Whatever happened to Ameritrash board games?

I played many mainstream board games as a child, but I first entered the world of 'hobby' board games in 2013. All manner of games enamored me, but my favorites were titles like Dead of Winter and Eldritch Horror, those that offered immersive themes and dramatic narratives. Back then, there was a name for games like that. It's one that, 13 years later, seems to have disappeared - 'Ameritrash'.

What is Ameritrash, anyway?

The term is almost as old as I am. We can track its usage back as far as the year 2000, when it was first used in several rec.games.board forum posts. The discussions center on luck-based 'Beer and Pretzel' games, which are defined in opposition to the abstract, strategic 'eurogames' that were popularized by German designers.

Curiously, it's quite hard to pin down exactly what counts as Ameritrash based on these forums. Some exclusively use the term to refer to mainstream family board games like Monopoly and Chutes and Ladders, while others attach it to hobbyist games like Titan, Talisman, and War in the Pacific. These games weren't always American, but they were apparently part of a distinctly American design philosophy.

The phrase began appearing on BoardGameGeek in 2006, and by then, it was considered a full-fledged fad. Its meaning had also evolved slightly. Luck was still a primary component of the Ameritrash genre, but Robert Martin's original Geeklist places a heavy emphasis on the game's theme (usually fantasy, horror, sci-fi, or military). Elaborate titles, garish art, plastic minis, and intriguing 'toys' all apparently helped build the Ameritrash vibe. Conflict was a key part of gameplay, with dramatic mechanics like 'Take that!' and player elimination appearing often.

Ameritrash as a piece of jargon was never fully defined. In some corner of the internet, people are probably still arguing about it to this day. Most would probably agree with a definition posed by Jeremy Kalgreen in 2007: the driving force behind an Ameritrash design is drama. The mechanics, theme, and components all exist to create and elevate said drama.

That about sums up the giants of this genre: Arkham Horror, Zombicide, Twilight Imperium, Battlestar Galactica, and more - heck, even War of the Ring has been defined as an Ameritrash game. That last one, though, is known as a wargame first and foremost - a genre of games that, alongside euros, was used to define what an Ameritrash game was not. It will prove an interesting example when we move onto our next question: what happened to Ameritrash?

Where did Ameritrash go?

Ameritrash has always had a whiff of controversy about it, and it's not hard to see why. Some genius just smooshed 'American' and 'trash' together. Since its earliest days, some fans of the games bound to its banner have smarted at their favorite titles being compared to garbage. Bonus insult points if they also happen to be American.

Not everyone found the title hurtful, of course. I certainly didn't back in the 2010s. Trash TV and trash cinema are well-loved media genres with their own cult followings, and I revelled in my title as a trash lover.

People may have bickered over who was 'better' in online forums, but back in the days when I didn't even know BoardGameGeek existed, lines were more easily blurred. I could play Agricola one day and Zombies!!! the next, without a hint of discourse darkening my door. Those were simpler times.

Still, it can't be denied that the name caused contention. There was enough ruffling of feathers that BoardGameGeek created an alternative way to categorize games previously labelled Ameritrash: 'Thematic' games.

That label tells us a lot about the current state of Ameritrash games. Take, for example, the current best board games, according to BoardGameGeek:

Five out of those ten are classified as Thematic games with a capital T. Considering that eurogames held near-total dominance of the top 10 in the 2000s, Ameritrash, it would seem, is alive and well. In fact, it's doing better than ever! Or is it?

The new Ameritrash

Of these five, Star Wars Rebellion is the only one that's exclusively a Thematic board game. Even Twilight Imperium, a former poster child for the Ameritrash movement, is considered to be a mix of strategic and thematic gameplay. As the hobby has grown, board games have had to find new ways to innovate. That means inventing new mechanics and micro-genres, as well as borrowing from genres that a game might not usually touch.

This is how we get a thematic wargame like War of the Ring. This is how we get to a point where games are defined less by a broad design philosophy and more by its specifics. Gloomhaven is not an 'Ameritrash' game; it's a legacy dungeon-crawler with RPG elements. It borrows some of the drama-driven philosophy from games we would call Ameritrash, but it exists in an entirely different design space.

Games are no longer bound by the binary of strategic or thematic, and they're certainly no longer associated with specific countries. Germany may have kicked off the eurogame craze, but many of the designers of those strategy games in the BGG top 10 are from the US - or somewhere else entirely. Board games have gone global since the year 2000, and they're more diverse than ever.

Ameritrash, then, really is dead, killed off by the expanding horizons of board game design.

Except it isn't.

Purely Thematic games still exist. Star Wars Rebellion checks all the boxes, with dramatic dice rolls and oodles of minis to play out a cinematic space opera, right on your tabletop. Nemesis, a survival horror game where one bad pull from the token bag could destroy your chances of winning, is one of the most narratively satisfying games out there. Almost every Cthulhu board game on the planet is still milking the Ameritrash genre, from Unfathomable to Mansions of Madness to Cthulhu: Death May Die. We even have solo Ameritrash games now, thanks to Van Ryder's Final Girl series.

Ameritrash, as a design philosophy, hasn't actually gone away. In lending its influence to other genres, it has become less prominent, less distinct. Combine that with a name that's fallen out of fashion, and you have a label that's gradually faded into the background of board gaming.

Over a decade later, I still love my Ameritrash board games, whatever we're calling them these days. A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.