Themes and mechanics, chickens and eggs.

Ya gotta love an guy that claims "German Games are Fradulent" right there in the article title. Greg Aleknevicus makes some good points. If Ra (Egyptian gods) can be rethemed as Razzia (gangsters), how good a job are those mechanics doing representing the theme? Well, not so good, which is pretty obvious.

His point about Tikal is well made too. If we're all "exploring" the wilderness, why do I get to decide where the new terrain goes? That's a good question. Further, he says (as a positive example) that if you strip all the theme from Duell, you could probably still decide that it looks like fencing. Agreed.

However, when he talks about Union Pacific, he says, "Some people have suggested that they prefer playing Union Pacific without a board at all." That is silly. Like it's ancestor Acquire, Union Pacific's game board provides competition for key connections which can be denied to other players.

That other Greg in my blogroll, Mr. Costikyan, rebuts this article here on his weblog. He points out that German board gaming is a mass market phenomenon, and should be rightly compared to American games like Monopoly and Life, to which they are far superior indeed.

He sums up with, "Eurogames rock. A-H published some of the finest boardgames the planet has ever seen. These are not contradictory statements." Every game design has theme, and every game design has mechanics. Sometimes, these things are intertwined. Sometimes, they are not.

A designer either approaches a game from top-down (theme first) or bottom-up (mechanics first). When a game can pass the test of removing all window dressing and the mechanics illustrate the theme, like in Duell, that's a special event. We tried to do this with LOTR. But it's not the only test for which games are good. Not at all.

Personally, I'm more of a top-down guy. I remember a board game on the Battle of Britain in which you rolled dice to attack. Some of those dice had sides that would hurt you (if you rolled a roundel instead of an iron cross as a British attacker, for example). The guy I played with thought this was ridiculous, and wouldn't play the game again. "Dealbreaker," we called it sometimes at The Old Place. Sometimes, when I notice a mechanic like this, it just sticks in my craw.