Eurogames Article from AimlessWords
The blog Aimless Words has published a great article "Eurogames - Join the Boardgaming Revolution" describing why every gamer and their mother should take notice about the emergence of Eurogames in the American market. The article also does a nice job explaining why all of these great family-games are coming out of Germany:
"It seems the Germans have a long and exciting history of gaming within the family; a practice that died a horrible death in United States in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Today, the true heart and spirit of boardgaming exists not within the hollow facade of Hasbro but inside the halls of dozens of much smaller companies in the U.S. and Europe such as Rio Grande Games and Mayfair Games. Rio Grande is an American company that was formed by Jay Tummelson for the purpose of publishing English language versions of German or Euro-games. Jay has experienced great success with Rio Grande and several other American companies have been founded recently to focus on this sector of the games market." - From: "Eurogames - Join the Boardgaming Revolution"
It's true that Rio Grande Games and Mayfair Games are both great Eurogaming publishers, but there are some also fantastically polished games coming out of American Companies, too. Most notable of which is Days of Wonder - those guys have a great line of titles, and their releases can stand toe-to-toe with anything that comes out of the German import market.
We're not nit-picking - we love both Rio Grande and Mayfair - we're just adding another to the list of the great modern American game publishers in right now.
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Posted by Critical Gamers Staff at October 31, 2006 3:08 PM
The greatest challenge with writing a sort of introductory article is such broad swipes don't leave room for all the greats. I agree with you - Days of Wonder has produced some very polished games. I own several of them. They also provide web-based play for some of their games. Always nice to jump online for a quick game when people aren't available locally.
A comment to my article noted that American eurogame game publishers are largely reprinting successful, or what they predict will be successful, games from Europe. This point holds a lot of merit as well. I haven't done a survey, but certainly the largest share of eurogames published in the US are still of European origin.
I don't have access to sales numbers, but perhaps one reason is that we just don't sell enough units here yet to create a large enough player base. With a larger player base, more people would be drawn to designing perhaps.
Of course, you know what they say about authors. They seek to write because of their love for books and reading and the experience of becoming a writer transforms their reading experience into more of an editing or critical experience. They lose the ability to read for pure enjoyment.
Another reason is perhaps that most designers are more of the hobbiest designer sort. After all, you have to be very prolific to actually make a living designing eurogames. And this assumes that your games are successful. Reiner designed for many years before quitting his day job.
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