The Problematic Pleasures of Efficiency in Goa and Navigador

As the hobby board game industry has grown, especially in the last five years, analog games have received much more attention both in mainstream media and in scholarship. Eurogames as a genre are characterized by thin themes and elegant mechanics, typically focusing on economic development and competition for resources rather than direct conflict. Although many games scholars, such as Greg Costikyan, go so far as to argue that theming in Eurogames is therefore entirely separate from gameplay, this essay argues that certain themes recur in Eurogames because they align with certain economic mechanics, and that this pairing of themes and mechanics is politically problematic. As Will Robinson notes, the thematic abstraction typical to Eurogames based on colonial themes is problematic because the Indigenous Other is abstracted out so as to erase the violence of European expansion. Although this is a trend that can be observed in many contemporary games, this essay will focus on two specifically: Goa (2009) and Navegador (2010)