Broadly, they have indirect player interaction and abstract physical components (eg Ticket to Ride), but more importantly in this context, they are board games that often do not use dice or a spinner to introduce randomness. Strategy then becomes a "boring" matter of executing an algorithm.

(There are many exceptions that do use die/dice, but for those that have not played board games invented after Monopoly, the idea of a board game that does not have die-introduced randomness may be quite foreign.)