Reply To: [unofficial weekender] $GAME is dead! Long live $GAME

[zoidpinhead 12952xp 3]

Pledge:  Get cracking with Warriors of Athena, Foundry Argonauts are next up.  My order from North Star isn’t here yet so I don’t actually have the rules.  I need to enhance my calm.  It was only published yesterday 🙂

Answer: Should there be reboot of any game at any given point in time?

It depends is the fence-sitters answer.  We all understand that companies need to sell new stuff continually and the easiest way to do that is to tell everyone to bin their rules and buy some new ones.  It also attracts new players who feel that they may have a chance playing against old hands who have become over familiar with the specifics of the mechanics.  This turnover is much slower in the historical rules market.  Production costs for a new edition are so high a publisher would prefer to try a different set entirely than issue a second edition of something.

A more controversial answer is, almost never!  It could be argued that the only reason to change rules so much that you need a new edition is in order to improve them.  Improve is a very loaded term.  Not everyone is going to think that changes made are “better”, even what most players might think of as ‘broken’ rules/units/factions are loved by some in our community (alpha strikers for example).

The best you can manage to do with a new edition is to make something that is similar but different to the original.  If written well and with due reverence to the previous version then maybe the new game is more popular or considered to be a better tabletop experience than its forebear.  My experience is that is seldom the case.  The best examples are probably the Dan Mersey ‘Rampant’ rules, most of which have had a second edition over recent years.  These are different games but often subtly improved from the first version and definitely enhanced by being in a bigger, glossier hardback version rather than the standard Osprey blue books.  Has anyone else found subsequent editions of a game that they preferred?

Loved the Fats Domino.  Friday afternoon and it’s time for a boogie: