too early for me really to know how much I like this game, I am drawn by its different rhythm to most of the other games we have.

In Terra Mystica each player plays a race of magical people who are settling a land by building and upgrading settlements on a hex-mapped terrain. Terra Mystica is a good fit for people who dislike randomness in their games: there is a little randomness in the setup of the game, but that is all. Furthermore there's no hidden information either, factors that make this game a similar game to Agricola.

Significantly different to the other low-randomness games in my list is the faction mechanism to increase replayability. The players select from a set of fourteen factions (races), each of which has its own special powers. Your choice of faction, in combination with your opponents', has a huge affect on your strategy and leads to a lot of variation between different plays.

A downside to this game is the amount of rules to absorb. There are many nice mechanics in this game, but they all combine to make it a lot to learn. This complexity also leads to a long game, I've read it takes 30 minutes per player, but I'd double that until you're more familiar with the game than we are. At that length, we've found it dragging towards the end with four players, despite the close finishes. My biggest peeve with the game is that the victory points are fiddly to score, so that it's easy to forget to score some, and then be unsure if you did later on. Consequently It's easy for the margin of victory to be less than the margin of error of forgotten VPs.

That said it's an absorbing game, and most people we've played it with have enjoyed it, even with a single game. My sense is that if you play often the volume of rules and the fiddly scoring cease to be a problem, which explains it's very high ranking on BGG. I, however, don't play enough to see these effects, so it doesn't fit as well for my gaming habits.

Through the Desert is truly an abstract game, the desert and the appealing pastel camels have no bearing on play at all. The aim is to place camels to build long lines or enclose areas. We haven't played this game too much, perhaps due to its abstract nature, but I feel it deserves more table time than we've given it so far.

Thurn and Taxis was a princely house that played a big role in starting postal services in the 16th century. The theme of the game is building up a postal network over a map of central Europe. Each turn a player draws a card from an open deck and tries to make a hand of linked towns on the map. Cashing in these hands leads to victory points in various combinations.

Ticket to Ride occupies a special place in our game collection due to how it manages to be an interesting game with a remarkably low complexity. The game mechanics are simple to explain and pick up - it's ideal for non-gamers and younger children. Yet despite its lack of strategic depth, it's still an enjoyable game for more intense gamers.

You start with a map of the US, on which there are various rail routes. To ride these routes you have to draw matching colors of cards from a draw pile. Each turn you can draw some cards, claim a route, or acquire tickets that detail longer routes. You score points for claiming routes and fulfilling tickets. The latter are only revealed at the end, thus keeping people unsure who is winning.

Ticket to Ride has rightly been a very successful game, and has spawned a bunch of variant games. These are their own games, not expansions.

I'm usually wary of spin-offs of popular games. Often they are designed after the original success and I'd rather get a new game completely. But I'm happy to have made an exception with Ticket to Ride Europe (which is a variant of Ticket to Ride). I find the Europe version does just enough to make it a different game, while preserving the key mechanics from its original. In general I prefer to play the Europe version although I like having the original for new people.

I got this game partly to try a Kiesling/Kramer game, but mostly because of the cool theme of uncovering Mayan temples. Each turn a player uncovers a section on a map, perhaps revealing a temple or treasures. You then have ten action points to expend on moving your workers, uncovering temple layers, or gathering treasures. At periodic intervals you score based on the temples you control and the treasures you've got.

We've had TransAmerica for a while, and it remains one my favorite short games. Play is on a map of america where each player secretly has five cities that need to be connected into the railway network. Each turn a player build two railway segments, but unlike most railway games there is only one communal rail network that players extend to reach their cities. I like the way that this element adds a twist to the game tactics - you have to think about how to best use what everyone else is doing.

Each player plays a viking group indulging in trading, raiding, and settling across a map of dark ages Europe. The theme and some nice mechanics make for an enjoyable game, but not one that we've dug out that often. We have the original Ragnar version of the game.