Holy cow, when did eurogames get so beautiful? That's the dominant thought coursing through my grey matter when I look at the Kickstarter page for The Great Library, the newly announced strategy board game by Eagle-Gryphon Games. It's the second heavy eurogame by the publisher, in fact the second by the same designer-artist duo of Vital Lacerda and Ian O'Toole, to absolutely blow me away from a visual standpoint.
The Great Library, in which players take on the role of librarians in this Ptolemaic wonder of the ancient world, is intricate and beautiful; it looks like a 1000-piece jigsaw, not a game you could actually play.
Lacerda and O'Toole's previous title, Speakeasy's warm color palette and art deco styling invites you in before you even look inside the box, and within is a board covered in artwork, plus well-crafted wooden pieces representing gangsters, barrels, and trucks. These games are works of art, and I'm finding I can't actually look into how their mechanics work because I'm too busy soaking in the lovely details.
These games stand out to me because they stand so contrary to my image of what a eurogame looks like. The Castles of Burgundy, Agricola, Terraforming Mars, all well-heeled titles that rightfully rank among the best board games ever made, yet all fall on a spectrum from ugly to average. You wouldn't cover these boards with a tea towel when an elderly relative with a heart condition comes calling, but neither would you hang them up on your wall.
Eurogames have traditionally prioritized function over form, and it's always seemed like a sensible choice to me, simply because they have so much function to fit in. Sometimes a game needs to look like an excel spreadsheet because otherwise the dozens of icons and components that one must understand to play it properly will be incomprehensible. Or so I thought.
Assuming it's any good, The Great Library proves that complex board games can still have top-tier graphic design. And while it was the double-punch of it and Speakeasy that made me sit up and take notice, these two are by no means the first games to make that point. Instead, they're just the latest in a trend that's certainly not new, but seems to be accelerating recently.
This trend has passed me by because I'm not a natural eurogame player. Or perhaps more accurately, I don't know anyone else who is and lives in close proximity to me. It's a battle to get a eurogame onto the table, and for me to make the effort it needs a really good theme and a lot of buzz around it.
Ark Nova, which I began playing this year, is the perfect storm: a world class game and ideal for an animal obsessive like me who wants to spend most of his birthdays at zoos. But say what you like about Ark Nova - okay we will, here's Tim Linward's review - it's not a beautiful boy. The visual design is cheap and cheerful, and Feurland Spiele hasn't even changed things up with a new lick of paint for the recent spin-off, Sanctuary.
So with my most recent excursion into eurogames confirming the usual stereotypes, perhaps that's why I've let the likes of Luthier, Endeavor, and The Gallerist pass me by. But now it's become unmissable. More and more, euro-style board games are taking pains to be beautiful!
What's your favorite gorgeous eurogame? Let us know over in the Wargamer Discord.