Euro vs. Ameritrash, Explained

Brass: Birmingham and Gloomhaven land in roughly the same bracket on BGG's weight scale, both comfortably in heavy territory. Sit either one down at the table and your group spends a similar amount of effort on the rules. From there, the two games have almost nothing in common. One is a tight economic engine about coal, iron, and canal routes, with the market doing most of the work that dice would do elsewhere. The other hands out a deck of story vignettes, has you kicking down dungeon doors, and cares more about whether your mercenary band's story is a good one than whether your turn was optimal. Weight measures how hard a game is to run. It has nothing to say about what kind of hard, or what kind of fun, you actually signed up for.

Board game people have argued about this split for decades, and the terminology says as much about the argument as the games do. "Euro" traces to a wave of German and other European designs from the 1990s built around trading, building, and indirect competition, usually with a spare, abstracted theme sitting on top of the mechanics. The other camp used to go almost exclusively by "Ameritrash," a name its own fans coined and mostly still use with affection. BGG's own site has drifted toward the gentler "Thematic" for the same territory in recent years: games built around dice, cards, miniatures, direct conflict, and a story you're meant to feel rather than optimize.

Euro design generally optimizes for a clean puzzle. Turns are efficient, luck is minimized or absent entirely, and losing usually means someone outplayed you rather than the dice turning on you. Puerto Rico and Agricola both reward the same kind of thinking: read the board, plan several turns ahead, and execute better than the player next to you. Thematic design optimizes for a moment instead of a puzzle. A card flip that goes catastrophically wrong, a betrayal nobody saw coming, a last roll that decides the whole game, all in service of a story that's more memorable for having gone sideways than for going according to plan. Twilight Imperium and Cosmic Encounter are built to produce exactly that kind of chaos on purpose, not by accident. Both traditions are doing real design work. They're just optimizing for different nights.

Most collections, and plenty of individual games, don't sit neatly in one camp anyway. Scythe borrows a euro engine and wraps it in faction conflict and painted miniatures. Gloomhaven runs on tight tactical math but delivers it through a legacy campaign built for story. Terraforming Mars has almost no direct conflict between players, but plenty of players who'd otherwise reach for a thematic game love it anyway for the tension of watching a shared board fill up. The split is a useful description of where a game's center of gravity sits, not a fence between two separate hobbies.

This matters here because weight is the only axis Board Game Menu actually sorts on, and weight was never built to answer this question. A menu can hand you a heavy main course that's rated correctly and still be the wrong kind of heavy for the mood in the room: a dense optimization puzzle when the table wanted a fight, or a dice-fueled brawl when everyone was hoping to sit and think. The weight number is simply never asked that question, so it has no answer for it. If a suggestion is technically the right difficulty but still feels off once it's on the table, that's usually why, and a reroll is the same fix here as it is for any other mismatch: quick, free, and no worse than the pick it replaces.

None of this is an argument for one camp over the other. The best shelves usually have both, for the same reason a good bookshelf has more than one genre on it. Some nights call for a puzzle. Some nights call for a fight. It's worth knowing your own collection well enough to tell which kind of night you're setting up for before the menu ever loads.