Gen Con 2021 Recap: Surreal Edition – Part 5 – News & Announcements

by Ryan LaFlamme
October 8, 2021 | Posted in Critical Hits

As the largest board game convention in North America, and one of the largest on the globe, Gen Con is by nature both a public spectacle and a nexus point for information revealed when that much of the industry gets together. It’s rare for that many publishers to be present at one location with such a captive – and enfranchised – audience to share major announcements with. So traditionally companies take advantage of the spotlight to release news and make announcements as a way of generating buzz and attention, with some going to far as to turn their own Gen Con announcements into an annual Moment. Indeed, in addition to the multitude of panels, demos, game sessions, and events of all stripes, it’s almost impossible for it to not generate newsworthy tidbits of one kind or another. Especially business-related ones. The people making those important decisions are often there, as are the people who generally report about those announcements. It’s all seen as very win-win.

Of course, traditionally a news announcement is only effective if people hear about it, and that can be tricky with so much else going on (not to mention every major outlet attempting to grab their own share of screen time). Plus, it’s not like the entire Gen Con audience is visiting the same panels or constantly checking their inbox newsletters while being in the middle of the convention, which actually makes many of those desired watershed moments very word of mouth initially. Add in the constant stream of updates, pictures, and conversations from the attendees themselves on social media, and it’s very easy for notable news stories to get overlooked until well afterwards.

Traditionally being the key word here. Because that’s how Gen Con usually is. 2021 on the other hand…

This year’s litany of news does look a little different compared to past years. Odds are you may have already heard about most of these at this point as a result. But if not, then join us in Part 5 of our Gen Con 2021 Recap: Surreal Edition and let’s dive into some of the headline-grabbing announcements made at, just before, or just after this year’s convention.

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News & Announcements

 

 

Ok so maybe it wasn’t that barren, but as Gen Con announcements go, it was quiet. Almost eerily so. Though it’s also completely understandable. First was the obvious elephant not in the room: a lot of publishers sat this one out. The number of companies present was at least 30-40% fewer than normal, including several of the industry’s biggest such as Rio Grande Games, Paizo Publishing, and everything Asmodee (which includes a slate of companies including Fantasy Flight Games, Space Cowboys, Days of Wonder, Lookout Games, Z-Man Games, Catan Studios, and more.) This naturally led to a reduction in companies making such announcements.

Secondly, one of the many byproducts from the pandemic over the last 18 months was companies needing to take a more active role in shaping their own marketing. With physical conventions shuttered for so long, publishers opted for alternative means of getting the word out, be it through virtual conventions, more community engagement via company Discords and Facebook groups, and amping up newsletter output. By the time Gen Con rolled around in September, most companies had already announced what the rest of their year was going to look like for the most part rather than intentionally holding on to it till the truncated con season started. It bears an interesting question on how this will affect the process next year when we (hopefully) return to a normal con schedule.

So what did actually get revealed around this time?

 

Prepare To Pay More For Games

As we elaborated on already at the onset of this series, one of the banner topics of Gen Con affecting both publishers and consumers is the ongoing calamity that is global shipping logistics. It’s a production chain mess across whole swaths of the economy, for which board games make up a tiny fraction. Yet it also affects it disproportionally hard compared to some given how small profit margins are for a game. Production backlogs, raw material scarcity, shipping bottlenecks, and labor shortages are all delaying or halting the process of getting a game made, let alone getting it into your hands. The issue isn’t as simple as not being able to being able to load it on a boat, though the container price spikes facing the hobby are by far the most concerning.

So, get ready for the price of board games to go up. It’s already started, with several publishers announcing that they would be raising prices either immediately or in the near future, including Steve Jackson Games, Fantasy Flight Games, several publishers under the Luma Imports brand – with more to come in the weeks and months ahead.

The news part is that this isn’t going to be a blip. You can safely expect the average price of most board games to go up by about 10% over the next year. Which, if we’re being honest, is far overdue.

For one, production quality of modern board games has gone through the roof in recent years. Detailed plastics, dual-layered player boards, customized inserts, renown game artists bringing it to life – all of these things have become commonplace features compared to a decade ago, and all these extras cost money. However, the average price of a board game hasn’t changed much in 20 years. Settlers of Catan in 2000 was roughly the same price as Catan today, even though the quality and appearance of what you’re buying has objectively gotten better. Which means that the publishers have been slowly getting less and less revenue from each copy of a game over time. They’ve been eating the added costs to keep gamers happy.

Well, that was tolerable when the cost of a shipping container to transport games over from the factories was at $3,000 each. Over the course of 2021, that number has surged through the roof, with costs ranging easily into the $15,000-25,000 range due to global demand. One publisher was quoted at $34,000 at a particular high point just last month. Even when the logistics glut finally calms down (with most forecasts putting that between summer and fall next year), it’s very unlikely it’s going to go back to $3,000 now that shipping companies know people are willing to pay much higher. The new normal could theoretically end up being something like $10-12k – four times what it was pre-pandemic. Another added cost.

Most publishers have either been able to absorb the surge costs in order to get product out or have slowed or delayed releases in order to offset some of those financial woes. (Or in the case of Ravensburger, simply halting most new orders for the remainder of the year to catch up.) In the long run though, it’s not a tenable business solution if they want to keep the people employed making the games we all like and actually stay in business. It’s very likely some smaller publishers won’t survive the rise in costs to begin with.

Put all those factors together, and yeah, prices are going to go up. It’s been coming for a while. That $50 game will now be a $55 game, which means you’ll have to go forgo one cup of coffee a year to compensate, but it’ll be ok, folks. You’re still getting a phenomenal value for your purchase – and still below what a fair market price probably would be if the industry was more focused on margins and less on the love of gaming.

 

Busted Algorithms, Blockchains, and Beleaguered Apps

Beyond the whole existential crisis thing, there were some other brief news tidbits that appeared just prior to the convention or on the periphery, and all of them dealt with the digital side of gaming in some form.

For starters, news broke just before the convention regarding the fate of Keyforge, one of Fantasy Flight’s flagship card games. Keyforge burst on to the scene a few years back with the novel idea of a competitive two player card game where every single deck is original. Every deck purchased would be 100% unique in terms of its card allocations, and while there would naturally be variance in the power of these decks as a result, part of the intended appeal was purchasing and playing these new decks to find out which worked and played in to your game style. The idea was to take this approach and avoid the need to build custom decks to play as you would with a traditionally CCG (like Magic: the Gathering) or LCGs (like Android: Netrunner [RIP]). In fact, they are deliberately not customizable.

Keyforge started out with a strong reception, but nearly from the beginning there were issues maintaining supply to meet demand – which in turn cooled demand a bit. Subsequent sets released resulted in slightly less fanfare, though the game has maintained a decent core fanbase. However, concern arose when after the game’s fifth set all talk of Keyforge’s future and products out of FFG sort of…stopped.  The reason is partially due to the ongoing logistics issues so many companies are facing, but more importantly is that the deckbuilding algorithm they use to create the Keyforge decks kind of, well, broke. And they have to recreate it from scratch. Which is going to take some time. Therefore, Keyforge is not actually dead but on hold until they can ‘fix the glitch’, wherein they will release the next set alongside a digital version of the game.

All of this somewhat ironically came out prior to Gen Con and not part of Fantasy Flight’s annual In-Flight report. As an Asmodee company, FFG was not present at Gen Con this year and chose to stream it online instead. Yet on that front, aside from a couple announcements regarding progress on a new Descent, an Outer Rim expansion, and some from LCG updates, it too was a rather subdued event this year.

On a similarly tangential bit digital news, last month before the convention CMON Games announced it was getting in on the growing “geeks with money” fad of investing in NFTs (non-fungible tokens) by partnering with Monsoon Digital to create a series of digital collectibles on Monsoon’s pending trading platform. There’s no real word on exactly how this would interact with the tabletop side of CMON (if at all), but the does company have a history of exploring new ways of incorporating technology into analog space  – remember 2019’s announcement of their Teburu gaming system?

Similarly to how Funko Games’ parent company bought into an NFT company this spring, there’s a notion out there that geek culture is just primed and ready for an explosion in blockchain-based digital collectibles. That is, once most people understand what an NFT is, how to obtain one, and have anyone remotely explain to them why they’d want to obtain them. Which, good luck on that part. So we’ll see how that all develops.

Finally, on the comparatively straightforward side of digital news, Czech Games Edition did make mention at Cen Con that they are hoping the long-awaited app version of Codenames will finally be coming out sometime in 2022. No confirmations on a set time range for release, but they are optimistic sometime during the first half of the year.

 

Big Rig Reboots Ride Again

What’s old is new again is as true with board games as it is anywhere else. The hobby is renown for continually improving on itself, either through modifications and iterative changes to specific mechanics and themes, or through taking an older game and revamping it with modern design principles. New editions of games are the board game equivalent of a content patch for a video game, adding new elements, fixing bugs, and making balance adjustments deemed needed over time. Sometimes it’s also as simple as having been out of print for a while, with the express intent of a new version reigniting interest in a long forgotten classic. Done right, a new game edition can be a massive success story. Done poorly, and it can come off as a cash grab.

In these two cases, it’s most likely going to be the former.

The first of these two announcements was made earlier this summer by Restoration Games with a reboot of the 1986 Mad Max style highway combat game Thunder Road as Thunder Road: Vendetta. Bringing back old versions of games is the entire ethos behind Restoration Games, and they have made quite a name for themselves by successfully revitalizing and reimagining beloved games from the past for the modern era. Several examples include Downforce, Fireball Island, and the pending fulfilment of their largest project to date, Return to Dark Tower.

News of Vendetta’s existence was not a secret heading in to Gen Con. They did, however, have a low-tech prototype of the game out on display for demoing purposes throughout the convention as a lead up to a Kickstarter intended for later this month. And even without the glitz and glam of a fancy prototype at the ready, Restoration still managed to get quite a few people to stop by for an overview on what the gist of the game is like. Which even with the changes still very much possesses the spirit of the Not-Road-Warrior, with all the ridiculous dice chucking car shooting antics of the original intact.

The other was also teased earlier this summer by Arcane Wonders but was elaborated on slightly at the convention, although they were keeping it low-key there as they didn’t even have a prototype, merely some non-displayed artwork on hand. Which is that they are working on a reboot of the 1987 Spiel des Jahres winner Auf Achse, now called Leylines.

One of the earlier titles in what has become a long and prestigious list of games from estimable designer Wolfgang Kramer, the Auf Achse is an early pick-up-and-deliver game where players are driving trucks of goods around Europe making deliveries to complete contracts. Auf Achse is a well-regarded game for its time (roll-based movement aside), and so word of a reimplementation certainly caught our attention. The new version will look markedly different, however, as it is trading in truck routes for a fantasy themed makeover due to…Reasons? Consider our curiosity piqued, though like everyone else, it will be a little while before we get to see more: Leylines is tentatively slated as a Gen Con 2022 release.

 

 

And….that’s it. Gen Con 2021 was sort of a news desert in a lot of ways. Well, except for release news! Check back for the final recap segment where we go over a slew of tentative dates for new game releases shown off in some form at the show!