What makes a reprint successful?

San Il Defanso wrote: Yeah, but the revised edition totally ditches the card combat from the original reprint. That seems like a pretty big mea culpa to me.

I agree (even though I like the new combat system). But again: if they've sold enough to even consider republishing it, then it must have sold quite well in the first place. So I'm just not sure it's a good example of a reprint gone wrong from a sales perspective.

In answer to VTs question, id suggest it is mostly internet hype and marketing. Though i'd say most reprints that are called reprints have some significant changes to them it is mostly hype.

For instance Tammany Hall has garnered quite a bit of internet buzz as a 'reprint' but other than the box size my understanding is that it is the game as the original. However as it went out of print and was noticed as being oop by the bgg community it is heralded as a reprint. Ra or Settlers have always been around if not necessarily in the original publishers warehouse so we don't call new print runs reprints. There are some games that fall in the middle a bit. Z-man has just reprinted Chinatown. It has been oop a while and i think it has a new box size. It could easily be compared as a reprint to Tammany but it is not a hyped reprint.

With the ffg there is always hype, but also because they change things at least visually it they always will garner some heralding as if they were new games.

I would say that my distinction between a reprint and a restock is largely based around how long a game was gone. So that excludes Catan, which has been basically in print in English for over fifteen years straight. Risk 2210 is pretty clearly a completely different game from Risk, which I think also precludes it from reprint status. That's actually why I don't consider Arkham Horror to be a reprint. It's pretty clearly a second edition, united to the original game in concept only. Not sure why I feel that way there, and not with Fury of Dracula, but I suppose that argument holds there too.

For me my mental cutoff is roughly five years, which is totally arbitrary but it's what my brain thinks. I think that's a little different from the normal 6-8 month gaps while a company is printing mroe copies of some Essen title.

That touches on something we've circled around on here for a while, that the next big wave of reprint cycles will probably be classic German games, if there's any new wave of reprints coming at all. It seems games like Manila, El Grande, and Amun-Re all have solid futures if they could make it back on shelves. At any rate they hold a little more credibility with BGG crowds than old AH titles.

an El Grande reprint is in the post apparently.

The thing is, will anyone dare update the mechanics from any of the classic german games?

I don't think it'd be anything more than a tweak, since modern design ideals are still pretty strongly tied to the German aesthetic. Granted, the new version of Wallenstein from a couple years ago integrated some of the bits from Shogun, so we might see something like that.

It seems like when a German game vanished in the past it would return with a different theme. That's happened as recently with New York, which was a reskinned version of Alhambra. It's not a big loss there, but I'd be disappointed if they did that with bigger tentpoles of the hobby.

So, reprint is a vague term that at best is described as games that have been out of print on a magnitude of years.

And with that said then, the successful reprints then will be the currently successful games. If Twilight Struggle were for some reason to go out of print for example. The ones that have been raised as successes were all already established successes.

Which means to answer the original question, in order for a reprint to be financially successful the game had to have been financially successful in its original day. And I'd further expand that to having a timeless quality to them - Not a game that falls into a design that caters towards the current trends or favorites.

The thing is that most of these games that are currently successful will not see them go out of print, or if they do the market will be so saturated with them that copies will not be hard to find.

I don't know if I buy that there will be a next wave of reprints. With game turnover and short attention spans no one looks to the past anymore...It's "What have you done for me lately".

We're already seeing a thinning out of reprints. Withing the last few weeks though we've been able to celebrate the re-release of Car Wars.

DukeofChutney wrote: an El Grande reprint is in the post apparently.

The thing is, will anyone dare update the mechanics from any of the classic german games?

Great point! AT games lean more on their settings, so some leeway could be given to play with the mechanics.

Whoever...we see even with AT games that when the mechanics are changed there's a bit of an outcry.

It's definitely vague, but I think I mostly use it to distinguish between a game that is truly gone for the time being, and one that is just in the off-part of a printing cycle. I don't think a real hit goes out of print anymore unless the publisher goes under (Uberplay) or there's some interruption in distribution (the Rio Grande/Hans im Gluck split). The exception to that would be a couple companies like Steve Jackson or Games Workshop that might let something lie around for years.

You raise a good point VonTush, that if something vanishes it's probably because it just wasn't selling very well. That's a really good indicator of how successful it might actually be in future.

I'm drawing blanks here...But has there been a reprint that has either gone insane in either direction of being a hit or flop that doesn't just scale proportionally to the overall market growth between the same period compared to the original edition?

From what I understand Talisman and Cosmic were both very successful in their day. I imagine Survive continues to sell well for Stronghold.

What about CCGs being reprinted in the LCG format? Netrunner was a major success for FFG and looks like it has exceeded anyone's expectations judging by internet/FLGS interest. Call of Cthulhu is still chugging along. Hopefully the Doomtown reprint by AEG does reasonably well. Even VS. is making a comeback. There seems to be a fair consumer appetite for reprinting fondly remembered CCGs in the LCG format with no actual game play changes (come on 7 Seas and Warlord!).

With all the other newish games out (mostly FFG - Star Wars, 40K, Lord of the Rings) it's like an LCG version of the mid 90's CCG boom all over again.

Carcassonne had the scoring altered a while back in one re-release (two tile city scores, and I think farm scores), and the very latest reprint (with new art, even) for this year has some different scoring mechanisms.

Carc was changing scoring with every printing for a while there. We made a house rule that, when in doubt, you score by the rules in the copy that you're playing. That generally changed each time as well.

S.

VonTush wrote: I'm drawing blanks here...But has there been a reprint that has either gone insane in either direction of being a hit or flop that doesn't just scale proportionally to the overall market growth between the same period compared to the original edition?

From what I understand Talisman and Cosmic were both very successful in their day. I imagine Survive continues to sell well for Stronghold.

The original version of Arkham Horror wasn't a big seller. It was terribly expensive compared to most boardgames at the time, retailing for $40 in 1987. The FFG reprint was a much bigger success, even adjusting for the overall expansion of the boardgame market.

And FFG is reprinting Mission:Red Planet? How is that going to be any different from the Nexus Ops reprint for them?

Also, checking this list from the other site of top vote getters for most in demand reprints, I can't see anything (other than the Star Wars branded stuff) that I would be comfortable committing a lot of money towards if I were a game publisher.

edit: and Warhammer Quest.

Colorcrayons wrote: Tolkien (though this is easy as every fantasy trope is inspired by this), Moorcock (ever read about the chaos symbol copyright? A thesis unto itself), Herbert (a few bits here and there), Aliens (space hulk anyone), etc. Some are so obvious, as the catachan special character "Sly Marbo" for instance. Sly Stallon's character Rambo. "Get it? See what we did there? It's clearly not based on a famous character in popular culture. We devised this clever thing all by ourselves. Don't you dare try to do the same thing or we will get mad and our lawyers are hungry." This tact is pretty typical for them.

I think you're exaggerating here. It's true that GW's legal approach has been extremely aggressive in defending their 40K background and it's also true that they appropriated the Chaos star symbol from Moorcock (which I forgot about) but they've never once sued anyone for their Fantasy stuff. They, TSR, and virtually every other RPG publisher out there appropriated Tolkien's "graceful elves/hardened dwarves/savage orcs" routine. As soon as TSR followed that model without challenge, it essentially became public domain, yet GW never tried to pursue them on that basis, nor did they issue a C&D to FFG for the Latari Elves or the Dunwarr Dwarves or the Broken Plains Orcs. Saying that Space Hulk ripped off Alien/Aliens is fine, but the latter ripped of Heinlein, so who's the bigger criminal here? In all honesty, there's greater similarity with the overall theme of Starship Troopers (neo-fascist, et al) than there ever was of Cameron's work.

Again, I'm not suggesting that GW is the victim here. Far from it. I've been a fan of their stuff for as long as you have and have played (and almost finished selling off) every game they've ever made except Warmaster, with multiple armies/gangs/fleets in each. I know their approach. But suggesting that an obvious joke character like Sly Marbo of the Catachans, an entire IG army essentially based on the idea of jungle fighters similar to the Rambo series, is somehow an unacknowledged ripoff of Rambo is going a bit too far. I don't think they intended anyone to interpret the character as anything but an (ahem) sly reference, if they even did that. Like I said, I played their games for 25 years and Rambo was not my first thought when I read 3 different IG codices containing that character. Rambo's essential themes are tragedy and patriotism, stuff that only vaguely resonates with the IG.

I think they've been most vociferous when protecting their iconic 40K stuff because that IP is somewhat original (Emperor, Warp from the psychic emanations of humans, primarchs, etc.) If you're saying no one can make insect-like aliens or guys in powered armor other than Heinlein or the makers of the Alien films, then you're also saying that Gamma World was a ripoff (except that it came before Aliens) and that Starcraft doesn't rip off GW but somehow sure does rip off HR Giger because, well, it does if you're looking at in black-and-white terms. That's just a little too linear for me. Would you be saying that no one can make a novel about wolves without ripping off Jack London?

Incidentally, I found it mildly hilarious that Blizzard's first new franchise in 18 years was called "Overwatch."

/thread derailment