Changing Trends

Either the market for zombie-themed everything is so saturated that few new zombie-themed games came out this year, or the market for zombie-themed everything is so saturated that I do not even notice zombie-themed games anymore.

This year’s trends that I notice at Gen Con are sequels and saturating the options. Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like there are more expansions, add-ons, and otherwise building on previous successful games this year. I know, that is always happening, but it feels like the balance this year has shifted somewhat more towards building on existing games than launching new IPs, converting non-game IPs to games, or trying existing game IPs as a different sort of game. Maybe everything already got its deck-building game in the past few years. Still lots of new things, maybe we are just having a year a little more like the movies or video games.

By “saturating the options” I mean trying a “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” variant. If you liked Werewolf more with 12 roles instead of just villager/werewolf, how about our online Mafia with 150 roles? Coup: Rebellion G54 has 25 roles instead of 5 from the original game. The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game is currently marketing a subscription for monthly class deck releases, with variants in each class. I like more options, but at some point you have more than the game can handle, and when you get into the dozens of options you are inevitably going to have some serious balance issues, which can get worse as combinations can multiply that problem. Says the man with so many Dominion expansions that he needed a “storage solution.”

: Zubon