Weshalb sind moderne Brettspiele so klasse?

[Happy Meeple-spielbox]

Hi all,

I am posting this link in agreement with the webmaster.

We have just translated most of the "Happy Meeple" pages in German now. I am certain that quite a few of them will be of interest to Spielbox readers but I wanted to post one of them in particular.

This page was originally written for our press pack in order to show the outside world why they should look into modern board games. As it happened, we got a few positive feedbacks on it. That's why we had it translated in German and I am posting it now. Hopefully, some of you will find it useful as a point of reference.

http://www.happymeeple.com/de/medien/weshalb-sind-moderne-brettspiele-so-klasse/

I wish you a happy meeple!

Nicolas.

[PzVIE-spielbox]

From the article:
"Moderne Spiele spielen sich flüssig, es gibt kaum Wartezeiten. Um Langeweile zu vermeiden, spielen die Spieler manchmal alle gleichzeitig. Und bei zugbasierten Spielen sorgen die Autoren (Erfinder) dafür, dass das Spiel auch dann interessant ist, wenn man nicht am Zug ist."

While this is true for family and most Ameritrash games, your average modern Eurogame does exactly the opposite; it offers so many ways for scoring that it is necessary to seriously think through every possible move and what it means for every other player. If you do that in recent designs from Stefan Feld, Uwe Rosenberg and many others, you need a few minutes to optimize your turn.

[Happy Meeple-spielbox]

You are right PzVIE. It shows the difficulty of generalizing.

I hope it is a good read anyway.

[ringo84]

In modern Euros I can see the trend to shorter turns. While 10 to 15 years ago it was popular to have quite a number of action points to spend on your turn and do multiple actions (e.g. Torres or Dungeon Twister), you do now pretty much one action if it is your turn (e.g. pretty much all worker placement games). This reduces thinking and planning quite a bit. But still, heavy Euro and strategy games involve heavy thinking almost by definition, so there will always be some downtime. The article is perhaps rather directed towards the audience of family games, in which turns are usually shorter and do not require as much thinking.

[Dumon]

Well, to be honest...

...to most people with more in-depth knowledge (basically, most of us who prowl this and similar fora) the article generalizes and simplifies too much. Actually, it oversimplifies games in general, already in the heading.

But then, it is not meant for us, and that is why I do not find it that bad, actually. As it tackles many things that "were wrong" with the traditional games, I think this might work in some situations as a nudge for non-gamers to warrant a second look into games in general.

If it should, however, be not a "sales pitch" but a genuine article providing unbiased information...

...then it is not really a good one.

Dumon