As I was exploring cyberspace today, I came upon this blog post about Settlers of Catan. One of the first things I noticed is that it's by a baseball writer for ESPN.com, Kieth Law. Ooh, I thought, board game news from ESPN! Unfortunately, the article has no drawn out comparison between sports and board games besides a short economic comparison at the top of the article. Law does, however, go into a nice history of Settlers, including it's relationship with games America had to play before Eurogaming worked its way to the US. Indeed, The Settlers of Catan was the first German-style board game to become popular in the US.
Law mentions in his article two aspects of the Euro-genre of games that I believe are too important to pass up. First, the games are competitive and fun from start to finish, although they rely WAY less on luck than anything that had been popular in the US before. Second, and related, there is no elimination from a game as there would be, for example, in a game of Risk. Allow me to make a quick note of my own on each subject.
First, I'll address the competitive nature of the games. Klaus Teuber, the designer of Settlers, hit this nail on the head, finding a perfect mechanic to keep everyone interested in the game. In Monopoly, once someone has landed (by a roll of the dice) on the correct spaces and made enough money, his victory is eventual, almost all the time. In Risk, once someone has a big enough army (and rolls 5's and 6's), there's little stopping her. In Settlers, however, the roll of the dice is far from the final say. Trading is an integral part of the game, and I've played plenty of games where a player is in position for the victory and the other players then boycott all trades with this person. The best player and the robber often become well acquainted by game's end, oftentimes only to see someone else pass him up for the victory. In other words, the game is designed to let players who fall behind make the ground and even snatch up a victory. Many (though not all) of the Eurogames do this, which make each game interesting from start to finish.
The other subject of note is the lack of elimination. As I said, it is related to the discourse above. It's importance is this: previous to 1995, when American board gamers wanted something of more heft than Monopoly, they had to resort to war games. War games take hours to play, and often a person will be on the brink of elimination and lose interest, else they will be fully eliminated and have to wait hours until they can get involved with the group again. Eurogames are not only played in a significantly shorter time span, but there is, as I mentioned above, involvement from start to finish.
In conclusion, that is why Eurogames are way better than American games. Just kidding; that's not what this post was about. But I do hope you found my rant in favor of Settlers of Catan to be helpful.
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