I’ve been seriously playing eurogames for about 15 years now. The Settlers of Catan was my gateway — both because it was the first euro that I owned, back in the ’90s, and also because it was the game that got me interested in the rest of the euro field, in the early ’00s. My first month of recorded games in October 2003 is a set of classics: Domaine (2003) x2, High Society (1995), New England (2003), Serenissima (1996), Starship Catan (2001), and The Settlers of Canaan (2003). It shows how heavily the special Ks of Kramer, Klaus, and Knizia impacted me in those early days of gaming.
In the fifteen years that I’ve been eurogaming, the field has transformed pretty notably. I mean, change is a constant; I tried to talk about the ongoing transformation of the field in yearly reports for 2005 and 2006 but I eventually decided that the board gaming field was too slow moving for that type of yearly reporting to be meaningful.
But now it’s 15 years past my entry to the field … and you can see a lot of change in 15 years!
So, to close out this year, I’m going to talk about what I see as some of the major changes in the eurogame field between the start of this century and … today. Continue reading