Lately I’ve been drawn back to the world of electronic gaming- SUPER MARIO GALAXY notwithstanding; I’ve found that my interest in that area lies primarily with PC games that are a decade or more old. No, my hard drive isn’t packed to the gills with cutting edge blockbuster games like BIOSHOCK but you will find MASTER OF MAGIC, STAR CONTROL 2, FALLOUT, and JAGGED ALLIANCE 2. Revisiting these games after having not laid eyes on them at least since THE SIMPSONS had a good a season…I’ve discovered that there is a timeless, perennial quality along with a scrappy charm to these games and other similar classics that all the cinema-like experiences, high-gloss production, and jacked-up 10th generation gameplay can’t possibly provide.

These games have a soul, a real heart of great gameplay, innovation, and character that a bajillion-dollar-a-year industry just can’t seem to bring back. It’s funny though, because all of these games I wound up abandoning at some point, selling them off on Usenet newsgroups (before the days of eBay) or even unceremoniously tossing them out in the trash under the assumption that newer, better games would take their places. I thought they were obsolete due to their now-antiquated graphics, sometimes clunky interfaces, and fairly dodgy AI- yet the qualities that made them great games in their chronological context still make them great today.

So my thoughts regarding this rediscovery of classic PC games inevitably turns back to board games- it’s not such a wide gulf to jump when you consider how, well, boardgamey a lot of classic PC games were before everything went real-time. And in particular, I’ve been considering how perceived obsolescence often informs what people think about older games or even games that are just a couple of years old. How, you might ask, does cardboard, paper, wood, and plastic become obsolete? I think it’s a silly idea myself but then again I like old games and I’m not afraid to look at a combat resolution table or shuffle tiny card board chits around.

In fact, I think a lot of the presumed obsolescence of older games is illusionary. How many times have we heard that a game is a “better version” of TALISMAN or a game is “CIVILIZATION in ninety minutes”? I don’t understand why great games should be made obsolete, and I frankly don’t understand why board gamers feel that older games need modernizing or updating even to the extent of designing games with the idea being that the finished product will be “like GAME X, but better”. Doesn’t anyone remember the STAR WARS special editions?

Witness PROPHECY, a Czechoslovakian fantasy game recently published in a very nice US second edition by Z-Man Games. Initial reports were that it was a TALISMAN killer featuring streamlined play, less random swings of luck, and more depth. Interest was high and reviews were great. I rustled up a copy of the 1st edition early last year and upon playing it I thought it was a very good game that was definitely designed as a TALISMAN update. It has a lot of the core elements- you control a fantasy character that wanders around, has random encounters, gains experience, and eventually enters an endgame where one player sets to eliminating everyone else. It does add some new quirks to the formula, such as moving player abilities to purchasable skill cards, less reliance on having the right cards or die results at the right times, and providing multiple movement opportunities rather than the old roll-and-move mechanic. It also eliminates events that completely hose players and there’s a greater sense of balance overall. It’s certainly not as wild as TALISMAN (particularly with the expansions) can get. But is it somehow “better” than TALISMAN, does it replace it or make the previous game- now regarded as a classic with some 25 years of history behind it- obsolete?

I think not. PROPHECY might be a better design, benefiting from more sophisticated design and modern concepts of balance and structure but it lacks the charisma that TALISMAN has always had. It doesn’t have the heart and soul that the earlier game had in spades, when we play it—it doesn’t make us laugh, groan, and harass like TALISMAN does. Sure, it’s modern and the Eurogamers might be willing to give it a shot, but I’d still recommend the new 4th edition TALISMAN over it- just like I would over RUNEBOUND and pretty much any other game that follows in the design lineage of the original classic.

Reprints are another area where obsolescence is brought up as an issue. As much as I love Fantasy Flight’s edition of the 1987 classic FURY OF DRACULA, I can’t help but question why they mucked around with a game that was already a beloved classic. Sure, they balanced some things out, made it a little less likely to wind up in one of those endless stalemates where Dracula is nowhere to be found, and they even improved on some elements of it. But the cost is that it isn’t quite the same; the redeveloper saw fit to update it, and I think that’s kind of unfortunate. You don’t go back into Stoker’s novel with a red pen and say “let’s change this part here”. When I play it, I’m continually aware of how it used to be. I think in every game I mention that the Dracula movement was completely different in the original. As a result, the new FURY didn’t make my old one obsolete at all despite all the new, modernized mechanics and updated gameplay.

Lately, companies like Valley Games have taken to reprinting games completely as they were originally available, which I think is a smart move even though their insistence on “updating” the art in their TITAN reprint to amateurish, generic fantasy art instead of the iconic silhouettes of the original is a completely stupid decision that presumes that something was wrong or unappealing about the classic Dave Trampier style.

In the past I’ve mistakenly thought that games can be made obsolete. I remember when I first got into playing SETTLERS OF CATAN and some of the first Eurogames that really started making waves in the hobby community some ten years ago and one of the things that really struck me is that it felt like they made longer, more complex games a thing of the past. Here were games that seemed to condense a lot of the ideas of more complex hobby games down to a more efficient, streamlined core- without cumbersome rules and almost no requirement for commitment. As a result, we shifted from playing a couple of games almost religiously to playing a lot of different games. A few years on, it started to become clear that the quality of board gaming was suffering. Sure, these new games played quick and easy and engaged some of the same thought processes the more complex games of the past did, but it also became apparent that many older games- at least the best of them like DUNE, UP FRONT, and CIVILIZATION provided more substance, depth, and because of those qualities they support a much higher replay value.

Deep, lasting relationships with games where you really get intimate with them through playing them repeatedly have become for many gamers a thing of the past, replaced by the hobby equivalent of casual sex- wham, bam, thank you Reiner. A lot of gamers don’t want to commit to older games and there’s a legion of credit card-wielding middle aged men who never turn up at a game night with the same title twice. These are the people who will tell you that an Avalon Hill game is “too long”, “too complex”, or “horribly broken”. They’ll evangelize to you that the games of the past suffered from bad design, poor components, or a lack of “elegance”, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean in reference to a board game. They’ll scoff at your copy of TALISMAN and suggest PROPHECY as an “elegant” alternative.