Friends of ours recently introduced us to the board game Ticket to Ride, and we liked it so much we immediately bought a copy. In the game, players must gather resources in order to build train lines connecting various cities. The longer and more difficult to build your route is, the more points you accumulate. Each game takes about an hour, and there’s a good level of complexity and planning required. The game has been successful enough that there are numerous sequels and expansions, and I may pick up a copy of the Europe-based game to help my students visualize European geography.
In the course of looking up info about the game series, I found a Wikipedia entry for German-style board games. I had no idea that the nation had lent its name to an entire style of board games, but apparently they like themselves a lot of board games in Germany, with enough German-speaking board game critics available to award a prestigious prize called the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year). It’s interesting to read the Wikipedia entry explain what makes a German-style board game different than other board games, and it’s also interesting to realize that as much as I like to play board games, there are people who take them far more seriously than I do. This passage probably explains why I’ve had more success getting my family to play Ticket to Ride than I have with other games:
In contrast to games such as Risk or Monopoly, in which a close game can extend indefinitely, German-style games usually have a mechanism to stop the game within its stated playing time.
So if the German approach creates games I can play with my family without needing to take a week off from work, all I can say is, Danke.