Good question. I don’t know! They are all multi-use card games, but I see Impulse to be very different to Mottainai which is different to Aegean Sea.
Mottainai is a more quicker game than Glory to Rome. And I still haven’t decide which one I prefer.
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I’d pick up on this. I think like Wehrle he’s got a singular vision of game design so the games have something of a feel of being a Chudyk while all being very different within that space. Mottainai is the main iteration being somewhat Glory to Rome inspired while skipping rights issues but it’s different enough to warrant both in a collection.
I think @Benkyo would be the person to discuss most about the iteration between editions. Impulse and Innovation have both been through editions and I’m not sure how much gameplay changed between Innovations 1-3 outside of Iello messing up the rules descriptions in 2nd. Did Impulse change rules at all or was it presentation?
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Innovation 1e-3e was the Iello screwups and some balance changes to about ten cards in 3e. Upcoming ultimate edition or whatever it is called has some big changes.
Impulse was purely a facelift (and two new expansions).
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As already said, Mottainai iterates Glory to Rome and that was publisher driven, though Chudyk took the chance to wildly recalibrate the game’s curves.
Adding that Impulse is a weird beast - reading the manual it reads very much like an iteration of Mottainai. The eponymous “Impulse” is just player actions with lead/follow, where you do everyone else’s actions and then your own. You have a player board where you tuck, on the left, cards that increase the strength of your actions. It’s been a while but I remember several other points of mechanical overlap and I thought the games would be similar.
In play, they end up feeling nothing alike. I give it respect, in a Knizia-like way, for being able to tweak a few minor variables and create a quite distinct experience.
Edit: Innovation Ultimate
The updates are mostly graphics (new age art, better colorblind assistance), wording, and a few card rebalancing tweaks. Those and the new expansion.
New mechanics show up in a few places, and I think it is limited to diagonal splay (won’t come into play much, it’s an end-game thing) and dogmas that scrap an entire age’s draw pile. The latter can help players catch up when behind or get the game into ages 8-11 more frequently. In play on BGA I never reached diagonal splay and I think we only triggered age-scrapping once or twice. It’s at the players’ discretion so we avoided it unless it was helpful in that specific situation.
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The four moods of @lalunaverde:
- People think this is crap, but it’s actually fire!
- I used to think this was fire, but sadly I just discovered it’s crap.
- I used to think this was crap, but it’s fire and now I’m obsessed!
- I used to think this game was crap, and playing it again it’s definitely crap.
(said in love, lest that be lost in plain text)
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That’s accurate. What’s the percentage though 
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- 96%
- 12%
- 5%
- 63%
I just rolled a d100 for these, so accuracy may not be very high…
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Two other designers that come to mind for me are Alexander Pfister and Jason C. Hill.
There are a lot of similarity in Pfister’s Great Western Trail and Maracaibo and I have and enjoy playing both. I’d consider one of the newer GWT variants if they have enough variance to the “original” (albeit, second edition), am considering the Rails to the North expansion and already have the Uprising expansion for Maracaibo but have yet to play that.
Jason C. Hill’s Flying Frog games show a fair amount of iteration through their catalogue (most examples below):
- Last Night on Earth (2007) introduces their style and core gameplay mechanics in a recentish/slightly nostalgic small-town America setting.
- A Touch of Evil (2008) expands on the LNoE core engine, adding player skills, multiple card decks, and solo/team/fully co-op modes in its American gothic horror period.
- Invasion from Outer Space (2009) basically reskins the LNoE theme with aliens replacing the zombies, adding a few new elements and enabling crossover games with LNoE.
- Fortune and Glory (2011) expands on AToE, adding more player skills, more unique card decks and the Danger/Cliffhanger mechanic reskinned into a 1930s-pulp fiction world.
- Shadows of Brimstone (2014) appears to further develop the AToE/FanG engine into a fully co-op dungeon crawler, originally with a wild-west theme but variants expand into other genres - so I believe, as I do not own nor have I ever played any of this series.
I own LNoE and three expansions to it, AToE with the Something Wicked… expansion, and FanG with the Rise of the Crimson Hand expansion. I’ve been considering buying Invasion from Outer Space for years, mostly to round out my LNoE range, but have no plans to get into Shadows of Brimstone or its related variants, mostly due to their cost.
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176%, checks out. Allows for 76% duplicate assessments
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I have all three GWTs and Rails to the North. My suggestion is original GWT and New Zealand which includes a mechanism very similar to Rails to the North plus some other cool stuff. Argentina is not worth it as the changes there don’t come together as well so it doesn’t completely work. This is just my opinion but from what i can tell online, it is a common one.
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So I agree with everyone - iteration isn’t good or bad in itself, it’s all about the why, what, and when. No mountains moving on that assessment.
Personally, I would have pegged myself as an originalist. Just knowing that I prefer T&E over Y&Y, Agricola over Caverna, Bruxelles over Federation, Race over Roll, Ethnos over Archeos… I have this picture where it starts with a vision that is closer to art. Once that vision is proven, it’s molded by the realities of the market and mass consumerism to become something more universal, more palatable, yet…less? The spark is taken out in favor of accessibility. I’d rather have the mountain to climb rather than the boardwalk next to the parking lot around the lake, you know?
Yet as I honestly go through the list, the counterexamples pile up. Gaia Project over Terra Mystica, Winds of Galecrest over Libertalia, Quo Vadis over Zoo Vadis (no dissent there, I’m sure), Birm over Lanc (maybe? Still sorting this one out, honestly), Neom over 7 Wonders, New Frontiers over Puerto Rico… that list goes on as well.
There’s a reason my book took four drafts. You get better as you go. Some things you can’t see, or learn, until you have something tangible in front of you. Sometimes you need a crowd to find the Halifax Hammer for you before you can patch that hole.
Yet there still has to be a reason why I celebrate Rosenberg’s or Knizia’s endless niggling with a design while I refuse to give Leacock 25 of my own cents.
The most prominent rationale has been stated: Is it different and/or better? That’s an obvious (and good) test, but also backwards looking. I can’t blame someone for trying even if the revision didn’t hit the mark. Mori comes to mind - I think Archeos was a good faith effort and just a miss.
Using Leacock as the canary (man, I wish the idiom were ‘peacock’ there), he is iterating on one thing and doing it too many times. Contrast to Rosenberg, he has 3-5 archetypes and is iterating on each one fewer times. I think the latter ratio shows an honesty and integrity that someone is generating and refining ideas, as opposed to milking an increasingly dehydrated cow.
I could also critique Wallace and Stegmaier in that it seems every item out of their gate ends up being iterated. At a certain point, it looks more like they are releasing unfinished products rather than continuing to work good ideas over time.
Lastly, I’m wondering if there is a “how long has passed” question. Quo Vadis to Zoo Vadis, Lancashire to Birmingham - that’s one thing. Azul, Azul, Azul, Azul - that’s something else. Yet Terra - Gaia - Innovation is somewhat rapid as well, and those are some big and valuable evolutions. Maybe time doesn’t matter.
End collected thoughts.
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Tangent - what about when someone iterates on someone else’s idea?
Examples:
- Glen More → Lunarchitects
- Habitats → Nova Luna
- 7 Wonders → Neom
- Puerto Rico → New Frontiers
- A Few Acres of Snow → Hands in the Sea
- Cover your Assets → Goat Lords
- Terra Mystica → Clans of Caledonia
Other examples? Famous or Infamous? What separates the times when this was a good thing from when it was a scandal?
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Another example there for me is Kane Klenko. I think FUSE is great. But so does everyone else, so he became the guy you go to for am uninspired real-time iteration of your big game (Pandemic Rapid Response).
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Terra Mystica came out in 2011 and Innovation in 2023 is 12 years later, I think that’s fair for some evolution to happen. But yeah Azul is also one that feels like “enough is enough–you’ve gone through enough of the basic shapes, no we don’t need triangle Azul”
Btw nobody mentioned the Evolution “franchise” yet. That one has evolved plenty and I’d say it got better from the very humble beginnings. I am still not the hugest fan. But Oceans is quite fun.
Two things, I would say, Forbidden* is not the same as Pandemic.
Also, I think even he got sick of the myriad of pandemics so he sat down and made a game that is really different from both his previous franchises: Daybreak. It’s so different, maybe from here he might branch off into more ideas?
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I’ll agree with the bare statement, but by chance I played Forbidden X in the same week as Pandemic X (with a different group), and realised how familiar chunks of it felt.
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It’s been a while.
Might be right. You run around a map, and random bad things happen at the end of your turn. Everyone has special abilities they can use to better achieve the overall goal. I mean that was the formula and still is for many cooperative games.
So at a very reduced level it is the same basic formula.
Which tons of other games have also used.
I never liked the Forbidden* iterations much and quickly sold them on.
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Again, I think this describes a number of the Pandemics. I’m not sure how much input Leacock had on the various flavors. I know he had input on the Cthulhu one, from what I’ve read, but beyond that, I don’t know.
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My first kickstarter and a game I enjoy for its puzzle, and have happily played solo a number of times. But the iteration is indeed there of the core pandemic mechanic.
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Building on this - in the world of GMT games this happens a lot, with the COIN series leading the way and lots of different iterations on the core mechanics to attempt to match theme etc.
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Ah, so I think Argentina is my favourite! I’ve not played New Zealand yet though.
GWT is my absolute favourite game. I think Rails isn’t as good as the OG but I love what Argentina does
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