Spotted Online – Kotaku Discovers Eurogames . . . and Annoys Me
Maybe it’s only because of my career, but whenever I see an article like “Forget Game of Thrones. The Best Board Games Are German-Style.” I feel both excited and disgusted all at once. I mean, it is awesome when a video game site covers boardgames, but do they have to do so in a manner that seems intent on insulting an entire class of game?
You go onto Board Game Geek or the Internet’s greatest board game review siteâ„¢ and look at what the other recommended games are. Not Ameritrash, but the other kind. The ones without cards with pictures of shotguns on them. The Eurogames.
Now I’ve played my fair share of “Eurogames” and enjoyed them, and I’ve had a lot of fun with “Ameritrash” games, but this entire article feels to me like the author is attempting to tell us that until we’ve played “Eurogames” we haven’t really had fun gaming. Which, unsurprisingly, is completely not true. Every single one of us is an individual with our own tastes and ideas of what makes a game fun and none of us are right or wrong. We need to play what we enjoy.
I love boardgames getting more attention in the world, but I’d rather see positive articles and not articles that require bashing an entire type of game before the article can even get to its point.
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Well, clearly kotaku is wrong because the best board games are the ones with the name Vlaada on the box. Being more serious for a second, this is why I can’t read Kotaku. Condemning an entire group of games is just bad journalism.
And I gotta say, the best part is easily him taking BGG’s ratings seriously right after lumping Battle Star Galactica (Rank: 22!) and Game of Thrones (Rank: 27) into his not-fun pile just because they’re ‘ameritrash’.
Psh. Unless you’re playing Victorian war games themed around a conflict so obscure nobody even knows about it, produced in Benelux and with the original Dodo-skin board and ivory pieces, you’re not gaming at all.
More importantly, where have they been for the last (arbitrarily picks a number) 15 years??! Euro boardgames (and American games styled after European ones) have been around a while. Catan has been on shelves at Target for two years already–and it was HUGE in the gaming community for years before that.
Sorry, but I can’t stand Kotaku. They have become a very contrived and amateurish site. The whole “your not cool if you play anything else” kind of attitude is very immature and frankly terrible writing. Kotaku is, in my opinion, a terrible site. All their articles come off sounding like this.