In North America, the complex board games created during the latter half of the 20th century typically took the form of simulated warfare. In Risk, Axis & Allies, Star Fleet Battles, and Victory in the Pacific, players take on the role of generals moving their units around tabletop maps. But for obvious reasons, this wasn’t a model that resonated positively with the generation of Germans who grew up in the shadow of the Third Reich. Which helps explain why all of the most popular Eurogames are based around building things—communities (Catan), civilizations (Terra Mystica), farms (Agricola)—rather than annihilating opponents. The result is a vastly more pacifist style of a game that can appeal to women as much as men, and to older adults as much as high-testosterone adolescents. [...]
But the gulf between the traditional American games of yore—“Ameritrash,” as the genre is dismissively referred to by the board-game cognoscenti—goes beyond the divide between militarism and pacifism. In Monopoly, that great bonfire of friendships, the conflict between players is direct, brutal, and zero-sum: You bankrupt me or I bankrupt you. Which is why so many rounds of Monopoly finish on a note of bitterness. The one game of Monopoly I ever played with my wife ended with her staring me down icily and declaring, without any hint of warmth or irony, “I have never seen this side of your personality.” [...]
Since the Eurogame genre came into being roughly four decades ago (the inception of Germany’s Spiel des Jahres award, celebrating the “game of the year,” would indicate 1978 as a rough date of momentum-gathering), the earliest creators understood something fundamental about the psychology of gaming: While people can tolerate losing, they despise the feeling of being eliminated from a game in progress. And so most Eurogames are designed such that scoring comes at the end of the game, after some defined milestone or turn limit, so that every player can enjoy the experience of being a contender until the final moments. If this sounds somewhat Euro-socialistic, that’s because it is. But such mechanisms acknowledge that no one wants to block off three hours for gaming, only to get knocked out early and bide their time by watching TV as everyone else finishes up.
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