Board Game Invasion

The field of board gaming is in a state of ongoing revolution. While the new wave of board games, sometimes called “Eurogames,” is highly variable, they tend to share some traits in common. I’m hardly an expert, but I’ll try to lay out a description…

1) They are relatively less luck-based and more skill based then most board games. At the same time, they contain at least some measure of luck or at least randomization, which makes them difficult to “solve” or to determine an optimal opening sequence (When I was in high school chess club, the part of chess that always bored me was learning the various openings and gambits, etc.)

2) They have a medium complexity of rules. They are in general more complicated than most of the games you probably played as a kid, but less complicated than the war games that have long enjoyed a fanatical following. The best of them (in my opinion) have rules that may seem rather complicated, but fit into an intuitive whole such that after having played them once they mostly make sense.

3) They take a medium length of time and have a defined endpoint that consistently gets closer rather than farther away. A good example of a game that fails this criteria is Monopoly. Not only does this game go on forever, at any given moment there’s very little way to determine just how much longer it will take to end…unless one person is very dominant, in which case the game will still drag along, bumming the other players out, until that prson wins. Eurogames are thus far easier to get together and play in the evening for busy people who need to go to work the next morning.

Now some individual reviews, from a fairly arbitrary list of games…

The freedom to enjoy repetition

I’ve been rereading Clara Claiborne Park’s The Siege for work, and I came across the following passage today in the epilogue. (The Siege was one of the first ever accounts of parenting a child with autism, and remains one of the best written and most comprehensive. Jessy was 8 when the book ended and 23 at the time of the epilogue; she is now almost 50 and an acclaimed artist. There’s a great deal in the book that inspires thought, but I’m endeavoring to restrict myself to one topic at a time.)

Now and then, over the years, someone has been interested enough to show Jessy a new bit of math - logarithms, simple functions, the transformations of equations, Fibonacci numbers. She grasps them quickly, but she doesn’t enjoy them as she did her repetitive arithmetic. She has passed beyond what I can teach her, and her father, who loves and honors mathematics, is discouraged by the contrast between what she seems able to do and the sterile iteration of what she wants to do with numbers.

-Park, 300

I started thinking about how this idea that Jessy’s father doesn’t want to teach her math anymore because she won’t do anything with it, she just wants to do repetitive patterns over and over. Playing with numbers in this way made her very happy, but seeing her do it made her father, a professor, sad, because it didn’t speak to the potential he saw in the math, in the numbers.

This reminded me of my own divide between creativity and technical skill. Somewhere along the way, I have had the idea very thoroughly ingrained into me that having the ability to create something new is far better and more attention-worthy than simply having the technical skill to do well something someone else already thought up. Or at least, I think this about subjects that I care about. In the arts, for example, I was far more interested in 2-D art and writing than I eventually was in dance and music, because I could be creative in painting, drawing, and writing, but I was unable to easily think in terms of dance or music, and therefore didn’t see myself progressing very far beyond simply acquiring the technical skills required for the imitation of others. So why continue?