Saturday Morning Gaming: The Agony and Ecstasy of Out of Print Board Games

When I was growing up, most board games were variants of Candyland. You’d pull your card (or roll your dice) and then move your guy. Chutes and Ladders added some interesting dynamics by having the board potentially harm or help you. Parcheesi added a lot of interesting dynamics based on whether or not you rolled a 5 or whether you rolled doubles. Sorry and Trouble had interaction based on whether you touched another player’s piece. Sillier board games like Happy Days: Fonzie’s Real Cool Game had a dynamic where the winning condition was not going around the board but collecting “Cool” points and first to 16 won.

The main thing that the games all seemed to have in common was that the outcomes were random and inevitable. Hey, if somebody bumped you in Sorry, there’s no hard feelings. That’s the way the dice tumble.

Games like Monopoly brought out a bit of animosity because, at that point, the game gave enough choice for any given player to feel ganged up on (even though, if you’re playing right, it’s more that one of the players has the mandate of heaven and the others do not).

The introduction of games like Talisman changed everything. Roll the dice, draw a card… THEN ROLL DICE AT THE CARD. Get bonuses for swords or spells! Heck, there are different players you can play as and so each game is different! Play as the Warrior! Play as the Sprite! Play as the Thief! It *FELT* like playing something new. It felt asymmetric… even if it was just, you know, Sorry and Happy Days and Monopoly with a little bit of a D&D skin on it.

Fast-forward a few decades, and there are now some seriously *AWESOME* board games out there that mingle all sorts of different types of gameplay, and asymmetry, and tactics, and chance, and JEEZ LOUISE THEY ARE SO FREAKING EXPENSIVE.

Mansions of Madness? Ninety bucks. Descent: Legends of the Dark? A hundred and forty bucks. Fury of Dracula? It’s out of print! You have to go to Ebay!

Well, thank goodness for Steam. Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition is thirteen dollars.

Well, I’ve been tinkering with it and the number one biggest problem is that most of the games I play with the gaming group belong to either Dman or Jman and they can explain the game easily.

I mean: look at this gameboard:

I’m now going through the tutorial for Fury of Dracula and finding that they go out of their way to say “you know what? Go to youtube.”

So now I’m watching this:

I’ll probably be able to talk about the game itself next week! I hope.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is the gameboard where the author is playing Lord Galdaming on turn one. It’s nuts. All screenshots taken by the author.)