• In February 2022, publisher Ravensburger announced an investment and partnership with crowdfunding site Gamefound, and with Ravensburger being the publisher of Stefan Feld's The Castles of Burgundy and with Gamefound being owned by publisher Awaken Realms, it might come as no surprise that Ravensburger and Awaken Realms are partnering on a giant special edition of The Castles of Burgundy that will be crowdfunded through Gamefound.
Hundreds of comments have been posted on that project page, with wildly conflicting desires about what exactly a special edition of The Castles of Burgundy should contain and how much it should cost. Will anyone be happy with the final product?!
• A similar-ish project is in the works from German publisher Queen Games, which is crowdfunding a comprehensive version of Donald X. Vaccarino's Kingdom Builder that it calls Kingdom Builder: Empire Edition, which will "contain everything in print for Kingdom Builder...plus 3D plastic houses and castles, 'bakelite' resin ability tokens, and 25% larger game board tiles".
Why are the tiles larger? As a Queen Games representative explains, "The idea behind the product was to upgrade Kingdom Builder with plastic, 3D houses. We worked with our manufacturer to get them designed, and from the samples we got they look fantastic. However, to have the level of detail we wanted they had to be bigger than the wooden houses were, and while they fit on the boards for KB, they take up the whole space and the board becomes a bit crowded. Therefore, in the empire edition, all of the tiles are larger to accommodate the houses."
Here's the landing page for this Kickstarter project, which will include a small expansion of "twist" cards that will be available separately at a later time.
• This item isn't quite in the same vein, but I neglected to post about it at the time, so here it is: In May 2021, Sophie Gravel posted the following on The Boardgame Group's forum on Facebook:
These games were originally published in a rectangular format and included wooden components instead of plastic.
Wooden or bakalite components are a clear choice for us on this classical collection.
But what about box size ?
I welcome all your thoughts and suggestions !