Not for competitive reasons (I tend to dislike hypercompetitive games and most of my favorite games are co-op), but in general I find games with this property really frustrating from a mental perspective.
Games of the style "everyone plays somewhat independently, with some interaction such as blocking, but mostly you race to score points" have the key property that you can do much better if you spend a lot of mental bandwidth carefully tracking the state of all your opponents (how many points they have, what they're doing), which also contributes to a strong "a computer, or computer-assistance, would make this better" feeling, which in turn makes a game feel less fun to me.
I actually really enjoy Catan, in large part because of mechanics like inter-player trading and the jostle for the 3:1 / 2:1 trading ports, which makes for much heavier interaction with other players. Ticket to Ride, on the other hand, is a textbook example of the mechanics I find frustrating and un-fun.
I really agree with you on this one. I often play eurogames with my friends and really, I enjoy it because I'm with my friends, not because of the game. I often feel like I'm playing a spreadsheet.
Bluffing games, guessing games, dexterity games are much more fun for me.
Try Hansa Teutonic or Tigris & Euphrates. Basically two different takes on area control and route building. Definitely has a lot of player interaction, of the good and bad.
I think it really depends on the game, you can have your game with little interaction, and then the clashing of players type of euro.
No, because chess has players directly interacting, rather than just playing independently.
I enjoy chess occasionally, with a player at a comparable skill level. That computers play it far better doesn't bother me in that context, the way it bothers me that a computer would be better at carefully tracking exactly how many points other players have in Ticket to Ride.
Games of the style "everyone plays somewhat independently, with some interaction such as blocking, but mostly you race to score points" have the key property that you can do much better if you spend a lot of mental bandwidth carefully tracking the state of all your opponents (how many points they have, what they're doing), which also contributes to a strong "a computer, or computer-assistance, would make this better" feeling, which in turn makes a game feel less fun to me.
I actually really enjoy Catan, in large part because of mechanics like inter-player trading and the jostle for the 3:1 / 2:1 trading ports, which makes for much heavier interaction with other players. Ticket to Ride, on the other hand, is a textbook example of the mechanics I find frustrating and un-fun.