Lets be honest though: it really is about money. If a company yanks back an ip and doesn’t republish the game there just isn’t enough money in it to be worth it. Contracts could be made to get the game on the shelves if it’s actually going to make money.
I disagree. Yes, it’s always about money, but that could have more to do with the IP cost than the actual game itself. It could also have more to do with the fact that FFG is making a game that competes with the Licensor’s IP.
Supposedly, the breakup between FFG and Games Workshop was because GW was mad that X-Wing was outselling Warhammer and wanted FFG to stop making it. FFG said no, and as a result, FFG and GW ended their agreement, and games like Chaos in the Old World and Blood Bowl Team Manager going out of print are the casualties.
Fantasy Flight has taken a game that they lost/gave up the IP to and re-themed it multiple times:
They stopped Wings of War and made X-Wing instead. I don’t have hard numbers, but I bet you that X-Wing makes vastly more money for FFG than Wings of War ever did.
When FFG and Games Workshop ended their licensing agreement, it caused the premature death of the Warhammer Quest: Adventure Card game.
FFG obviously still thinks there’s money to be made off this game, despite the lack of license, so they’re releasing a re-themed version based on their own IP called Heroes of Terrinoth.
FFG tried to get the Dune license from the Herbert estate, but couldn’t, but they still thought there was money to be made so they re-themed the game and set it in their Twilight Imperium Universe and released Rex.
Related, someone take a look at the Rex board one day. It’s atrocious. Anyone saying you can just play Rex if you want the Dune experience is a liar. I’m not sure how they managed to change Arrakis into a series of connected dots ala Arkham Horror but the game looks like trash is all I’m saying. I had the opportunity to play it and turned it down despite really really wanting to play Dune.
Behold!
WTF are all these people doing telling me it’s a replacement then?
God damn I should have looked in that box.
Having played 1.6 games of John Company, and having now fully grasped how the presidencies work…
I like John Company. A lot. I want to play it again.
A map with bordering countries is just a graph. Drawing it differently doesn’t make the game different. I wonder how the “storm” works, though.
For what it’s worth I’m also told the rules are the same or close enough that it’s pretty much the same… like GAME. But graphics matter. Imagine Dune but on DOS using ascii and you’ve got Rex. Technically the same but I’m not playing that garbage. I wanna move armies around a planet.
I only played Rex once, and it was years ago, but from what I can remember, instead of a storm, it’s an orbiting fleet of warships that bombards the planet. The fleet moves a certain number of locations, which functions similarly to the storm moving around Arrakis.
In all fairness though, the original Dune game, and the board itself, is pretty ugly. Some of the redesigned fan-made boards on BGG are gorgeous, especially the wood-inlayed boards, but the original game one is pretty much 1970s fugly.
That’s the Dune aesthetic.
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Is it?
I get that you’re joking, but the book was first published in 1965. Why not some retro-futuristic aesthetic instead?
Just because the game was published in the 1970s doesn’t mean that the game has to keep that aesthetic for all time.
This is a fan made version of Dune. It’s absolutely gorgeous and timeless:
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See also: Glory to Rome.
I am unwilling to play the fugly GTR even though it’s identical mechanically.
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I like the original better as it has genuine retro charm. This board reeks of the same aesthetic as Geek Chiq gaming tables and Steampunk stuff. Obviously a lot of nerds are into that, as it is very popular, but to me it is just tacky.
Also, it’s not very Dune-like.
Fair enough, though at least it’s planet shaped, when I move into adjacent territories I picture armies marching. I kinda think it’s got a bit too much primary coloring going on red, yellow, orange… Not great but, planet shaped.
John Company is really special - if Cole ever self-publishes a second edition, the primary thing I hope for is a little more breathing room in the rulebook - It has an inflexible page limit because Sierra Madre Games has a strict weight requirement for their games for shipping purposes.
The rules are complete, but it’s hard to find things without the index. I couldn’t find the rule about the ratio of goods to ships when taking the sail action until I got back to the room that night.
Neither of the games we played saw a bailout (failure to pay dividends when share value is £3) company failure (no cubes in the court of directors) or mutiny (7 or more regions closed to the company, India moves away from European interests). The game on Monday was almost certainly heading to a bailout, if we played longer.
This was my PAX West:
Couple things here… that’s 12 new games! Broom Service, Irish Gauge, and Tempus are all the right combination of interesting and entertaining. That’s also a lot of Paris Connection - partly because it’s the only short game in my backpack. But it also blossomed every time I played it - it has layers of understanding that aren’t really evident despite the tiny page of rules, and unlike many train games it’s surprisingly resilient to games with new players.
The Great Zimbabwe is also available online, and I wouldn’t say no to a multiplayer async game. http://play.boardgamecore.net/
TEMPVS gets a lot better in repeat play. It takes longer to teach than to play. You can crank out an entire game in ~30 minutes if everyone’s on point.
Good to know. I really like it, but I would never consent to playing it again on a table. The UX doesn’t handle interesting situations in a reasonable way.
Cock(roach) Poker worked a lot better at PAX than it did in New York. Royale version is also good, and different, but both are pretty much equally fun. I think maybe if people develop better heuristics for the plain version then Royale might become necessary. When I think about it, it’s really just a faster, cheaper, and more portable way to play the good part of Sheriff of Nottingham.
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Cockroach poker is indeed surprisingly good. As Anthony and I debriefed on all the stuff we did at PAX, I preferred it over Skull. I like how the first recipient of the pass has to decide whether they want it coming or going (in the games I watched and played, they usually chose ‘going’, much to the delight of the starting player).
The risk is always shared between two players at the table, and the starting player can easily dump the risk elsewhere.