The Gothic Game 2nd Edition Announced

It's interesting to see the new board in that video. Looks like the oubliette and the fall-into-the-moat spaces are all gone. Great Spiral Stair looks like it might be easier to escape. There is a graveyard, but the tower with the boiling oil is gone. The servants bedroom is also gone. There are fewer of the arrows that dump you into rooms. The entrance to the trophy room has been moved closer to the den. The overall color palette of the rooms has been changed from garish to shadowy, which is not necessarily a bad thing, just a matter of taste. Overall, I think that these changes streamline the gameplay while subtracting from the experience. In particular, taking away board features like the oubliette and the moat hazards makes the power of adjacency less interesting, and also makes rolling and moving less interesting.

If I were running this Kickstarter, I would have made only a few changes to the original game:

1. A hit point track around the north and east edges of the board, plus 8 hit point tracking tokens in the same color as the player pawns, to replace the need for a pencil and scoring sheet.
2. A short track in the southwest corner of the board to track various timed effects like number of turns before the vampire must return to the crypt, along with another small set of cardboard tokens.
3. A couple of distinctive icons for the cards, to indicate whether a card should be read aloud and played immediately or read quietly and held back for later usage.
4. Slightly longer rule book, just to clarify certain aspects of the rules.

You can’t tell me that you couldn’t do a double-sided board as stretch goal #1

Hi everyone, I'm Kris - the designer on this edition of the game. Happy to field any questions any of you have

To get started, the oubliette and the moat traps are still very much part of the game - in fact, they're deadlier than ever. Traps are now represented as double sided tokens and are placed randomly at the beginning of the game. So you don't know which trap you'll trigger when you land on one... now players have no idea where the oubliette is on the board!

Double sided board as a stretch goal. It's a brilliant idea, and something I'd LOVE to do... but sadly it was never an option. The original creators don't own the IP for the artwork featured in the original, so I had to have everything recreated from scratch.

Kris, first off, thank you for taking the time for offering to answer our questions. I’m going to be so bold as to say that this website in particular is where the cult fan base for the original Gothic Game lives. It gets mentioned, talked about, and is held in some regard here.

I also can’t stand it when creators get attacked by some of the more stubborn users here, so please know that anything I say or have said about this new edition is not anything I enjoy saying. I love the original game and I am not fortunate to own a copy. I want to be onboard with this new edition. I *love* the new art, something I outright dislike about the old one.

That being said, this really is a hard sell for me at this point. I hear things like reduced randomness and slightly more forgiving gameplay and my immediate reaction is that this isn’t totally in the spirit of the old game (as well as bad flashbacks to FFG’s fumbled reworks of Dungeon Quest and Merchant of Venus). Adding modernized mechanics to appease current gaming tastes leaves me believing that it really isn’t at all the same game and that the game shouldn’t bear the name at all and instead stand as it’s own entity, even with the thematic similarities. It isn’t exactly a household name after all, I’m not sure that the name recognition is a help when the game has been reconfigured so.

Again, I don’t want to leave you feeling discouraged, as a designer and content creator myself, that’s the last thing I want. Feel free to sell me on the new edition/tell me I’m wrong. And again, thank you for your time!

Kris wrote: Double sided board as a stretch goal. It's a brilliant idea, and something I'd LOVE to do... but sadly it was never an option. The original creators don't own the IP for the artwork featured in the original, so I had to have everything recreated from scratch.

Is the layout also affected by not owning the artwork....seems like you could use the same layout with different artwork to accomplish being able to play the original. Or even a permuted layout that functions equivalently as the original?

Hi Josh, thanks for the warning!

Seriously, I appreciate your candour. I completely appreciate your point of view and there's every chance I'd have the exact same thoughts if someone else were designing this game.

Like you, I love the original game (and Dungeon Quest - that my all time favourite right there!) - so much so, I've invested three years of work into this endeavour. From the beginning it was important to me that the game was true to the spirit of the original. If not, I'd have been better creating an entirely new game as you say.

There's no two ways about it, striking a balance between making changes and keeping it faithful is a hard thing to do, particularly because everyones tolerances will be different. For some people, any deviation from the original is sacrilegious(!) - I realise I'm never going to win those people over. I'm confident that the changes I've made have improved the game. If you haven't seen any, you should check out some of the previews - all the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, including by fans of the original.

I actually think you might be surprised at how much of the original remains intact. If anything the game is more brutal! All the horrible, awful cards and traps you love to hate are still in there.

Whatever your concerns, please know that this has been developed by a fan, just like yourself. I'm happy to go into more detail on the changes I've made and the reasons for doing so, but it will have to wait a few days. I'm heading to Essen tomorrow and I've still got lots to do!

Speaking of which, if anyone here is going to be at Spiel then we'll be at stand 5M120 with a copy of the game. It would be great to meet some fans of the original and I'd love to hear your thoughts in person. Robert Wynne Simmons, the man himself, is coming down on Friday morning too. I'm sure he'd be delighted to meet with fans of his game!

Space Ghost wrote:

Kris wrote: Double sided board as a stretch goal. It's a brilliant idea, and something I'd LOVE to do... but sadly it was never an option. The original creators don't own the IP for the artwork featured in the original, so I had to have everything recreated from scratch.

Is the layout also affected by not owning the artwork....seems like you could use the same layout with different artwork to accomplish being able to play the original. Or even a permuted layout that functions equivalently as the original?

No, the layout is not affected. What you've suggested is what we have done. Well, with a few alterations. Some of the rooms have been moved around a little bit, and there are slightly fewer spaces. Also, some of the rooms have been changed. For example, I removed the servants bedroom and added a cemetery.

The KS is live, I just pledged. There is a discounted rate for the first week.

hotseatgames wrote: The KS is live, I just pledged. There is a discounted rate for the first week.

Yep, email just arrived, annoying that the postage is still the same for the UK as the US even though it's campaign is here - FFS, can we ever get a break over here.

www.kickstarter.com/projects/blackletter...hic-game/description

To those that have played first edition, would it be soloable? I love playing Talisman and Dungeonquest solo, and this looks like it would side today on next to those. Not sure how much cardplay etc there is I guess.

Not in the least. The object is to kill the other players. It would be like trying to solo Wiz-War.

I have soloed both The Gothic Game and Wiz-War, to teach myself the rules. It's doable, but requires some selective amnesia about who is holding what cards. The only really enjoyable way to play either game is with live opponents.

Asking the people who have played the original is there enough game in this 'roll and move and eleminate other players' game for £50 ($65) or are there more modern design games that does the same or better ?

southernman wrote: Asking the people who have played the original is there enough game in this 'roll and move and eleminate other players' game for £50 ($65) or are there more modern design games that does the same or better ?

By modern board game standards, The Gothic Game should be a terrible game. Roll-and-move can be frustrating, the swingy cards can undermine any strategy, and player elimination is a bitter pill for some players to swallow. In reality, everybody that I have introduced to it enjoys The Gothic Game. The roll-and-move is dramatic, the swingy cards are exciting, and most players avidly watch the rest of the game even after getting eliminated. The game has great atmosphere and offers a singular experience unmatched by other games. It is accessible to non-gamers, and serious gamers will eventually discover that there is some strategy.