10 Best Eurogames (For New Gamers) | Collection Starter

0:00 ah continental europe makers of fine wine fine cheese fine sausage and video editors who are only okay at their job and really need to start bucking their ideas up am i right terry perhaps europe's greatest export however has been euro games if you want to know exactly what a euro game is and why they're important check out lori's video on the subject it's awfully good despite being edited by a continental european their games with less of an emphasis on luck and fighting each other and more of an emphasis on gradually building a solo plan or an engine or a strategy to achieve victory a lot of them big thinky boys but not all euro games are heavy enough to murder a horse or so complex you need a phd in tiny wooden pieces there are some beautiful lightweight euros out there and lucky you we found 10 of them this is a collection start and here are the 10 best euro games for beginners number 10 king domino can't be easy being a king everyone's trying to kill you you got to fight godzilla and that's a hassle and also you have to make sure your kingdom's a perfect square of matching terrain king domino is a super light family euro starting with your castle you're gonna build a kingdom one tile at a time these tiles are a bunch of different types field water wasteland yellow everything a good kingdom needs to thrive anything can connect to the castle piece but other than that you can only connect ends where the tiles match you know like dominoes some of the tiles have crowns on and at the end of the game you look at blocks of the same type of land count up the number of squares in that block multiply it by the number of

1:30 crowns in that block most points wins with bonuses for making a perfect square having a cast of the middle stuff like that it takes about 15 minutes but it's super addictive and actually teaches a nice common euro mechanic varying turn order see every turn you stack the available tiles like this generally the least valuable on the top most valuable on the bottom and the player who picked the least valuable tile gets to pick first from all the available tiles next go so you have to decide whether it's worth taking a bad tile now in order to get first dibs on an amazing tile in the future fun cheap and can be explained to granddad number nine takanoko it's got a little panda in it look it's got a little panda in it i resent having to say more than that about this game but i will takinoko is a very beautiful little game about growing bamboo in a garden planting tiles making sure those tiles connect to the water supply so the bamboo can grow or moving the little panda around the garden to eat your opponent's bamboo he's a dirty little you're a naughty little panda all players will be working on secret objectives maybe the panda has to eat certain amounts of bamboo or there have to be certain numbers of certain bamboo of a certain height or tiles have to be arranged a certain way it pushes the limit to being a euro slightly because it's got a die that you roll every turn but that's just to let you know what special bonus you get so it's fine it's fine it's a game that manages to be light charming whilst also being tense and mean everyone racing to complete secret objectives first and that panda is just absolutely wonderful until granddad makes him eat a bit of pink bamboo that you desperately need and suddenly you get very happy about panda's low birth rate your greedy little bastard number eight

3:00 carcassonne easy to play impossible to spell on your first google carcassonne is a lovely tile laying game where you and a bunch of friends build a french countryside it's serene and calm and also a little bit of a gambling game granddad loves gambling you don't need an inheritance it's fine see every turn you'll be placing a tile that connects in some way to the board roads connected to existing roads cities connected to bits of city but when the tile is down you can then choose to place your little meeple this is a meeple look at it look at the meeple you can place it somewhere on that tile if you place it on a road you'll get points for how long that road is when it's finished if it's in a city you'll get points when that city is finished maybe they're on a monastery they'll pay for a whopping nine points if it's complete but here's the catch if you put a meeple down that meeple stays on the map until the thing it's standing on is completed sure you'll want the thing you're building to be big when it's finished so you get loads of points but you can run out of meeples real fast and worse if someone else can connect one of their roads or cities to yours and their number of meeples on that thing outnumbers yours they rob you of literally all the points you were building damn france you mean it won game of the year when it first came out and despite what some considered to be a tepid setting it's become something of an essential classic in the hobby number seven splendor loads of euro games can be explained with one simple song buy a thing to make a thing to make a thing to buy more things it's a toe tapper splendor is one of the best regarded games of this type chiefly because it's so simple and tightly focused you've got a marketplace full of stuff to buy

4:31 a bank of really satisfying to hold chips and you can do one or three things on your turn collect some chips spend tips to buy a card or reserve a card which basically means can't afford this right now but i'm gonna take it away so none of you because goodbye at first oh granddad you've never been kind since the war the cards you buy can not only net you some points but they also count as a chip for future purchases that you don't have to spend so as you build your set up and up suddenly you're throwing around huge money attracting the attention of local magistrates he's the talk of the town so wealthy yes but does he know how to love splenda is a great little exercise in building a long game plan step by step which is the bedrock of euro gaming number six stone age let's talk about worker placements ah the sexy language of eurogaming worker placement is a pretty common thing in euro games and stone age is seen as one of the mechanisms defining games it can be summed up like this there's a map with locations on it if you put a worker on a location a thing will happen maybe you'll get some resources maybe get some tools maybe two of your workers will can make a new worker yes there's a sex hut in stone age granddad gets it i haven't had sex in 15 years jason and i want to [ __ ] if your worker is occupying a space no one else can go there because social distancing so every turn you're racing to see who can plop lads on a map first in order to enact a plan forcing you to come up with backup plans if someone gets there first stone age is a perfect example of worker placement there are so many different things to do and all of them are helpful and you need to do pretty much everything to pull ahead you need more workers to roll more dice another euro with dice breaking all the rules this list

6:02 rolling more dice increases your chance of getting more resources to build more buildings but the more workers you have the more food you'll need to feed them and also it takes time in the sex heart to get these workers lots of plates to spin definitely on the crunchy end of the brain puzzle number five constantinople but sorry i mean istanbul another worker placement game right now but with an extra little spatial puzzle twist thrown in istanbul not constantinople sees you navigating a grid of locations all the locations let you do stuff get goods trade goods for cash trade cash to buy room for more goods spend goods to get rubies gambling with dice rolls and guessing free one of your relatives from prison so they could run amok in the town sure why not lots of different ways to slowly get more to get more why'd they make it i can't say eurogamers just like it better that way the fun gimmick of istanbul not constantinople is that as you move around the grid you the master have to have one of your assistants with you on location to do that action i know showing them the ropes i guess internships are like that when you leave a location having done a thing you leave one of your apprentices behind meaning you'll eventually have to go back to that location in order to get them this is such a smart little trick because now you're not only factoring in the locations in your plan but you have to work out little routes and reverse routes to try and do everything with as little backtracking as possible we're getting quite rulesy now lots of bits here lots of tokens so let's calm it down a bit before granddad explodes number four point salad super simple little card game now if you like sushi go but played it to death point salad is

7:33 right up your alley it's a little more luck based than most euros but that luck gives it more exhilaration than annoyance and also the game takes like 20 minutes to stop complaining and re-rack there are six types of veggies you can collect sets of on the backs of all these cards are different ways to score maybe two points for every pepper seven points for an even number of cabbages maybe you can get eight points for having at least one carrot one onion and one cabbage there's over a hundred different ways to score and on your turn you'll either take two veggies or one scoring card from the market that's it super quick turns as scoring possibilities and potential combos appear and disappear while grandad stuffs himself with enough lettuce to sink a cruise liner at the end of the game you look at all the personal scoring cards that you've collected and add up all the points you've managed to get and then you immediately go again because quotes you've got the hang of it now number three seven wonders this is a grand stately home of board game design old respected a bit empty and isolating for my personal taste but undeniably well designed think of seven wonders as a step above games like sushi go in a round you start with seven cards take one to play play it then pass the rest to your neighbor while receiving the remaining six from your neighbor on the other side keep doing this until you've played six cards then you do that again twice more over the next two rounds in sushi go the scoring system's super tight which lets you pass enough information to more easily understand which cards your neighbors need and how best to screw them over in seven wonders it's a bit more complicated you need to set up systems of resources to pay for bigger better cards you need to make sure your army is stronger than your neighbors whilst also building sets that get more complicated as each age

9:04 occurs so it's a lot harder to keep track of what your opponents are building maybe your grandad loves this because other players not constantly being all up in his sh it gives him the room to breathe and carefully and calmly build a collection of cards for some this drastically reduced player interaction feels a little hollow like a bunch of people sat around a table working quietly on individual jigsaw puzzles by now you probably have an idea if sedate experiences like that are your bag but if you're in doubt give seven wonders a go it rewards planning and patience in ways that are really satisfying once you crack it number two lords of vegas on the other end of the interactivity spectrum this is my kind of thing lords of vegas is a game all about building casinos of various colors around the board when you own a casino tile you place one of your dice inside every player's turn one casino color will pay out if it's yours you get some money use the money to buy bigger better casinos you can gamble granddad your savings come back you can re-roll the dice in your casinos try and get bigger payouts you can merge your casinos with someone else's of the same color and perform a hostile takeover if you have the highest value dice in that building but they can try and steal their casino back by paying to re-roll their dice don't get me wrong it's really pushing it when it comes to the definition of a euro game it's hugely thematic got loads of victory determining dice rolls and it's mean but it's also a city building game collecting sets to drastically mitigate luck where a player's plan supersedes the fortune of flipping tiles a rolling bone so for me it counts at the very least as a bridge for gamers more used to monopoly to get into more

10:35 euro style games speaking of it also kills monopoly if you actually like that game please replace it with lords of vegas because whether buying property screwing over opponents the giddy rush when everything you've built pays off in one fell turn it does everything monopoly does but so much better and number one ticket to ride ticket to ride tops a lot of lists not just for family euro games but games to introduce people to board gaming in general set collection hand management road building end of game bonuses there are loads of fundamental euro game mechanics here in a game that's easy enough for even the grand daddiest of granddads map of the us on your turn you either take two train cars from the market from the deck play a set of colored train cars to lay down your trains on the board or take a new secret route card which will gain you or cost you points at the end of the game depending on if you complete that route there that's the entire game but it will rewire you to think like a eurogamer do you play the long game building bigger harder routes that'll make it easier for others to screw you over by taking a section of track that you really need or do you build quick enough and making lots of smaller routes but they'll net you fewer points there's no player elimination it's super difficult to tell who's winning till the very end and it sold millions for a reason it's the best possible entry point to this style of gaming better than katan in fact you heard me it's engaging strategic but with plenty of wiggle room for small failures and it can be bloody raucous and mean when that board gets crowded

12:06 for new gamers it is absolutely worth your time and that's our list what are your favorite euro games for beginners let us know in the comments please don't forget to subscribe to no rolls bart for more great games about the greatest hobby in the world and never forget to get on board