Never change a winning team. This is true for football, a little for our daily routine, and sometimes even for the world of board games. But is it always true?
If you think about it, a board game usually is born after many, many hours spent thinking about new mechanics or blending working ones, then testing the first prototypes; but also illustrating the various components, theming the new creature. Of course, then there is the production, commercialization, marketing and promotion part, and so on… “ça va sans dire” (it’s obvious), therefore, that the creators and publishers try as much as possible to capitalize on this enormous investment, if not in money (and often it is also so), certainly in the time spent by so many people. So what to do with all this mass of squeezed neurons, worn pens and stressed meeples?
The best way to create a new game without creating a new game is to simply add a piece of it: expansions are often the shortest solution to prolong the life and hype of a successful title. Sometimes they are the obvious of ”addons” that do nothing but raise even more decks of cards or fill even more packs already full of tokens, others instead transform a good game into a masterpiece: titles like The Norwegians for A Feast for Odin transforms the gaming experience, removing defects and adding mechanics that then make the game impossible to disconnect from the expansion.
Other times, however, the meat is always the same and it’s the sause that changes, as in the Great Western Trail trilogy. Surely, from Kansas City you go to Buenos Aires for GWT: Argentina or Wellington for GWT: New Zealand, but it’s not just the destination of the cattle that changes, on the contrary! In the South American version we will have to deal with exports to European ports, while in the Maori version not only do the cows become sheep, but we will have to sail to reach other locations, sell wool and grab a myriad of bonus cards to enhance deck building. A trilogy that is uphill both in terms of difficulty and satisfaction.
Instead, sometimes it happens for some games that you go through both expansions and a re-release with substantially different mechanics, and then you go back a bit to push much, much further. I’m talking about that masterpiece of Terra Mystica, to which was added the expansions Ice and Fire and Merchants of the Sea, launched into galactic space as Project Gaia changing the substance and mechanics a bit, and in the end was brought into a not well-defined golden age with Age of Innovation.
And precisely we want to focus on this title: after having smoothed out the edges with the two expansions and after having changed its face, Feuerland has ventured into a somewhat risky experiment: taking the “good old primeval boar”, Terra Mystica, and giving it a new shape while essentially maintaining all its mechanics, but changing its balance. This renovation was planned, of course: to get to the Age of Innovation, authors and publishers have thoroughly analyzed thousands of online and tabletop games, and decided where and when to intervene.
The result was the most unexpected: at the beginning I was very skeptical about this re-release because, in the end, Terra Mystica was already a gaming masterpiece with little to fix. Instead, after a few games, i perceived the great beauty of seeing something already beautiful elevated to immortality. The reference points of the races have been swept away by a random “initial combo”, the books add depth without creating useless and complex frills, the innovations are the icing on the cake of a strategy that is composed in different ways with each game, and of course the interaction, although less “bad”, is felt throughout the game.
So, only compliments? For the game, in my humble opinion, yes. For the setup, however, no. Even more tokens, even more meeples, even more everything and even more small packs to open and close. To set up this gourmet delicacy requires patience and not one, but several starred players, and the result is tiredness even before the first round.
We at The Dicetroyers couldn’t stand by and watch this gaming masterpiece fall prey to disorder, and here it is, our organizer for Age of Innovation! Everything in its place and setup in a few minutes, to give this pearl the oyster it deserves. Sure, there are many trays, but each one will mean saving time, neurons and diopters.
The Age of Innovation has never been so organized, try it and believe it!
Discover also the other games in our catalog and contact us for any request or question!
