Board Game Jargon Primer, Part 4

We return again to our series of articles on unfogging the palimpsest that is modern boardgaming jargon. I’m trying to keep the list in as roughly an alphabetical order as I can to make it easy to find your favourite confusing term. This is part 4, but you can find links to the whole series below.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6
• Part 7
• Part 8
• Part 9

Economics game

The umbrella term “economics game” refers to games that encourage you to manage a number of resources in a simulated variable market. The key systems in play simulate production, distribution, trade, and consumption of goods, as well as potentially creating and managing trade routes and expanding business empires. You know–an economy. It doesn’t sound like something that would be amazing fun but economics games are some of the most highly-rated and well-regarded boardgames out there. Some of the best examples of economics games are created by famed designer Martin Wallace; Brass Birmingham is considered one of the most accessible of these. Other brilliant examples are Friedmann Friese’s Power Grid and Juma Al-JouJou’s Clans of Caledonia.

Engine-builder

This has nothing to do with anthropomorphic trains living in a bleak hellscape under a despotic ruler in a large black hat (and if this reference is too obscure, you don’t have children). When you construct a boardgame engine, usually in the form of a set of cards or tiles in a tableau (q.v.), you are attempting to build a sequence of actions or events you can trigger so that they cascade in a way that provides ever increasing amounts of points or resources, If you (ahem) play your cards right, the resources you gather will enable you to obtain better components to add to your engine, improving the interactions and resources and points you gain from it. Iterating through the actions to provide the resources is called running your engine, and in some of the best games the game ends just as the engine starts providing the best returns. This is a good thing because once an engine reaches peak performance, the game stops being as interesting, and usually the engine runs only three or four times.

Engine building is a staple of many Euro-style games (q.v.). Although many of these are seen as multiplayer solitaire (q.v.), there’s a definite delightful dopamine crunch that goes with watching a really well-built engine run, which helps explain their popularity.

One of the most beautiful games out there, Wingspan–by designer Elizabeth Hargrave and illustrated by Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo, Natalia Rojas, Greg May, and Beth Sobel–is an engine builder where the engine components are various birds, and the environments into which you place the birds are separate, parallel, interconnected engines.

If you prefer your engines a little more literal, there’s Steampunk Rally Fusion which sees you building an actual machine engine with cards that you draft (q.v.). It’s a race game (q.v.) so the engine does more than just grab points for you.

Not all engine building games are tableau building games (although you’ll often see the two together). Concordia is one such counter-example: more strictly it’s a deckbuilding game (q.v.) with engine building elements that use a point-to-point movement (q.v.) mechanic.

Euro game

A Euro game is the direct antithesis of Ameritrash style games (q.v.), and minimises combat, luck, and demonic activity for raw strategy, brainwork, and old European towns. The term originated as a way to distinguish between games that treasured high luck elements, dice rolling, and wildly variable outcomes (originally designed and produced in America) and games that found minimal luck and predictable outcomes based on decisions. If the game uses dice, you seldom roll them, and when you do there are multiple ways of mitigating a horrible roll. In this way, luck is minimized in favour of making strategically meaningful decisions based on what you have in front of you. The two terms have started losing meaning as more modern boardgames have started to blur the lines between the two broad genres, and games are richer for the visual ambiguity of their genre lines.

Family game

Not every game is appropriate for younger children, or for groups of adults who are unfamiliar with more complex games, or for groups of mixed adults and children, and this is where the “family” genre comes in. Such games usually feature simpler mechanics, high levels of interaction, and often very little in the way of subtlety. You can tell a family game by asking yourself, “Would I play this with a group comprising an eight-year old, an eleven-year old, a thirty-two year old, and my mom?” If the answer is “yes”, you have a family game on your hands. The ideal family game means that everyone at the table has fun and has an even chance of winning. Some family games don’t even have a “win” concept at heart, and exist purely for the comedic value it brings. They’re much like certain presidential candidates in that way.

Farming

To farm for resources in a game means to bend an unnecessary amount of time toward obtaining said resources. Usually, this is said in a way that implies gaining an unnecessary quantity of said resources, especially if holding that many resources breaks the game to the point where farming is a forbidden tactic in serious play.

Farming game

Not related to the entry on farming (above), but rather a more pastoral genre of games where the theme is about running a farm, complete with a menagerie and crops of all kinds. Just about every farming game is a Euro-style game, and some of the more technical ones even fall into the category of economics games, but the common thread is that you’re either plowing land, reaping crops, or rearing animals.

One of the most well-known farming games is Agricola by Uwe Rosenberg, a game set in the 17th century. It sees you organising and running your farmstead, as well as growing and feeding your family. It’s the very epitome of a farming game, and probably one of the most beloved examples of this genre.

FLGS (Friendly Local Gaming Store)

Short for “Friendly Local Gaming Store”; this refers to a brick-and-mortar shop run by the nice people who not only stock and sell the games, but also often run games evenings for those people who play collectible card games (q.v.), wargames (q.v.), or even just regular boardgames of all sorts. Although the terms originated to exclude online stores, scope-creep has all but ensured that almost all stores–digital or not–that stock boardgames are now termed FLGSs. Note that the term does not generally extend to stores that sell boardgames as part of a wider variety of goods, so it excludes the Walmarts, Amazons, Takealots, and other such agglomerated stores.

Flip and fill

Like roll-and-write (q.v.) games, flip-and-fill games came into being very recently, relatively speaking, and rely on players using a deck of cards as a randomizing mechanism. In this genre of games, players use the cards to determine how their player board (or more commonly, a player sheet) becomes populated with ticks, crosses, numbers, letters, or some other mark as required by the game. Strictly speaking, roll-and-write and flip-and-fill games are roughly the same; what distinguishes them is the way players obtain the information needed to fill their sheet, and the level of detail provided by the dice or cards. Naturally, cards can impart more as well as more nuanced information than dice can, so by their very nature deliver the more complex type of game. Mike DeLisio from the Dice Tower (q.v.) likes the term “noun-and-write” to broadly describe both types of game as well as any potential new varieties. No one else on the planet likes this term. [Not even the other people from the Dice Tower. -Ed.]

Welcome To… is a well-known example of these games, and sees players fulfilling the role of a district planning office assigning street numbers to houses and estates on their player sheets. The cards determine which house numbers are on offer, and what associated feature goes with each house number, such as pools, neighbourhood parks, and so forth. Its popularity has ensured that there are now several themed expansions for it, ranging from Halloween neighbourhoods to post-fallout districts.

Hadrian’s Wall lies on the other end of the difficulty spectrum of flip-and-writes, and gives each player two sheets to fill as they attempt to repel the Pict invasions by building up the fortresses along Hadrian’s Wall in olde England, back when the Holy Roman Empire was still A Thing. It’s not for everyone, and even as a group activity, Hadrian’s Wall feels like multiplayer solitaire (q.v.). Too much brainwork happens for the normal levels of talk at the table!

Gateway game

Boardgames have often of late been likened to hard narcotics, and you’ll hear terms such as “cardboard cocaine” getting thrown about–not to mention “plastic cocaine” for the mini-heavy (q.v.) dudes on a map (q.v.) style games that publisher (q.v.) CMON is famous for. Tip: No one has ever been jailed for dealing cards in a dark alley. [Yet. –Ed.]

The problem with modern boardgames is best paraphrased by noted boardgame critic, Jane Austen: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a […] man in possession of a good boardgame must be in want of another boardgame.” Okay, so she didn’t really say that but the sentiment still stands, and some people who start out playing boardgames end up collecting them instead, and end up with more just a single shelf-of-shame (q.v.). And like many hard narcotics, boardgames can be a bit of a drain on the resources, especially when a collection of ten games quickly turns into a collection of a hundred and ten.

I’ve digressed too much. Let’s step back a bit: a gateway game is seen as one that is entertaining enough, offers enough fulfilling decisions, and yet is simple enough for someone who isn’t neck-deep in the hobby to easily grasp and play. It’s a game that can be explained and grasped within the span of five to ten minutes, but the subtleties can take several games to discover. It’s a fool who, when asked about his boardgaming hobby, pulls out Twilight Imperium or Mage Knight as their shining example. As fantastic as those games are, they’re too big, too bold, too complex to hold the attention of one not yet hooked on the hookah pipe of minis and meeples.

No, for these poor souls, we haul out games such as Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, Splendor, Love Letter, or Wingspan. Even Settlers of Catan will do if you haven’t anything better. The point is to play a game with people that leaves them wanting more. If you’ve done it right, you’ve made a new friend to add to the weekly game night, and ensured that they will be buying new shelves to hold new collections of games.

The first step of addiction, as we all know, is admitting there’s a problem. This author isn’t admitting anything.

Grid-based

A game that is grid based has square or rectangular areas upon which the game action takes place, as opposed to hexagonal spaces (hex-based, q.v.). This can be a traditional board, or it can be polyominoes (q.v.), or even simple square tiles. Chess is one such example, and if we seek a rectangular grid, we can look at Chess’s Japanese cousin, Shogi. Carcassonne is a tile-based game, but the action takes place on an invisible square grid, and so falls under this definition.