The Tao of Gaming

I think Yehuda's summary is quite fair.

In comparison to Chess, your opponent is actively trying to interfere with your plan, and tactical opportunities arise. Even at the most strategic, tactics will sometimes overide strategy. Clearly in PR you have less strategic influence because there are random elements and more players (which decreases any individual player's control). Strategy has a scale, and is not a binary "all or nothing." Even if you think Puerto Rico is strategic, Chess is more so because there is more capability for meaningful long term planning.

My experience playing PR (roughly 75 games) has seen me thinking less and less about strategy as I play more. In the early games I would say "I'm trying this plan or that plan". With chess, my early thoughts were tactical; my thinking became strategic as I went on. I considered chess more strategic as I played more. My views on PR have moved in the opposite direction as I gained experience. I haven't heard anything (from people who've played many more games) that leads me to think that "my mind will be opened" after another 75 games. In my first dozen games, I debated "The shipping strategy" vs "Building strategies" vs mixed strategies. I don't bother thinking about that any more. What I think about is maximizing some utility compared to other players. I've laid out how that works in some detail.

I looked over the games I have reviewed and few of them qualify as strategic. I don't think that's surprising - they are mainly high chance multiplayer games. There are also a ton of auction games, where evaluation of a play's worth (possibly future worth) is key, just like I think evaluating an action's value in PR is the most important feature. Some of the games are more strategic than others. The ones that I do think of as strategic tend to be games that I haven't played deeply. Remember, after 10 Puerto Rico games, I considered it strategic. [I suspect that the reason that Chris voiced the opinion despite so few games was that, as a frequent wargamer, he plays more games that allow for long term plans (even if they have more luck than PR)].

What this discussion has revealed is that I set the threshold for "strategic" above Eurogames. Certainly the question of "Which games do I find strategic" leads me to say "damn few that I've reviewed." And most of the games that I want to claim I haven't played often enough. I'm not claiming the games are shallow, but almost all of them deal with efficient use of resources and evaluating unknowns. Charting a long term course of action isn't a big part (although planning matters). I don't think I've ever really thought about it formally like that, but now that I've written it out it seems obvious. European games are not, as a general rule, strategic. [Perhaps the abstract are, but I don't really play them]. I think it's simply that my baseline is Chess.

I'm not worried about insulting PR (or European games in generally). It's clearly one of my favorite games in my favorite genre. I'll concede its one of the more strategic games in the genre, although I firmly believe that there is a dominant strategy with refinements being worked out.

Are Eurogames devoid of strategy or long term thinking? No. But I don't think they are strategic games, in general. They are on the low end of the scale. Clearly, other people have different scales. I mean, when Chris wrote that PR wasn't strategic, I thought "Obviously." The comments on his site surprised me.

"Strategic" means different things to different people. That's pretty obvious in hindsight, and maybe glib, but there you have it. I'm usually very loose and informal on word usage, so I wondered if I had used 'strategic' indiscriminently in the past. On my old website, I've called exactly two games strategic: Titan the Arena and Stephenson's Rocket. The former isn't, and the latter was one of the ones I mentally said "that qualifies" when browsing earlier. So I think that I've always had this belief/bias, but it never occurred to me to bring it up before.