What Are German Board Game Ideals?

Here are a few of the German-style design goals. None of them are unique to German-style games, of course.

These games are usually designed so that no one gets "killed out" of the game. They're not wargames (which are usually for two people) and nobody wants to be kicked out of the game when it still has an hour to go.

They're usually designed in a way that limits a successful player's ability to extend his lead over the other players. It's no fun to play a game for an hour knowing you're going to lose. This feature is often called "balance."

German-style games are usually themed to some degree. Many people prefer games with a strong theme over weak-themed or themeless (abstract) games.

German games usually offer players little or no opportunity to attack other players, or to tear down what other players have built. Instead player interaction is mostly limited to things like trading and competing for unclaimed resources, territory, or other goodies. (Consider Settlers, where you can't steal or destroy another player's roads, settlements, cities, or development cards, which are the major sources of victory points. But you can "attack" in a couple of small ways, such as breaking someone's road by building a settlement on it, and perhaps by doing so stealing away the "longest road" award.)

Usually (in a good game, anyway) there is more than one effective path to victory. In Settlers, you might concentrate on building cities and going for the longest road, and neglect the development cards; or you might build less in order to buy more development cards in order to get points from the cards as well as the Largest Army award. You can try to get a balanced set of resource hexes, or concentrate heavily on one or two kinds and rely on trade to get what you need of the other resource types, and so on.

German games often have what I've heard called a "story arc," meaning that your tactics and strategy (if you play well) will change as the game progresses. In the early moves you may be developing infrastructure rather than going straight for victory points. In the middle game you'll be using your infrastructure to generate a steady stream of points; in the end game you may sacrifice all to grab as many final points as possible.

German-style games are usually for multiple players, and are to some extent designed for family play. They usually last no more than two hours, and may have mechanisms built into them to guarantee that they don't take all day. Often this means that the end condition is not one-player-wins-the-race, which might take a long time if players play poorly or concentrate on interfering with each others' progress. Instead the game will end when there are no more tiles left to place or cards left to draw, or after a set number of rounds, and the winner is then judged to be the player who has gotten the most victory points or acquired the most territory, or some other such measure.

There's gotta be more, but my Twilight Imperium crew is here and we have to continue battling for control of the galaxy, so I gotta go! I'm sure some other folks will chime in with more info.

Thought of another one: minimal down time. "Down time" is the time you spend twiddling your thumbs while you wait for other players to think and move. German-style games often try to keep all players constantly involved. In Settlers, you can collect resources and participate in trading on other players' moves. In Puerto Rico, you choose a role card on your turn and execute it, then everybody else gets a "mini-turn" doing something related to that role.

I don't think it's possible to divide all games into "German-style" and "non-German-style" (not that anyone has tried :-). Wargames have been appearing that are clearly influenced by the European style, for example. I just finished that game of Twilight Imperium, and it makes a good example. Rounds are structured to minimize downtime and give every player the chance to do something on other players' turns. The goal is not necessarily to conquer the galaxy or eliminate other players; instead you collect victory points which can be won in a variety of ways including by being a successful trader or improving your technology levels. On the other hand, you can definitely attack other players and win points by doing so; you can destroy or take what your opponents have built (although you can't take away any victory points that they've already won); and you can even get killed out of the game, although that seems rare.