Kris Hall: Similar, Similar

So how similar is too similar?  Does having a great game in a given genre inspire me to say “enough” or to go looking for clones?  Or to put it another way—is it possible to have too many train games?

These thoughts were inspired by the various internet items I’ve seen lately on Steam and Age of Steam 3rd edition.  Some people have indicated that they will buy both.  Is that too much of a good thing?

While I am happy to collect expansions for many games (I have all of the current Arkham Horror expansions even though the number of expansions is higher than the number of times that I have played the game), but too much similarity between one version of a game and the next is a turn-off to me.  To me, Ticket to Ride Europe felt overly familiar when compared the basic Ticket to Ride.  But Ticket To Ride Marklin offered just enough innovation to be fun and worth a purchase. 

I plan to buy Steam (on the grounds that it is less demanding and more like Railroad Tycoon than regular Age of Steam), but I don’t think I’ll need to own Age of Steam as well.  Even a fanatic Martin Wallace fan sometimes wonders how many cube-shuttling games he needs. 

Obviously, some players can’t get enough of certain genres or certain subject matters.  Wargaming is a fairly small subset of the general gaming hobby, but wargame publishers keep churning out eastern front games.  I assume that many wargamers are happy to own half a dozen simulations of the Barbarossa campaign. 

Of course, scale and game mechanics can make two different simulations of the Battle of Gettysburg into very different experiences.  The old Avalon Hill Gettysburg game is so different from Richard Berg’s Three Days of Gettysburg as to seem like a different animal altogether.  But if I owned those two games (and I do), how many more Gettysburg games would I need before I felt sated?  How many different Civil War combat result tables would I need to see before acquiring a new Gettysburg game feels just plain redundant?

I don’t know.

But Martin Wallace has said that he plans to develop a Gettysburg simulation as a Treefrog Game. 

Because I already own so many Gettysburg games, there will be no need for me to buy it.

Of course, it never hurts to check out the rules of any new game…

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