"These Games of Ours"

Last night was the monthly meeting of the games group coming out of the Atlanta Board Gamers. Once a month we convene in a restaurant a block from our usual games store. The organizer is my friend Ward Batty owner (with his wife) of Batty' Best and host of our Sunday game-playing sessions.

Therein lies the story. This Sunday represents the last time the group will be able to meet as Ward is closing his doors for good. Already the shelves are nearly bare as people have taken advantage of the last minute deals.

Ward's closing is part of a trend. Another group of gamers with some overlap has been meeting in The War Room, a store most closely resembling a warehouse where I used to drop my sons off to play Dungeons and Dragons. By contrast, Ward's place was what O'Henry would have described as a clean well-lighted place. Every female member of the group I know took a look at the respective bathrooms and declared it no contest. Now the War Room too is shortly going to close due to a hike in rent.

We are still negotiating new venues and different arrangements. There is an established group near GA Tech, although that is problematic for a number of members who live north of the city. Somehow it is unlikely to be exactly the same.

Of course it remains to describe what exactly we play in this club. I roughly divide my attentions between two classes of games. The first are two player abstracts which I largely play online via correspondence. These will be the subject of another entry. The second are games variously known as German games, Euro games or as one mailing list ridiculously likes to phrase it: TGOO (standing for "These Games of Ours").

There is much debate as to what exactly constitutes a "Euro" game. These games often include some element of luck (cards, dice, etc.), but most often have a significant element of strategy and often allow for multiple strategies. They tend to last under an hour although there are exceptions to all these guidelines.

The archetypal games of this type that more or less launched the genre in this country is the wildly popular (in Europe) boardgame The Settlers of Catan. Of course there are outliers. In America Sid Sackson was designing games that generally are accepted into this category dating back to the early 60's.

I found out about this group and the genre in general by an indirect route. By reading Games magazine I discovered the online store Funagain Games and from there I discovered the Spielfrieks mailing list. A quick search for "Atlanta" in their archives yielded Ward and his store's website and the group of which I am now a member.

One of the central resources for people interested in this type of games (or many other types for that matter) is the website www.boardgamegeek.com. It is essentially a database containing reviews, comments on thousands of games, as well as user-created "geeklists" centered around central themes some useful and some frivolous.

One of the features of this site is the ability to play games via a web interface, notably the game Tigris & Euphrates one of the major accomplishments or Reiner Knizia a math PhD who is one of Europe's most prolific game designers and one of my favorite (yes one gets to the point where one has favorites designers!).

I have infected family members with this interest, most notably my daughter. I brought her to the games group a week and a half ago and she was amazed at the ability to get a game together without having to browbeat her brothers to play.