General topic - second and third editions, how games change, which ones you like or don’t.
Tangential: What games are out of print and desperately need a new printing?
Tangential: If you know the history of any games with particularly interesting and lengthy evolutions (Fury of Dracula, Twilight Imperium) I, for one, would be curious to hear it.
My very first whining on this topic. Immediately came out of my head. I’d like to have Ian O’Toole edition for all the Cube Rail games that Rio Grande Games have released so far. Im fine playing them myself as they are, and I think @EnterTheWyvern feels the same, but we are a bunch of beige bois. But IOT art would have made me much easier for me to introduce these games to club members
I’ve been working on a game design called UltimaRails where players compete to operate 3 different companies to deliver 4 different types of goods on while developing a tight, shared board.
So far the companies are: Beige, Light Beige, Dark Beige
And the goods are: Big beige cubes, small beige cubes, grey cubes, hat meeples
I seem to be alone in much preferring the colours of the old edition of El Grande to the new one (even if the new board does make things clearer). And preferring the old art of Lost Cities to the new one. And original Santorini to what I’ve seen of plans for the 2nd ed.
On the other hand, the number of new editions which massively improve on the original is just huge. Viticulture Essential Edition, for a start. Pax Pamir 2nd would be a safe bet too.
I think this is more sentimental reasons, since El Grande was one of my first modern board games. Dumb me bought it from Amazon Germany for 20 Euros after watching SUSD, and discovered that the cards are in German (duh!). Have to use PS and printed them out. So, yeah, I do prefer the old edition
At the third SHUX, the second one I attended, a couple people taught my now husband and I a game from the early 1990s called Castle of Magic. From modern game design perspective, it’s got some real problems. It uses a basic roll and move element (like Monopoly) and has a lot of randomness/luck. But it also has a lot of interesting things going on including player interaction (deducing others’ plans and secret conspiring) and good plotting (not quite strategy). For the 5 years since I played that in 2019, I’ve wanted somebody like Restoration Games to give it an update and re-release it.
And a 2 lb die cast locomotive to denote first player??
Not at all. I prefer the old strongly enough to keep the El Grande Big Box box (translated: the the big big box box) around. That thing is horrifying, but I find the new art even more horrifying.
Close. Everyone knows the best trains are, in fact, cubes. So it’s a 2lb (0.9kg) pewter cube
Mission: Red Planet 2e is great. I’m deeply concerned about 3e. Downgrade in art, introducing variety where not needed (which will diminish the mindgames) and not doing the one or two things it could need, like a b-side for each card (a la Citadels) and maybe revamping the events that get tucked around the planet.
Reprints needed…
Dogs of War (whoop)
Glory to Rome
Tigris & Euphrates
Orleans
Sol
I think the 2nd edition of Yokohama is excellent (probably because I own it), the Hansa Teutonica Big Box was a fantastic reprint because it was cheap.
RPGs suffer much more from edition-creep than board games. The hole is much wider and deeper, but I’ll dance around the edge with a couple of my experiences.
Savage Worlds has kept the same base core mechanics, but they keep fiddling with things with each new edition. They have changed how melee damage works, how bennies are awarded, how recovery from shaken works, how specific maneuvers work, how specific edges work, and so on. Everything is close enough that I can run it, but I can’t keep track of the little changes and it frustrates me.
Big Eyes Small Mouth (BESM). 1st edition: Cute and charming–I love a game with a good heart. 2nd edition: Let’s tighten it up a bit and expand it in nifty ways–2d6 GURPS Lite. 3rd edition: Let’s learn all the wrong lessons from Silver Age Sentinels and rip the heart out. 4th edition: same.
PSA for the Americans - it just dropped to $30 on Amazon today. Yoink.
It’s coming according to well placed people on the Knzia discord.
In this arcticle:
W Eric Martin makes the anecdotal note that 10 years is the lifetime of a game.
I do like games coing back into print, as I can get the ones I want easier. Do all of them need reprinting though? Unlikely.
I played it with 3 others on BGG@Sea and none of us were impressed by it. We preferred the original deluxe version overall.
I have so many 2nd editions, reskins, evolutions of games… I don’t even know where I would begin to list them. As previously stated I favor evolutions and smoothed out new editions over older ones–especially when I don’t know the earlier editions and have no nostalgia for them.
I also tend to like pretty games. My taste is not that out of line with what the mainstream seems to like these days, so newer stuff generally seems nicer. Production values are also often nicer when games make it to the reprint stage.
Games I would like to see a reprint of for various reasons
I stopped tracking unavailable games a while ago… for a while I had a whole bunch of games I was hoping for would get reprints but some of them showed up on BGA, others got a German edition (years later) and yet others I tried on TTS (Quantum) and was disappointed.
Can’t think of any others at the moment…
Antike 2 is the one that Mark Bigney loves. My friend has it, it’s very beige
I’d be interested in Samurai as well
I have the latest Ra reprint, which seems to be preferred by many, if nothing else for the player boards which have the scoring hints and what is kept between epochs and what isn’t. After seeing pictures of older versions, I am quite happy with what I have.
Zoo Vadis is a reskin of Quo Vadis, and again, after seeing images of the latter, I am very thankful to own the former. QV was actually available used at my FLGS, and it did not look very appealing, despite knowing the gameplay is the same.
Fury of Dracula 3rd is much prettier and a completely different game than the 1st edition which I played in high school. I would love to be able to play both and compare, but you never see the 1st edition anywhere anymore except in gmwhite999’s collection, and he doesn’t live near me. Plus, the 3rd edition game is pretty long, but I have enjoyed the couple of plays of it I’ve had.
So far, I think any other second+ editions I have or reskins I have not seen the first editions of to make comparisons.
I think there’s a few categories of what gets a second edition:
So the games I have which have multiple editions:
War of the Ring: I have 1e with upgrade. This is a balancing thing, Ameritrash (I know I know this one’s Italian) tends to win huge on second editions. First edition is full of thematic rules and cards, second edition they remove or tweak everything that didn’t fit the gameplay.
I wouldn’t know here as I never played it before or after the upgrade pack… woe…
Brass - Modernization. Pros and cons. I have both Birm and Lanc here. Birm is better for sucking people in, Lanc is better for holding them long term. It’s really an audience thing here.
Great Western Trail: Rebalancing and design. Pfister always needs rebalancing and even here I’m not sure if the game matches the gameplay. See 6 craftsmen buildings that support the cowboy strategy…how are you ever going to get that on the board?
They say it’s not a big change but gameplay-wise I can’t go back. More money for bandits/teepees and income with trashing really unlock the way I play the game.
Design-wise, we’ve all heard me whinge about the absence of Asians and American Indians and how the omission can be worse than what wasn’t really an egregious implementation in the first place, so I won’t whinge here. Suffice, I preferred teepees here. And cities to the west.
Dune Imperium. Interesting one here. I still have the original, fully expanded. I kind of want what is supposed to be the improved edition, but don’t want to pay for it.
Castles of Burgundy. OH NO I can’t stop once I start. v1, $27. Fits on my shelf. Green and Yellow look the same. Thin but strong components. Entire game fits in one plano. Icons are bad and buildings are arbitrary but reference materials are good.
v2. It looks better in person than online. Which is to say a C rather than an F. Better iconography, but shrunk to the point you can’t see it. Still referencing the manual for several of them. $50 now. Fits in two planos. Modules are nice?
v3. Ok, now it’s $200. Castles of Gloomburgudy box. Tiles are larger but iconography is still too small.
CAN WE JUST MAKE CoB right?
I own v1 and v3 and honestly v3 is quite good if you can find it for a discount. I wouldn’t have such high standards for it if we didn’t already have v1 and v2 to learn from. v3 is good, I’m just whinging again.
Eclipse: 2e. Straight up better in every way? Is that safe?
Puerto Rico: 1e. I don’t know all the ins and outs of the different editions but I’ll get the new Deluxe next year.
Pax Pamir: 2e. These are two different games, so far as I can tell.
Wow. I’m barely into my list. Hansa Teutonica (big box), Agricola (z-man second edition), Le Havre (complete edition), El Grande (big box), Tigris & Euphrates (first edition, not even two maps)… even RFTG has a second edition now with five rebalanced cards. This is row 30 of roughly 300…
No way to possibly go through them all. Maybe I’ll scan later to decide if any of them have actual interesting things to say.
Reprints and new editions are generally of stuff that’s expected to sell well. Graphic design is generally done flat rate, so larger sales means you can spend the same per copy and get better work. Custom made bits – tokens, plastic bits, etc – get proportionaly cheaper as well, as they have large set up costs. some plastic molding methods produce parts that are incredibly cheap, but have huge tooling costs.
And if the people doing the updates are good, they understand what was wrong with the old verison, and upgrade those parts.
Conceptually I think Mansions of Madness 1e and 2e are so different as to be different games. Yes, you’re still laying down tiles to explore a space and fight monsters, but the simplicity of the robo-GM in 2e has meant that most of the scenarios are monster fights and you have to go to third party tools (e.g. Valkyrie) to find anything like complexity.
Whereas Arkham Horror 2e to 3e is clearly a major redesign, but it feels like basically the same game at the core.