Let'sTalk About: Splendor

There is something to what you're saying about market segmentation and publishers finding where they can make money. They're losing out to big, expensive kickstarters on the taking money out of early adopters with high limit prices, so it might make sense that they would start selling cheaper, simpler shit, figuring that the hardcore audience is already gone to kickstarter.

No statistics backing that up, but it makes theoretical sense.

You know, it's funny...I can remember as far back as 2007 or so when Robert was already kind of railing against the new, FFG style games that were really kind of assumed to be AT because of...I dunno...pictures of dragons? I was getting into that stuff at the time and I didn't really get why he wasn't into all of that but I get it now. He was holding out for those heavy theme, light rules games.

When I think back a little further to 2004, 2005...what really felt edgy or maverick about AT was when we would walk into the Atlanta Game Fest with Zombies!!!, Thunder Road, Nuclear War, Talisman and Omega Virus and people would literally turn their noses up at us. We would have people literally come by our table and scoff or act condescending. Because we were playing simple games that were more about fun than mechanics. I dunno, maybe that was the Atlanta scene at the time. But at any rate, seeing a FFG game at an event now is like hearing an MC5 song on a Volvo commercial.

That is a great point about gestation...but are we going to see more "BGG pleasing" games going in he opposite direction, following on from Mage Knight and Crusoe? I am really interested to see what happens in the Euro field because they TOTALLY got caught up in the hybridization....hard to believe that it was just a few years ago that Euro publishers wouldn't touch anything with a sci fi theme. I really believe the AT movement help change that.

I started to type out this long response about the past few decade being a design renaissance with all these genres blending creating an explosion of innovation and design advancements...But then I realized I wasn't buying what I was selling.

Games of all makes/models shapes/sizes have come out, are coming out and will always come out. The "problem" is that they don't get the glitz, glamour and promotion because they are "flawed" for being too simple, too pedestrian (like the gamers turning their nose up at Omega Virus).

They got overshadowed so they got missed...Unless you start looking for them. Over the past few years there's been a lot of noise praising the layered, complex and multiple system designs...But to be blunt, I'm calling Bull Shit in saying that there is suddenly a new development with games going back to simpler roots.

Now, in reality we have gone through a bit of a renaissance with rapid innovations and experimentation and I do think we're hitting a point where things are coming back to a normality.

To say that we've been in a rut of complexity and systems ignores games like:
Red November, Wings of War, Small World, Ticket to Ride, Nexus Ops, Last Night on Earth, Mall of Horror, Mr Jack, Incan Gold, Dice Town...and that's just a handful from six/seven years ago.

As it connects to age as well, I think my own tastes have mellowed the older I've gotten. When I first got into the hobby I was defiantly in the Euro camp, but stuff like BSG and Cosmic shifted me over to the AT side. I was part of that tribe for a while, but now as I get older I'm less inclined to be part of a tribe at all. I suspect that for me it's a mark of maturity to care less about fulfilling a specific expectation of what Nate should like.

Last night I played Cosmic Encounter and Panic on Wall Street with some folks who were all younger than me, the youngest being 18. I'm known in my normal group as a guy who loves big raucous games like that, and I do. But I found myself also wanting to get in something bigger and more serious at the same time, and with folks closer to my own age. There's a general desire for balance in my own gaming diet. I don't want just a steady stream of trashy goofiness anymore than I want a steady stream of heavy Euros, or light German games, or wargames, or whatever.

I wonder if a lot of us are starting to experience something similar. As the rush of the "Ameritrash revolution" winds down (indeed, it's barely a memory for me), I wonder if some of us are actually realizing the whole AT thing might have been as much about image and response as it was about the actual games themselves.

It's not my intent to sound presumptuous about this. It's just something I've noticed in myself, and I was wondering if other people have seen that too.

As I think about this more, what I'm realizing is that for me who I am gaming with drives what gets played and subsequently what I pay attention to as far as new releases go. My tastes vary across a wide spectrum...And I've always have and I'll always be that way. But who I'm gaming with is what points me towards the style and genre of game I pay attention to and therefore notice.

And I do find myself caught in a "Grass is greener" mentality where after week after week of lighter thematic games, because that's what I play in my group, I find myself wanting to get into deeper, complex and multi-layered games.