Pampero and Why Euro Games Don't Hit the Same Anymore 

Amazing!

@@NoPunIncluded For explanation: what happened in our session was that whenever two players with bulldozers stand on the same area, we would start negotiating "I use yours, when you use mine afterwards". So it really felt like a negotiation game. One player that did not participate in negotiations lost by a large margin. So I was really wondering whether Pampero intentionally wants to be a negotiation game instead of a "normal" Eurogame. And it could indeed be a good negotiation game if designed as such.

I think that all that's needed in that regard is some clarity of intention.

@@NoPunIncluded Yes, agreed, that would have helped, well, plus some streamlining on the rules and systems as you rightfully pointed out. Btw, it felt really surreal the moment when you pointed at me and spoke to me directly 🙂 Love your videos!

Well, conversely, BGG has millions of users. The chances of "JimB1" being one of our viewers were pretty slim. Consider me equally astonished when I saw your comment.

There's nothing wrong with liking the games you like. Lucky for us, It's not like the games on your shelve get any worse because of the new "hotness". I think I'll choose Great Western Trail over - for example - Ark Nova any day of the week.

@@erik-janvanoosten1450 It's not that i don't like new games, but many titles feel 'generic'. A retheme of classics with 2 new mechanics. In the last years i absolutely loved new games like Arcs, Wonderland's War, Nemesis that brought me a fresh experience. But the hobby feels like quantity of quality now. 20+ new Kickstarters every month. It's crazy. It's like checking 5 check boxes, slap some art on it and next. Pampero feels exactly like this kind of game.

A few months ago, Tom Brewster of SU&SD also said they weren't really going to look at Euros much any more (Lacrimosa was the title I recall him mentioning, but don't remember if it was on their podcast or in a video). This is kind of disappointing to me, because I mostly prefer playing Euros -- I enjoy the struggle to combine actions & resource earning to Do A Thing, and whether the mechanics are novel doesn't really matter to me. After all, people do crosswords or sudokus as a hobby, and crosswords don't show much innovation in their rules either; it's just solving a different puzzle using the same rules.

I feel like this has been going for much longer than that. Before 2020 there used to be year were there was a handful of very high caliber heavy euros. Now I'm happy if there's one or two per year, and even then I feel like they don't have the same durability.

It feels like a decade ago, we were exploring a whole new world of boardgames. The scene was new enough (and, more to the point, small enough) that new games were usually worth trying. Even the games which weren't amazing were often novel enough to be worth buying (or at least, worth playing when one of your more wealthy engineering friends bought it.) But these days, there is such an enormous backlog of great games that any new game has to be truly incredible to be worth organising a game night... let alone actually forking over your cash. And that's *before* considering the current issues of industry oversaturation, annual release dates, and general churn that seems to have resulted in twice as many games being released with only half as many of them being... you know, actually any good. EDIT: I say "these days", but i guess for me the cuttoff was some-time in the early 20s. I'm pretty certain that covid had nothing to do with it (it was already trending this way before covid), but the tipping point (or perhaps it's better thought of as the "culmination point") certainly coincided with that "post covid recovery period".

Bigger than Uruguay

We are a small country luckily

This is a “big” issue with a lot of the recent releases. Our homes and tables are not changing size but the games grow and grow. We need more games like first rat and white castle

I agree completely. This style of writing rules was very popular in older tabletop RPGs, they call it Ivory Tower Design. The designer sits in their ivory tower and throws seemingly random rules at the players, who are supposed to figure it out themselves. Modern Dungeons and Dragons still has a lot of it, weird and unintuitive interactions between rules that are kind of hidden away in the wording, such as the spell "see invisibility" technically not allowing you to see someone who is invisible. For board games, I recently bought Spirit Island, and I loooove the way the rulebook is written. When a rule seems random or easy to misinterpret, a little clarification is added afterward, explaining the purpose. And there are some strategy tips to get you started if you're confused. Lovely stuff

Like even then, you can have additional chapter on explaining ideas, strategies and themes. And reader can choose not to read it, if they will.

@@Sina-dv1eg Can you expand on "see invisibility"? How so?

@@SilvesterBoots Basically, in the 5th edition of DnD, there are many effects that allow you to turn invisible. The invisibility condition is described as making you undetectable by visual clues and giving you a bonus to dice rolls for hitting or avoiding attacks. That makes intuitive sense, if I can't see where your punch is coming from, you'll have an easier time hitting me. Now, we come to the spell "see invisibility". It is described with this sentence: "For a duration, you see invisible creatures and objects as if they were visible." So, a normal person might read this and assume that the person no longer has a bonus for attacking or avoiding you, since they are no longer invisible to you. BUT, the spell never explicitly mentions that the invisible person loses their invisibility benefits. The invisibility condition doesn't say that it gives you a bonus against targets that can't see you, just that it gives you a bonus. So, someone asked lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford what this means. And Crawford replied by congratulating the person's attentiveness, because apparently this was all intentional. According to the lead rules designer, see invisibility does NOT remove the combat bonuses that an invisble person has against you, even though you "see invisible creatures as if they were visible". This makes literally no sense, and they apparently changed it in the new book that came out last week, 10 years later. What really annoys me about this whole ordeal is the smugness when Jeremy Crawford explains it. I think you can easily find the video on RU-vid. If you CONGRATULATE a person for their astuteness because they UNDERSTOOD your rules, then your rules are absolutely terrible and should never have been published.

​@@Sina-dv1eg I see. Thank you for the answer. Yeah, it's Jeremy's gimmick. In all his answers he relied on how things were stated, so his words were more of clarifications of how sentences should be read. He, preferably, didn't change rules. Does it make situation better? No. It's the way he approached errata. Congratulating - is his way to relate to a person, in a good way. He generally tries to be welcoming. Doesn't solve such approach to errata for some. Meanwhile, they also (and many other systems) proposed gold rule - that rules are guides at best. So I mostly went with them as template and gone with what makes sense around our tables. My job being an arbiter. That's probably the main problem for DnD5 - it leaves too much on beginning GM. P.S.: That might be oft frustrating. People speak and expect differently. It's how many bridges they build to each other that matters.

Thank you!

I hope you are not forgiven for this.

I forgive you

same :D

Here is "JimB" 😀: My fellow players and I do like epic wargames (e.g. TI4), which often include some dealmaking aspect. So that's fine for us. But what we found disappointing is that Pampero comes with all the heavy-Euro mechanisms (resource management, card upgrading, additional point conditions etc) but then all of that appears actually pointless (pun not intended). With some streamlining and clarification on the intend Pampero could have been a good negotiation-Euro hybrid, just as pointed out by Efka...

Anachrony and Lisboa were pretty good. But yeah. I buy more games like Arcs than I do like Pampero these days. I have enough amazing Euros that I really don’t feel the need for more. White Castle kind of looks compelling, though.

@@johnathanrhoades7751 I love Lisboa, but it’s from 2017 I think so not exactly a new design. I tried Barrage at PAX last year, that seemed pretty decent

What games do you even play then, zombiecide?

@@KingSardine Undaunted, burgle bros, nemesis, ra, space base, planet x, inis, cosmic encounter, paperback, heat, arcs, catacombs, sheriff of nottingham, sky team, whitehall mystery, bargain quest, arboretum, decrypto, telestrations, diamante, long shot, monikers, cockroach poker, blood on the clocktower, rising sun, men at work, quest for el dorado, hive, ghost stories, fugitive, sabotage, cubitos, forgotten waters, chinatown……..want me to go on? I don’t get your point……

@@ManusNoble1988 Then maybe you are just into ameri games and dudes on the map

I think maybe let's consider that the spectrum of game genres is a bit broader than an ancient bgg feud would have you believe.

- The game is not thematic at all. Eg you build a wind turbine that is fairly expensive and only delivers a small amount of energy the moment you build it and then it just sits on the board for the rest of the game doing nothing The way I see it is the energy produced is continual. Any energy produced is usually measured in kwH, not static kilowatts. A windmill is producing energy and then a contract is the industry who is being serviced. The energy is not lost in a way, but rather being used by the contracts that you have taken. I agree with all of your other points which makes me struggle if that is a bad or good game. The unbalance in the cards or tower bonuses is probably Julian's way to let the players balance out the game by racing to get the best bonuses.

What is the list? I don’t recognize them all.

I think he was pointing to the "top ten games" link in the corner, not the euros behind him