My aim has always been to blend the elegance of the Euro style of design with the thematic immersion that you find in American games. For me theme comes before mechanisms.
Quotes about Ameritrash
Just as it took Japanese and German cars to show Americans just how ugly our cars were, it took the German game invasion to show us how ugly our games were. Oh sure, we had games that had lots of plastic pieces and big, mounted boards, but they were still ugly.
That then became my goal, to combine the American style of games, where content is more important than mechanisms with the German style of abstraction and ingenuity.
Every major classification in music literature (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Impressionism, Expressionism, Atonalism, Neo-Classical, etc.) started out as a pejorative and turned into the accepted definitive term to describe the genre. “Ameritrash” has become exactly that. You don’t need to be politically correct about it when the AT fans embrace the term themselves.
As soon as I feel the urge to make sound effects as I play, or trash talk my opponent, I know I’m playing an “Ameritrash” game.
