Then there are others that are shamelessly transparent in the strategy department, but an exercise of tactics, which still involve interesting decisions. Aladdin’s Dragons involves all sort of interesting choices to make in the rounds of blind bidding. There’s bluffing and reading and claiming space and optimizing for now or later.

But yes, a decent set of players of Aladdin’s Dragons aren’t discovering how the game works. They’re mostly discovering how each other work.

Bridge is even worse… it’s mostly not about strategy, but about designing efficient protocols for exchanging information between partners. And actually, it’s not designing, but learning these protocols from your partners or other resources (unless you are very good with them and can invent something better yourself).

I think some problems with Chess can be solved by trying mutations. Don’t play the official chess. Change some rules and play. If it turns out bad, let it die. If it turns out fun, share with your friends, and let them mutate further. If your friends have other interesting ideas, try to combine them in one variant. Go forth and multiply, cross and mutate. Be a true follower of Evolution.

And about computer games… they are a very broad subject and hard to generalize about them. When speaking about computer games, most people think something like Counterstrike, but turn-based strategies, puzzles like DROD or roguelikes are much closer to board games than to Counterstrike, IMO.

I disagree with you about TtR in that regard, however; You’re dealt a goal; you have the option of risking bigger stakes by taking on additional goals, with a higher payout. And you have to accomplish them without clueing any of the other players in to what you’re doing (to keep them from blocking,) which brings me to my next point.

Board Games have an interesting and distinct extra element that video games largely lack. The meta-game. I think another commenter pointed it out, but I think it’s worth another mention. Board games inherit all the nuance of poker, but with more options. If you can convince your buddy that them move he’s about to make isn’t his best option, you can talk him into doing something less beneficial for himself/more beneficial for you, if you make the case convincingly. This aspect almost saves the “Decidables” — almost.

Carcassonne, I don’t think is decidable, I just think it’s somehow boring.

Games I would recommend trying, which I think would confront some of your generalities about Eurogames (though they may not be strictly in the genre:)
Wealth of Nations
Citadels

Arkham Horror and Pandemic are also both wildly entertaining, but are player-coöp, so are different animals entirely, but are worth looking into.

However, I have found a variant of chess that does seem interesting, and would be fun to play. It’s called “Stanley Random Chess,” or SR Chess. It plays like normal chess with one exception; each move you make has a 50% chance of being declared illegal, and a computer moderator will make a random – but otherwise legal – move on your behalf.

So you could get 3 moves entirely under your control, and then 10 totally random. Suddenly it’s not an army walking in lockstep, it’s a gamble whether or not your rook will be able to attack in two turns, or if he’ll be left next to an enemy pawn. You can’t plan ahead too far, because you don’t know what’s going to happen – your opponent won’t necessarily be making sensible moves either!

Alternatively, if you can find a copy of the game ‘feudal’ ( http://www.gamepile.com/details.php?id=9 ), it’s a two-to-six person game of similar-to-chess with a comparatively large 4-part board game that has a player-determined setup. Team play is especially fun. Play time usually runs around 20 minutes, so it’s not too terribly boring.

The thing I love about it is that it’s randomized and often far from balanced. You start out with a cool non-linear deck-building game, with a huge state space (to a first order approximation, the multiset of cards in your deck and your opponents decks). But then you select 10 cards from 25 (or more, with the expansion) to be the vocabulary of the game. Every game results in different combinations, and the “optimum” play for a given vocabulary isn’t necessarily obvious even in hindsight. Sure you could practice and analyze and perfect play for one particular combination, or for a particular core of 3 or 4 powerful cards, but that analysis will only apply very fuzzily to other situations. Some games come down to the wire, some result in complete domination. Some games we’ll try antithetical approaches, some we’ll be fine-tuning the same solution. In some games luck is a major factor, or the very first hand, but in other games the strategy can change 10 minutes in. It’s fast enough that you get to play a whole lot of different games in one session.

It looks like a Eurogame, but in many respects it’s the anti-Eurogame. I, too, hate the “count everyone’s resources to the last decimal point three turns before the end” aspect of PowerGrid. In Dominion, as far as I can tell the only thing you need to be counting is Victory Points (and I do OK even though I’m lazy about that). Although there are elements of attack and defense, the gameplay is more independent than many games, which works well for an exploratory game: if you want to try a particular strategy, you probably won’t be summarily curtailed by your opponent, you can at least give it a shot.

Dominion has delivered hours and hours of “learning to play a cool new game” experience for me, and for that I love it. It would be an exciting challenge to write a computer program to play it too: because the state space is so big and non-linear and there’s so much randomness, it’s pleasantly resistant to attack. Even if you could optimize a search to “solve” a particular combination of cards, the next deal will change the game completely.

Ironically, the reason I enjoy chess (at least, playing with people who are at a similar or higher level than I am) is because it’s a search for understanding. I *can’t* just look up answers to the conundrums I come across in games — I’ve already looked up the answers I can look up, and at this point it’s a matter of personal epiphanies. That’s really a lot of fun.

I’m learning Shogi (Japanese chess) right now, which I hope will have less of the “just go look it up” factors that western chess has. I’ll let you know how that turns out.

I haven’t been playing many board games lately, half because I don’t got that much time, and the games I have, I’m sure you’ve played, since they all rank highly on BGG. Agricola fits that mold you described perfectly – there’s actually minimal randomization, and it’s mostly about the execution. Dominion where most of the skill is determining how the cards interact, and go for that strategy all the way to the end, practically. Race for the Galaxy is what’s doing it for me right now, in that there’s actually quite a bit of luck, being a card drawing game where most of the cards are unique, but after the first expansion it’s actually quite incredibly balanced. You’ll still get bad beats sometimes, but you can define skill probabilistically, and to some degree, you can control how much risk/reward most of the time. Sometimes you’ll aim for a single strategy and win with that, but most of the time it’s about adapting to the adjusting environments and analyzing risks.

It’s late here now, so I need sleep too.. haha..

Which makes it even easier to trashtalk.

At that point, the only fun you can have is outlandish trash-talking.