Choosing which crank to turn on a machine knowing exactly the result each will achieve is not really that much of an impactful decision. 'Of the things I could do right now, this one will get me x points but set me up for x+5 points later, and this one will get me x+3 points and set me up for x+4 points later. I should do the second one.' That's not a decision at all unless you're really bad at math - with perfect information there's always a best path to take, there's only the calculations to do, and doing them creates the illusion of a decision. You figure out the thing that gets the most points and do that. Put the cubes in, turn the crank, points come out.

Now, don't get me wrong, creating a great and clever cubes-to-points engine is immensely satisfying and totally worthwhile, but the fact is that non-euro games have much more interesting decisions - who to attack, how to prepare for the unknown, how much is safe to risk on this outcome? Do I choose to make this roll because the reward is great even though probability isn't in my favor? How can I use what's available to me to overcome this turn of events? What did the other guy mean by that move, is he bluffing? Decisions that involve more than calculating a predetermined mathematical result.

These kinds of puzzles seem to me more interesting to solve. They feature the kind of decisions that mean something in real life - that pose moral questions or challenge my self-awareness or how well I know my friends. That put us in difficult places - we don't have perfect information, but we have to act anyway; how do I decide the path when the best path isn't clear? And then how can I make that path work for me even without knowing what's at the end? Should I choose based on my information or the information my character would have? Decisions like that involve interacting with ourselves and other humans in a deeper way than comparing our abilities to independently construct abstract point-generating engines.

It's pretty much a meme now that eurogames are 'deeper,' but that just isn't as true as it sounds. It seems obvious on the face of it because of their elegant machinery and avoidance of luck compared to other games' slick production and wildly inelegant systems, but I think that's a shallow reading. The thematic game, the conflict heavy game, the luck-dependent game, the imperfect information game, those can go much deeper than simply devising a strategy and testing it against the strategies of others - the good ones leverage the quirks and foibles of the human players, they exploit and reveal mental blind spots and trapdoors, they tell stories and incite the players to create more stories, they involve strategies that encourage adaptation and responsive thinking and teamwork rather than raw analysis.

Of course none of this is to say that one style or the other is better. A great game is a great game, by whatever mechanisms it achieves it. But to say that eurogames are the only ones that offer meaningful decisions is not quite correct.