How to Create a Theme for Your Euro Game

Some games lack intuitiveness because they've got elements within the game that relate to the real world. I think one of the missed opportunities is you have the resource of oil, but oil doesn't work as energy. It's functionally interchangeable with other stuff. So trying to make a game more thematic is thinking through very clearly what are the elements within this game and how do they work in the real world? How can I make that so within an abstract set of rules? And then that's tough. Not always easy to do. A lot of these kind of year-of-games miss that because they are very abstract.