Links: Patching Board Games, Questioning Reprints & Honoring Your Country

It's intriguing to think of how the Internet and communities like BGG have allowed for flaws to be found in board games and provided a way for them to be "patched" more easily than ever. Whether it's rules errata, FAQs, house rules, second edition printings with corrected cards, or endless expansions there are many ways to correct, improve, and continue to support board games after they are released. This may be viewed as a crutch to release games before they are ready or a tool that developers and publishers can use to support their games. Truthfully it's probably a bit of both, but either way the technology and community are there and it would be foolish to ignore them.

Our goal isn't to break the metagame — if our handful of developers were able to solve the metagame in the time the set was in the FFL [approx. five months], then the people in the real world would do it in a matter of weeks — instead, we want to provide a large number of strategies that are about even power, and allow for room in the metagame to shift as certain decks gain or lose popularity. This means our main job is to try out as many cards and combinations of cards as possible, and to give the overall strategies enough to make things interesting — not to pinpoint balance everything against each other.

Being a fan of old designs myself (my top three games are all from the 1980s or earlier), I do keenly follow the response to reprints of old games, and it feels like the movement is starting to sputter. It's not necessarily that fewer reprints are being released. Indeed, I suspect we’re seeing more than ever before. It's that the ones that get released are greeted with a shrug from an increasingly saturated market, and in a couple cases from the publishers who release them. And perhaps more disturbingly, more and more titles are quietly being dropped from reprint schedules in favor of bigger money-makers.