Board Game Arena - Play Euro Games & others online (also general Euro thread)

[Lukasaurus]

Board Game Arena ([url]http://www.boardgamearena.com[/url]) is a website where you can play Euro games & various card games online with others for free. Absolutely free - no payment required ever. You can become a premium member through signups or money, which give you access to stats, but other than that, membership doesn't give you any advantages over other players.

If you are unfamiliar with Euro games, I'll let wikipedia explain (also, the pictures below are from the RL printed version of the game, but the online version maintains all the same artwork).

[quote]
German-style board games are a broad class of tabletop games that generally have simple rules, short to medium playing times, indirect player interaction and attractive physical components.The games emphasize strategy, play down luck and conflict, lean towards economic rather than military themes, and usually keep all the players in the game until it ends. German-style games are sometimes contrasted with American-style games, which generally involve more luck, conflict, and drama.

German-style games are usually less abstract than chess, but more abstract than wargames and train games. Likewise, they generally require more thought and planning than party games, such as Pictionary or Trivial Pursuit, but less than strategy games, such as chess and Go. Their rulebooks are typically four to twelve pages long and playing times are on the order of 30 to 120 minutes. These games appeal to a wide range of ages, though generally not very young children. The audience includes casual gamers, who play with family and friends, as well as more serious hobby gamers.
[/quote]

Some you may have heard of are Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride.

The games currently available on BGA are (and I'll get the descriptions from boardgamegeek):

[url=http://en.boardgamearena.com/#!gamepanel?game=stoneage]Stone Age:[/url]
[img]http://boardgame-reviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/stone-age-2.jpg[/img]

Players struggle to survive the Stone Age by working as hunters, collectors, farmers, and tool makers. As you gather resources and raise animals, you work to build the tools needed to build your civilization.

Players use up to 10 tribe members each in 3 phases. In the first phase, players place their men in regions of the board that they think will benefit them, including the hunt, the trading center, or the quarry. In the second phase, the starting player activates each of his staffed areas in whatever sequence he chooses, followed in turn by the other players. In the third phase, players must have enough food available to feed their populations, or they face losing resources or points.

[url=http://en.boardgamearena.com/#!gamepanel?game=dominion]Dominion[/url]

[img]http://www.gateplay.com/images/products/display/Dominion_Seaside_game_d.png[/img]
In Dominion, each player starts with an identical, very small deck of cards. In the center of the table is a selection of other cards the players can "buy" as they can afford them. Through their selection of cards to buy, and how they play their hands as they draw them, the players construct their deck on the fly, striving for the most efficient path to the precious victory points by game end.

From the back of the box: "You are a monarch, like your parents before you, a ruler of a small pleasant kingdom of rivers and evergreens. Unlike your parents, however, you have hopes and dreams! You want a bigger and more pleasant kingdom, with more rivers and a wider variety of trees. You want a Dominion! In all directions lie fiefs, freeholds, and fiefdoms. All are small bits of land, controlled by petty lords and verging on anarchy. You will bring civilization to these people, uniting them under your banner.

"But wait! It must be something in the air; several other monarchs have had the exact same idea. You must race to get as much of the unclaimed land as possible, fending them off along the way. To do this you will hire minions, construct buildings, spruce up your castle, and fill the coffers of your treasury. Your parents wouldn't be proud, but your grandparents would be delighted."

Dominion is not a CCG, but the play of the game is similar to the construction and play of a CCG deck. The game comes with 500 cards. You select 10 of the 25 Kingdom card types to include in any given play -- leading to immense variety.

[url=http://en.boardgamearena.com/#!gamepanel?game=raceforthegalaxy]Race for the Galaxy[/url]
[img]http://images.boardgamegeek.com/images/pic253528_md.jpg[/img]

In Race for the Galaxy, players build galactic civilizations by game cards that represent worlds or technical and social developments.

Each turn each player chooses one action, but the others will share in the actions chosen, each player secretly and simultaneously chooses one of seven different action cards and then reveals it. Only the selected phases occur. For these phases, every player performs the phase’s action, while the selecting player(s) also get a bonus for that phase.

[url=http://en.boardgamearena.com/#!gamepanel?game=gosu]Goblin Supremacy (GOSU) [/url]
[img]http://boardsandbees.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/nounet.jpg[/img]

In a fantasy world dominated by goblins, when the bloodmoon rises in the sky, a new war begins, and new warlords raise their armies.

GOSU is a hybrid of Race for the Galaxy and Magic: The Gathering. Each player raises an army of goblins made up of soldiers, heroes, magicians, and other classes.

Each turn, a player can play a new goblin, activate a goblin, draw cards or pass. When all players have passed, the player with the most powerful army wins the battle. The first player to win 3 battles wins the game.

[url=http://en.boardgamearena.com/#!gamepanel?game=puertorico]Puerto Rico[/url]
[img]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-usjBS8jVTKU/TaWy3Zx5HoI/AAAAAAAAABs/WI3fEEZwpKw/s1600/puerto-rico-game.jpg[/img]
The players are plantation owners in Puerto Rico in the days when ships had sails. Growing up to five different kind of crops—corn, indigo, sugar, tobacco, and coffee—they must try to run their business more efficiently than their close competitors: growing crops and storing them efficiently, developing San Juan with useful buildings, deploying their colonists to best effect, selling crops at the right time, and, most importantly, shipping their goods back to Europe for maximum benefit.

The game system lets players choose the order of the phases in each turn by allowing each player to choose a role from those remaining when it is their turn. No role can be selected twice in the same round. The player who selects the best roles to advance their position during the game will win.

There are several other games - Coloretto (a card collecting game), Haggis (no idea what this is), Can't Stop (once again, never played it) and Chestnut Table Gype (a dice based game).

I own or have played the games listed above in RL and at the moment, am really enjoying GOSU, a tableu building card game. Also, Race for the Galaxy is the game I have in my avatar. It's another deck building game similar to Puerto Rico. Very complex, but very deeply strategic.

[b]A word of warning - these games can be complex and there are no tutorials. However, each page above has a link to the game rules, and videos explaining how to play. If you have played the RL counterpart of the game, then you will be familiar with how to play. The rules are exactly the same. Also, if you have read the rules, and want a game, start one.. people are usually pretty helpful. I haven't played GOSU in real life, but I spent 20 minutes reading the rule book, and then started a game, explaining I was new to it.[/b]

If you feel like signing up, you could use the link below. It's a referral link, but if you would rather not you can just go to the site via one of the links above and join up that way. Referral helps give premium membership, but like I said above, there is no player advantage, just access to stats.
[url=http://en.boardgamearena.com?s=1678280]Referral Membership[/url]

If you aren't sure about any of the games, I would recommend playing GOSU first. It's easy to learn, the rule book is fun to read, if you are familiar with Magic The Gathering it helps a little bit (the game is not similar, but the way combos work and how cards can work together is).

So, enjoy :D (The images above are from the RL printed version of the game. The online version maintains all the same art)

[Rahkshi]

Oh god I love Puerto Rico, sign me up.

[Aerkhan]

Puerto Rico sounds abit racist.

[Lukasaurus]

[QUOTE=Aerkhan;31434391]Puerto Rico sounds abit racist.[/QUOTE]

It's a bit of an ongoing joke with players, but the game is just an abstract cube moving exercise with a theme (an awesome theme) on top. You could replace it with other themes (harvesting minerals from asteroids or whatever) and it would still be the same game, however, I think the theme helps lend to it's charm and replayability. Eurogames tend to be more historical in theme, without luck or minimal (ie, no die rolling), whereas Ameritrash (that's the actual genre name, and is used in a positive way) tends to be big on space/fantasy themes, tonnes of miniatures and die rolling. Some Ameritrash games people might be familiar with are HeroScape, Space Hulk, Space Crusade and Hero's Quest (all awesome).

(from the BGG wiki)

Ameritrash is "a catchphrase for 'American style boardgames.' In general, this means games that emphasize a highly developed theme, characters, heroes, or factions with individually defined abilities, player to player conflict, and usually feature a moderate to high level of luck."

There is a great deal of dispute over what Ameritrash means, even when it is accepted as a meaningful term. Many gamers would never call the "old" Avalon Hill a producer of Ameritrash. Ameritrash means something to most hobby gamers, but what it means still varies somewhat across communities.

Some mass-market American games can be considered Ameritrash, but many are not. The distinction is typically in the theme. A fantasy RPG style game such as TSR's Dungeon is clearly Ameritrash because it has a highly developed fantasy theme. On the other hand, an abstract game such as Scrabble would not be considered Ameritrash.

Players of "euro" games probably used it as an insult for poorly-developed American games (after Hasbro bought out Avalon Hill in 1997, the center of game design and development experience shifted to Germany), and then some fans of those American games adopted the term as a badge of honor**.

** I love Ameritrash style games, but most of the people I game are into the Euro games :P. Either way, I love both, so I win :)