The Design of a Soulless Euro

How To Make Euros (Take One)

Components. Any soulless Euro starts with components. You’ll want a board, of course, with lots of different spaces. Don’t worry if it coheres or not: the play’s the thing. Then you’ll need some pieces to move around that board. For classic euro style, use cubes. New-fangled games shape those cubes into wheat or cows or bricks to pretend they have theme. Don’t fall for this trick. For modern euro style, use meeples.

If shouldn’t need to be said, but your cubes and meeples must be made out of wood. Don’t even think of using plastic. In fact, if you try to offer painstakingly molded plastic bits as  a Kickstarter upgrade, your backers will probably insist that you offer wood as an alternative, and then they’ll never use those plastic bits that you spent months molding and OKing, at the cost of your schedule.

Resources. Your euro must feature lots of resources. If you can fill your over-sized box with so many resource components that it’s not as vacuous and space-wasting as most eurogame boxes, you’ve done well. Most of your resources will do mostly the same thing, but nonetheless create some artificial rules so that some are required in certain situations and others in different situations. Catan created the idea of arbitrarily combining otherwise identical resources for specific purposes, and that’s stuck, even if Catan fails other soulless-euro tests.

If you’ve done well, strategic players will want to acquire all of your wooden cubes (or meeples or whatever) during the game, lusting after blue cubes when only red cubes are available, and dreaming of green meeples when the board is filled with red, yellow, and blue. Make sure that they constantly have to decide between these different resources, and they’re never able to get everything that they want. Any good soulless euro is about prioritizing some colors of components over others, then angsting over the colors not taken.

Mechanics. Your soulless euro must have a mechanic. Obviously, this should be worker placement. Unless you’re trying to go for the nostalgia market, in which case you might use majority control instead. The other possibility for nostalgic play is, of course, auctions. It’s unclear why anyone ever thought that was a game mechanic instead of an administrative nuisance, but somehow it caught on. If anything, auctions are more soulless than the other options.

Once you have one mechanic, you’ll need to add a second one. Integrate them. And voila!, you have the core of a soulless euro. If you’ve carefully adhered to the souless euro mechanics, your game will either be worker-placement/auction (Keyflower), worker-placement/majority-control (Dominant Species and definitely not Scythe, which is neither), or majority-control/auction (El Grande).

Don’t be seduced by the more evocative mechanics that have invaded the euro market, particularly not deckbuilding. Though Dominion does have some soulless elements, with its abstracted cards and victory points, Donald X. is a New Yorker, not a Euroer, and the deckbuilding genre that he created is in danger of giving soul to euros, thanks to all the words and pictures you can include on a card.

Conflict. Don’t let your players fight. Warfare is entirely out. So is take-that. No nasty cardplay. No offensive actions. In fact, no direct conflict. It makes euro players cry. Do include conflict, but make sure it’s entirely indirect. Maybe players want the same action spaces, maybe they want the same very limited components, maybe they want to accomplish the same goals. If you can make your conflict so indirect that reviewers complain that your game is multiplayer solitaire, you’ve nailed it!

Randomness. Catan used dice. Do not follow in its footsteps. Though Catan is one of the foundational designs of the eurogame community, its dice were clearly a mistake. Dice are bad, m’kay? They’re too random.

Instead you must hide your dice away. Most games prefer to do that with cards. They work just like dice, but they have room for pretty pictures and lots of text*. (* Actually, they work nothing like dice, because they draw without replacement instead of drawing with replacement, but that’s just design, so don’t worry about it.)

In addition, you can hide randomness in the chaos caused by player interactions. That’s the almost invisible conflict noted above. If players can empty resource supplies, get actions in advance of other players, or take those limited spaces on the board, they’ll mess up other players actions, and that’s almost as good as the roll of the dice. Imagine a meeple stamping on a worker-placement space forever; that’s good euroconflict design!

Victory. Finally, someone’s got to win. Well, you could give players the chance to celebrate their shared victory, but unless it’s a co-op game, everyone thinks that’s a cop out.

Make sure your players score lots of points. Lots and lots. You need to know definitively who was in first, who was in second, and who was in third (and no one cares after that). If you have just have a few goals in your game, people will argue about whether they were on the verge of getting the rest, but if you have lots of points, the score is pretty obvious.

How do players earn those points? Through everything. Just look at all the things that players can do in the game, and assign point values to the end result of each thing. Maybe you should do some playtesting to balance out all the points, to give more points to high risk things or difficult things and fewer points to obvious and simple things. Maybe … .

You’ll need a score track to go with all of those points. Make sure that the top players will wrap around the track. Maybe even two or three times. Because that gives them some psychological benefit that they’re smashing the game or something. And if you get your score track drawn out around the board and it wraps at some weird number like 80 or 73, don’t worry about. The players will figure it out.

And that’s how you make a euro.

How To Make Euros (Take Two)

Step One, go out and find yourself some wood,
You could get cubes, but discs are also good.
Not cylinders because they roll,
Avoid plastic, it has no soul.

Build a board with lots of placement spaces
Take those cubes (or discs) and place them.
Create conflict by limiting the spots,
Make sure some spots will be wanted lots and lots.

Score the game in many different ways,
Spaghetti scoring is all the craze.
Victory depends on what they chose,
Now you know how to make euros.

How To Make Euros (Take Three)

1. Place cubes on board.
2. Push cubes around board.
3. Arrange cubes to score points.
4. Codify all of your rules.

(Euro design is simple!)

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8 thoughts on “The Design of a Soulless Euro

  1. Hehe! Love this! Chuckled out loud (even at work)!

    A couple of things also worth mentioning are turn order and everything’s an auction.

    Everyone knows, if they look, that worker placement is really auction in disguise. Players decide which item is worth the most for its current value and pay that value. Auction.

    Its even more obvious that majority placement is auction in disguise. Each area is an auction; majority placement just means you’re running multiple auctions at once.

    So to design a soul-less euro you have to use auctions. Maybe multiple types at once.

    And then there’s turn order.

    In other types of games, turn order is straightforward; either everyone goes at the same time or people take turns until the game ends. But soulless euro players always want turn order to be terribly important, so make sure that in addition to your cubes, they are competing over turn order as well. This is easy; just use whatever your primary mechanic is and have turn order also be determined by that mechanic. Alternatively, to make turn order even more important, have your turn order mechanic be something opposing all your other mechanics; if players are spending money, better turn order makes things more expensive; if players are getting income, more income makes their turn order worse, etc. Having a lose to win mechanic for turn order may seem like an easy out, but euro players go mad over this sort of thing.

      • Only barely–Caylus was October, 2005! But I see (and cede) your point.

        I think I disagree with 14-year younger you on trick taking games in general–auctions are fundamentally a way to allow the players to determine the value of a game resource rather than having the designers do so–and since in a typical trick-taking game, the value of tricks is equal, the equivalence breaks. Except, of course, that the value of tricks isn’t even a little bit equal even in straight-forward games like bridge and spades–because at issue is also leading the next trick (this is even more obvious in asymetrical trick-taking games like The Great Dalmutti and its many siblings). So, of course you’re right, but I think a trick-taking game (ignoring bridge and Tarot, which actually contain auctions in play) is much less of an auction game than a set-majority or region-majority game; the guessing and optomization aspects are more dominant, with the valuation that makes something an auction less so.

        On the other hand, Knizia’s For Sale is an auction game whose second half (indisputably a one card blind auction) feels like a trick-taking game.

        No question that auctions exhibit one big pillar of modern board game design, that being competitive comparativr valuation of game elements!

        • When I talk about my Grand Auction Unification Theory nowadays, I remember auction = majority-control = area-control, but I only remember the references to trick-taking when I actually look back at the article. So, yeah, I agree with your disagreement.

          • *nod*.

            I’ll note, though it’s harder to see it from here, that while Caylus is almost certainly the progenitor of the worker placement game (yes, other games played in the space first, but it was Caylus that spread the idea and spawned imitators), it was itself descended from Puerto Rico (whose mechanic is ultimately a worker placement game where the workers are conceptually and you only have one) which is descended from Meuterer and Veratter (where you have a similar exclusive actions that deny those actions to other players, but the selection of said actions is partially secret).

  2. Of course you also need a resource pyramid, involving three or more of: coins, cubes, cards, tiles, victory points.

    Example: coins buy tiles, tiles produce cubes and coins, cubes buy cards, cards give victory points.

    If you can read the value of each resource at each stage of the game, you too can be that annoying person who wins games straight out of the box by building low-level stuff early and harvesting high-level stuff late.

    • Yep! I simplify that with “different colors of components”, but yours is a very accurate expansion.

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