Farewell Euro Classics

Boardgames
41

Sorry, I"m just catching up, but this.

Samurai - Lavish praise
Ra - Lavish praise, best auction game ever
Tigris & Euphrates - A Fine Move
Through the Desert - Better than Samurai or Tigers & Pots
Blue Lagoon - Not Quite as good as Through the Desert but Much Cheaper so Probably the Better Buy
Yellow & Yangtze - Not as good as Tigers & Pots
Babylonia - Not covered

I’m likely repeating, but what are they whining about? The British reviewers loved this line and made sure it was constantly sold out and never on sale. And given that Beige month was recommend recommend recommend, while FUN MONTH was … don’t buy it’s not fun, they probably had a good bet that the reviewers would like it.

Maybe they just didn’t want the risk. What if the reviewers don’t comment on this one?

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42

I guess… stop… making games? Go home and hide in a dark coat closet.

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43

I read most of their post and it seemed less snarky than I anticipated. More of a lament for the state of the industry, which I ultimately agree with. If you want real success, you have to either go a Kickstarter route and prey on people’s unhealthy psychological quirks, or hope to get the nod from a very few sources of trusted approval. And that’s kinda true.

Which pushes back to a meta-point, the new “culture of the best” driven by the internet.

It used to be, a new restaurant opened up and you’d say, “let’s go try it.” Now, the question is, “what do the reviews say?” Google, yelp, etc. This comes with two problems, one is that new places or things get a very small chance to prove themselves. One false step or unfortunate mismatch with an influencer and your new business either goes under or is doomed to a mezzanine of scraping by. The second is the result, once the hierarchy of “best” is established, traffic gets overfocused on one place and other perfectly decent places sit empty.

So there used to be more of a spectrum of success. You still had to be great and get critical nods and advocates to hit the big big time, but there was an ecosystem of people trying and sampling different things, wandering through the wasteland of products. Whereas now we want to save time and money so we research and focus. And anything that doesn’t get focus gets close to nothing.

When I think about it, in any industry there are now a few “best” places you have to work. In any city there are a few “best” restaurants you have to go to. In any year there are a few “best” movies or shows you have to watch. Heaven help you if you aren’t on that list.

I once waited 3 hours in a line to get a table at a restaurant that was, maybe, a smidge better than the other five empty restaurants on the block.

I think it is worth lamenting this. And some of it is our own fault for wanting to be super efficient. Some of it is the industry’s fault for putting out so much mediocrity that we rarely buy based on trust. Success and quality rarely come on the first shot, and we’re creating a new ecosystem where the up and coming don’t get enough out of it to work out the kinks and become something wonderful.

At the same time, this is also on the publishers and designers. So your industry is constrained by a few influencers or key marks of approval? Get creative. Market.

As I’ve thought about it, this is the genius of Asmodee buying BGA. Not necessarily a profit grab. Now they have a platform they control where they can drive exposure to titles they believe are quality and underappreciated. Like Abyss - actually approved by SU&SD but still didn’t get buzz. If they think it deserved better, there’s now a low risk, hugely scalable way to get people to again browse the ecosystem and see for themselves if they like it.

There’s other solutions too. Don’t just whine, innovate.

But it’s also on me, to wander and sample a bit and create a market where something with quality but not buzz might still make it to me.

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44

The internet certainly seems to drive a “best or nothing” attitude. But ultimately there’s no such thing as being objectively the best. And informed consumers will arrive at that conclusion, given time to mature.

I don’t go to the “best” restaurants: they’re too expensive and, more often than not, put balsamic vinegar on everything.

I don’t buy the “best” new game; because 9 times out of 10, it will be forgotten in the next 4 weeks.

Sure, making it to #1 on the BGG hotness will sell thousands of boxes. But I’m more interested in the game that’s still interesting 2 years after it was released; and I’m not alone.

I’ve been looking for a good deal on a second-hand Race for the Galaxy for years, and it just never happens. If there is a used copy for sale somewhere, it’s usually just as much as a new copy, once you factor in the cost of shipping. And RftG hasn’t received SUSD’s attention in years.

So, if you’re a boardgame publisher and you’re struggling to figure out why your new game isn’t selling when it’s been on the market for approximately 45 minutes; and the pre-orders aren’t sold out, I have 2 suggestions for you:

  1. Build a brand. A name that consumers can trust to reliably put interesting, fun, beautiful and functionally complete games on their table, at a reasonable price
  2. Burn twice as long or more, but half as bright. The long tail pays bills. Flashes in the pan barely singe eyebrows.
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45

And there’s no individual reviewer who totally agrees with my preferences anyway, never mind a consensus.

I’m generally not interested in the #1-hotness thousands-of-sales games because they don’t fit my style, so I want a broad market that will cater to my tastes too. The more the business model pushes for maximising immediate returns, the more it must try to concentrate on a small number of huge sellers rather than the wider space of less-popular games, and the less there is that I’m likely to enjoy.

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46

I have doubts on this, personally. I would argue that the “flash in the pan” are what sells. Most customers wont play them for more than 2 times per year.

47

I’m torn. Everyone wants their game to sell like Wingspan.

But should you base your business model on “Wingspan sales figures or nothing”? No, absolutely not.

Sure, Codenames likely made CGE more money than everything else combined, but I bet the long tail of Galaxy Trucker kept the lights on until they got to that point.

In a game of poker, you can win with a Queen high; and you can lose with a full house. Your success at the table will be the result of how well you play the hands you are dealt.

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48

If you’re a company driven by people who want to make games, you can have the one long-tail seller that keeps you going while you make other things, hoping that one of them will be big before the current thing fades out. (One obvious example of this is Steve Jackson Games: there’s a constant flow of people who want to buy Munchkin stuff, and that gives them the ability to try other things. People ask them “why do you keep doing Munchkin” and the answer is “so we should not do it, and leave that money on the table?”.)

If you’re a company driven by accountants you have a constant cutting of the worst-performing lines as quickly as possible in order to replace them with what you hope will be another big thing, which in turn will vanish if it doesn’t perform.

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49

I split my purchases, some on critical feedback (reviewers or friends) Some on brand type stuff, for example I bought a Bonehunter album recently because of the record label that put it out. Then there is some wild impulse stuff, like I bought Burano because I had Murano and it made me laugh to have games from different islands in the venetian lagoon. I’ve used other spurious reasons too. It’s something I’m committed to as without that experimentation and random stumbling it’s easy to get rote and stale. I’ve bought more duds than successes, but the successes can lead to other great stuff as it stretches my tastes and freshens things up. I bought a Free Nelson Mandoomjazz dice because the band name made me chuckle. It was immense and led me on to The Mound Fuji Doomjazz Ensemble and others I’d have not sampled without the way in from the first arbitrary purchase. Also Burano remains amongst my favourite games (probably my favourite) and I bought it arbitrarily.

So buy semi random every so often and you will most likely be disappointed, but it can lead to exciting new pastures.

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50

I don’t like poker has a business analogy because winning with a queen high involves bluffing and misrepresentation.

However, let me make a baseball analogy. If you are always swinging for a home run, you’ll strike out a lot. Games are won* by stringing together singles and getting as many plate appearances as possible (and driving the pitch count up).

(*) Unfortunately, the modern game is dominated by the long ball and unbalanced by overpowered pitching.

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51

Are you talking about Kickstarter campaigns?

In any case, if I didn’t state it previously, the original article from the ZMan blog about the Euro classics reeks of dissatisfaction with corporate for canceling the line because it isn’t as profitable as Ticket to Ride et al. SUSD did make reviews on several of the games from the line and highly recommended all of them and I am sure they helped them gain traction. That whole argument about reviewers falls with that simple fact.

The power of a few reviewers to push a game to the hypelist notwithstanding it is a) not the only way to get to that list and b) it is no guarantee that a game is a sales success in the long run.

And here’s the other thing. As hobbyists, I am reasonably sure that everyone on this forum will have done any or all of these:

  • backed some obscure self-published Kickstarter
  • wandered the long tail of BGG rankings
  • looked for hidden gems in the halls of small publishers at some convention or other

These days I buy games as much on recommendations from this forum as from my own research (that includes looking at ratings and reviews).

I have already played Ticket to Ride to death and own a copy of Azul from its pre-Asmodee days. I am not a good customer for the likes of Asmodee who only want to own the rights to games that are already on shelves at every bookstore and Target. To them crowdfunding models are anathema. How can they compete? There would have to be risk involved and they’d rather grow the rate of their growth.

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52

I think I’m an outlier. Maybe I’m not a ‘hobbyist’. But I haven’t done any of those things. In fact, I’ve never backed any Kickstarter at all, or been to a convention. I did preorder a GMT P500 game once, though, so maybe that counts. [It took so long to come through that by the time it came to be delivered my debit card had expired, the payment failed, and it wasn’t delivered. I’m not in a rush to preorder P500 games again, though I prefer the system to Kickstarter]

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53

That was not meant to be a complete list or any sort of fixed criteria… sorry if it came across that way. It was meant as a roundabout way of saying that I assume that people who care enough about games to come to a game forum tend to form their own opinions through a variety of means. Again sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that going to conventions or backing kickstarters was in any way a requirement for anything.

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54

Where else does one hear about games that don’t have big PR budgets? (Serious question.) SU&SD news was good for that. I’ve been reading Dicebreaker (they announce all the big stuff as well, but if I see that the subject is some big game I know I won’t be interested) and sometimes BGG’s news items.

I still can’t remember where I heard about Leaving Earth, mind you. To my perception, it was suddenly a game I liked the look of and was helping to import into the UK. :slight_smile:

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55

I got my copy in a game store in the US when I asked the staff if they had anything that would be hard to get over in Europe. The cover looked so beautifully retro that I had to have it. Also space. I had never heard about it before. I had already bought so many books though during that stay that I couldn’t afford (the space in the suitcase) to also get the expansions which it took me a while to find back here…

For myself, I have figured out a few people among the boardgame reviewers whom I pay close attention to because while my tastes do not align exactly with them, they have pointed me to interesting games in the past. Other than that it’s probably spending too much time browsing BGG, r/boardgames, discussion.tekeli.li and youTube/podcasts, boardgame Kickstarters or going through “this new in” shelves both online and offline.

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56

I’d say r/boardgames. Especially if you open up a question, there’s always a number of titles I’ve never heard of and the recommendations are usually tailored to whatever interests you’ve expressed.

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57

In the days when I frequented r/boardgames, SUSD news certainly felt like stating the bloody obvious 95% of the time. There’s not much that get by the sub, with all the usual ‘Reddit is a toxic cesspit that stymies and degenerates any discussion’ caveats. It’s healthy to sometimes stare into the abyss!

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58

A post was split to a new topic: Games you think everyone should know about

59

The plot thickens:

60

I suspect that if you go to Reiner Knizia and say “I would like to do a new edition of your game” he asks for quite a bit of money. If – for whatever reason – it doesn’t sell as well as you thought it would, that may be a problem potentially leading to breach of contract.

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