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Acquiring Classics/Reprints vs. The Cult of the New
Chapel wrote: ...Rail Baron...
I have a copy in need of a new home. The box is a little beat up, but the components are in great condition. Let's talk!
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- Legomancer
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- Dave Lartigue
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We're coming up on my 10 year anniversary at BGG. I got into boardgaming about a year or so before that but I registered for BGG on 9-11-2005 (never forget).
At the time, there was a sort of established "pantheon" of classics. You had your holy trinity (Settlers, TTR, Carc) and you also had things like T&E, Puerto Rico, Princes of Florence, El Grande, Wallenstein, Power Grid, Samurai, Through the Desert, and a few others. These were titles that it was assumed pretty much everyone was familiar with. If you did the kind of geeklist where you said something or joked about different games, you'd probably have a lot of these as examples. There were new games coming out, and things got hyped, but in general it seemed that these games were on one tier and everything else was on another.
The first two games I really remember challenging this were Pillars of the Earth and Caylus. Caylus came in like a juggernaut, and it was declared a new classic almost immediately. Pillars didn't have that much momentum, but I remember feeling like it was being given more "legitimacy" than it deserved.
When I compare that to the current climate, things seem really different. Not just that there are different games in the Top 10, but this sense of a tier of "the canon" is completely gone. Part of this is because a lot of those games are OOP, but in addition there doesn't seem to be much of a communal memory past the previous three years or so. There doesn't seem to be any desire to have one, either. The majority of gamers seem to fall in on of two categories: those who are only into whatever the newest thing out is, and those who are "collectors" and are just looking for sheer numbers, regardless of quality.
Having been around for 10 years now, I've seen things come and go. I know that some of these old classics just aren't that great; Samurai is just okay, Princes of Florence is dull, Carc feels pretty played out, and the less said about Caylus, the better. Maybe it's just me, but I still have this sense of there being a "canon" and a newer game entering it (like Agricola or Dominion) should be rare, and a big deal. But I think I'm in a definite minority in feeling that way.
I know I'm falling for a nostalgia trap. Looking at the dates for some of those "classic" games in 2005, most of them were also about 3 years old at the time. But a lot of them stuck around. Some, like Trias and Clans have more or less been forgotten, but a big chunk of them are still there. The reprint of El Grande has surprised some folks who weren't even aware it was criminally OOP, as I think it just seemed like an evergreen title.
I played 100 new-to-me games last year and so many of them were mediocre chaff that didn't seem to aspire to be anything BUT mediocre chaff. I got very little sense of anyone really swinging for the fences and trying to do anything but entertain some gamers for a couple months. I played Istanbul the other night and it's not terrible, but no one will be thinking about this in 6 months. So often I see something being hyped and just think, "You want me to get excited about THAT? That sort of thing drew yawns 6 years ago." To pick on Istanbul some more, it's a game that won a major award for having merchants run a wheelbarrow around an old-timey town collecting fruit and cloth to sell at the market. This is from the guy who did Traders of Genoa! Tell me he couldn't have done this in his sleep years ago.
I know that a lot of this is my own hangups. Like, I don't see the point of spending $60 million to make a movie whose only goal is to make $70 million and then be forgotten. That seems stupid to me. Likewise, I don't see the point of putting out another cloth-on-a-boat game just to have something on the shelves, with no goal except to make the rent. I get that not every design is going to be T&E but again, I'd rather play something that aimed high and missed than something that successfully covered its bottom line and a little more.
That's enough. Feel free to shred it and make "get off my lawn" jokes, I just wanted to get that out.
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That's where I am now. If a game wants to get on the shelf it needs to
- Beat whatever genre game I have on there now, -or-
- Freshen up a genre game I have (hello expansions), -or-
- Be new and interesting.
For example, I keep being disappointed by CIV games, so I am looking at CLASH OF CULTURES. I am not interested in PIRATE KING because it's not as good as MERCHANTS & MARAUDERS.
The last "new" game I got in that its novelty won the day was... ROBINSON CRUSOE I guess. Even that is just a tightly wound worker placement game (cf. AGRICOLA, LE HAVRE, DOMINANT SPECIES also on the shelf). If I have to find something genre original, it's probably BATTLESTAR GALACTICA as a traitor-in-their-midst game.
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Now I mostly play games with my wife and larger family. When we play anything remotely complex, we play it several times in a row before playing a different game. I don't understand how people have the energy to be constantly learning new rules and re-learning old ones.
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Given the general lack of creativity in the current glut of games, the choice of playing one new game versus another is not usually that meaningful. Maybe that leaves sensing players anxious to keep trying new games in hopes of finding something interesting, particularly if they are unwilling to apply intuition to sort through all the chaff.
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I too can't imagine playing 100 new to me games in a year.
I've been fortunate enough to find like minded folks, so I've never been out to a 'game night' as it were. And by 'game night' I think we're meaning a place where everyone shows up with an arm full of games and folks cycle through stuff. There's no way I'd be up for that.
I like to plan the game for the evening first. 'Anyone wanna come over and play Lunar Rails?' or 'Hey fellas, let's try a little mordheim in the next two weeks.' Seldom are fillers even brought out, because we all know what we're there for so there isn't any milling around. Plus, I'm fine chatting a bit.
So, Mr. White, how do you play any new games? Usually it happens one of two ways. 1) It's something that I've always been curious about and wanted to try (TITAN) or 2) It's something a buddy wants to play that I think I'll play again in the future (Pathfinder Deckbuilder). I'm all up for trying a classic or playing something that I think my friends and I will build a history with. I've got a buddy who only buys like one boardgame a decade. He likes Shadowrun, so he bought that Shadowrun deckbuilder. I'm looking forward to playing it because I know I'll play it several times. Still, even in the above cases (pathfinder, shadowrun) those individuals are like I was with TITAN. They want to experience the game specifically for one reason or another...I don't get a sense that they're simply owning the game because it's new and they had to find a new game to buy.
I have played in public places where game nights are going on, and I simply can't imagine going from table to table trying to generate vps with a different group of folks every hour. To me...it's sorta pointless. Even at conventions...I list out what folks want to play well ahead of time. Maybe I'm a control freak, but this is why I haven't played games like T&E. It doesn't seem to interest me that much and I'm never really in a situation to play an undetermined game.
This is likely part of the reason I've become disenchanted with keeping up with boardgame releases. The reviews on the front page mean little to me at this point. There's just too much noise and I'm just repeating the same refrain over and over against the tide. I'd rather play a handful of great games where knowing them means I get to play against the other plays and not against learning a new ruleset.
But...back on topic a bit more...I've always been sorta backwards facing and it's taking all I've got not to go buy up a bunch of Dark Future (again). I'm finding that, a decade away from it, I enjoy painting again. Looking forward to building up our BloodBowl league, putting a decent Mordheim campaign in place, and running through these DCC rpg modules.
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What I've learned weaving through those phases is what I truly like, what I want my games to look like, how I want them to feel and what I expect them to deliver as far as experience goes. Now age isn't a factor.
But in general New and Talked About will always beat out Old and Better the majority of the time when battling for table time.
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In the last twelve months, I have a fair number of games that I hadn't played before, including:
Mystery Rummy
that Marvel AvsX dice-building game
Rune Wars
Firefly
Twilight Struggle
Robinson Crusoe
Forbidden Desert
some boring Lord of the Rings deckbuilder
the Pathfinder deckbuilder
Age of War
Thunderstone 2nd edition
Yggdrasil (aka Bag-norak)
and probably a couple of others that have slipped my mind.
Most of the games were okay, though Thunderstone and that AvsX dicebuilder game sucked badly. The only one that I might need to get out of the bunch would be Robinson Crusoe, though I would rather play a couple more times before deciding. All in all, I would have been happier to have spend more time playing classics and less time learning mediocrities like Yggdrasil or Mystery Rummy. I know enough about board games by now to know that I'm unlikely to enjoy deckbuilders, dicebuilders or bagbuilders.
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Legomancer wrote: Get off my lawn!/quote]
It's probably more who I am than anything, but I got into the hobby four years ago and the first thing I did was go to 'school'. I was brought in by deduction games, so I started looking those up, which led me to titles like Sleauth, Clue: The Museum Caper, Electronic Detective, and two SdJ winners, Scotland Yard and Hiemlich and Co. From here I branched off and explored two paths, SdJ games and Sid Sackson games. Through older podcasts like Board Games To Go and On Board Games I learned much about the history of the late 00's, what was coming out then and being talked about. Through videos I learned from Board Games with Scott. I was digging through the archives trying to understand the lineage of the hobby, I read about AT's return in the early 00's, the rise and fall of Knizia from 1995-2005, the mid-00's mad-dash to create the new Talisman, cooperatives establishing themselves, and the since waning prominence of train games.
It's all there for anyone who want's to learn it. I guess your post is about how little emphasis there actually is on learning it, on the value of knowing these things, of knowing older games. To me you always start at the beginning, and I know I'm an anomaly, but it just makes sense. I can't understand being interested in something as a hobby and not wanting to know how it got where it is.
I guess I'm saying "get off my stoop!"
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