W. Eric Martin: Promo-a-Go-Go

No one likes to discover that her newly opened game is missing a piece. Even if the absent bit is only the twentieth cube in a set or an easily replaced pawn, you’re still pinched by anger and frustration. You’ll have to find the publisher’s contact information, compose a letter, then wait for a week or two (or several) to see whether the promised replacement part actually arrives. Even worse, future purchases from the same publisher will bear a modicum of worry that you’ll be disappointed once again.

What’s surprising, though, is how these same feelings overcome you upon the announcement of a new pawn or type of cube for an already existing game. While some are excited by the new possibilities that such material portends, you become frustrated by the thought that the game you currently own – the game you previously enjoyed and felt satisfied by – now feels incomplete. “I don’t own the whole game any more,” you say. “The publisher is using this game as a cash cow and ripping me off by producing something extra just because he knows that people will buy it.”

I know these feelings well because I used to be possessed by them. I viewed every expansion and promotional item as a must have and did whatever was necessary to purchase or trade for them. Even in my youth, I was driven by the need for completion: I collected proofs of purchase to obtain the limited edition Star Wars figures from Kenner or special Lego kits available only through catalogs. I asked my parents to visit Shoney’s in order to collect the new Big Boy comic and I subscribed to Marvel titles like Rom and Micronauts even though the comics were awful. (Astoundingly bad, really.) Breaking free of one of these collection compulsions felt wonderful, as with the Choose Your Own Adventure series that my brother decided to collect, yet I could not shake the collection bug completely, continuing to scour used bookstores throughout New York for that obscure Dick, Ellison or Moorcock paperback that I didn’t yet own.

When I submerged myself in the world of designer games, I initially scoured BoardGameGeek for clues to promotional items that needed to be part of my collection, but the weight of existing history, combined with the number of expansions that I would need to purchase to complete such collections, helped wean me from this lifelong acquisition kick. I bought Carcassonne and was pleased to find the River expansion included, yet I’ve purchased only a couple of the expansions – and those only on a used basis when other gamers cleared house. I own the base set of Settlers of Catan but neither Seafarers nor Cities & Knights because I purchased a Japanese version of the game while in Okinawa that’s incompatible with the Mayfair releases. I’ve refrained from chasing down the white houses for Taj Mahal, houses that serve no purpose other than being different from what’s included in the box owned by most people. (That said, when a friend sold his copy of Taj Mahal to another member of our game group and I spotted those precious white houses in the box during an inspection by the new owner, my fists clenched in frustration. Old habits…)

My moment of clarity, as it were, came roughly six months after Spiel 06 when I spotted a pile of Spielbox magazines that I had purchased at that convention solely for the inserts. I had not looked at those magazines since buying them; worse, I don’t think I had even played the games for which I had new expansions. Playing wasn’t the important thing; acquiring was – and the recognition of that sorry fact helped me break the habit almost completely.

For the most part, I no longer stress about finding every extraneous bit for a game. At Spiel 08, for example, I neither rushed the Abacusspiele booth for a gorilla tile for Zooloretto nor hounded Repos Production for the tenth village tile for Ghost Stories. I’m not loath to purchase such expansions when they’re available, such as the alternate Settlers of Catan maps that Kosmos produces by the thousand, but if I don’t get one, well, I have plenty of other games to play.

Besides, the item will likely turn up again in some form or other, whether on the shelves of a used game vendor, in a later, larger expansion, or in some other modified form. Witness the second life of J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard, for example, of which only seven copies were originally produced, with six of them going to people connected with the Harry Potter series as a way to thank them. (The seventh book netted nearly $4 million for charity at auction.) When the book was announced, fans went nuts over the idea that they wouldn’t be able to buy it – or even read it. How dare Rowling write something that we can’t read? Who does she think she is? We deserve, no, demand to have this book available to us, we who have supported her with our book purchases!

This idea being ludicrous, of course, because what those people deserve for buying Rowling’s books is just that: the books they bought. No promise exists beyond the immediate book, just as no promise exists beyond the game box that you and I take home. The components will all be present and in good condition, but beyond that, the designer and publisher owe us nothing.

Why do promo items exist in the first place? For multiple reasons, including the cash cow theory mentioned at the start of this column. If a game sells well – or promises to sell well – a publisher might ask the designer to come up with a sequel, as happens each year with the Spiel des Jahres winner. Publishers also use promos to spur sales of existing or new items, an effort that can backfire in certain circumstances, as when Zev Shlasinger offered animeeples to those who preordered the English edition of Agricola, only to later have them show up in games from many other licensees. If Zev offered animeeples to everyone, those who preordered would feel taken advantage of; if he didn’t offer them, then he might offend gamers who were late to the party, making them feel left out. In the end, he stuck to the initial offer, directing gamers to original publisher Lookout Games for the promo pack.

More generally, designers like tweaking their creations, and given the opportunity to do so, they’ll come out with something new or something that existed during the game’s development which was later cut. At Spiel 08, for example, Friedemann Friese mentioned that the Flux Generator, a special power plant that costs 33 1/3, came into being when he had a blank space available on the card sheet for the second deck of power plants for Power Grid. He then used that card as a promotional item to encourage people to buy games from his booth in Essen rather than from the discount vendors found in the various halls. If you can get a copy of this card, great, but if not, then so what? Power Grid existed before this card, and the game stands apart from it. The Flux Generator is a bonus item that makes the game different, not something that completes it.

On a topic more geeky than gamery, a friend was recently telling me about the Improbables, a superhero group that he and his friends had created back in college, with each person having a lame, almost immaterial superpower. One girl had hair that she could manipulate Medusa-style, but it was Annie Lennox-length, which reduced its usability; she could also detach her hair and send it off on missions, but if it didn’t return within 60 seconds, she would die. Cutie Kill could make her fingernails grow at will – not too quickly, mind you, but faster than normal. Multiple Max could create duplicates of himself, but since all the beings collectively retained the same mass, he grew smaller and smaller with each duplication. Another guy could stretch himself out a la Mr. Fantastic, yet once he stretched he was stuck at that length.

Naturally me and others started brainstorming superpowers of our own. My wife Linda is invulnerable as long as she does jazz hands. Our friend Daisha is now Shockerena, who can force others to do the Macarena uncontrollably. Our exchange student Seung Chan took on a power that I created, the ability to always have exact change on hand for any purchase. The name he gave himself? No Tip Boy.

I’ve yet to come up with a good power for myself, and my many suggestions – knowing how many miles you can drive on the amount of gas in your tank, visualizing each person who has previously handled money that I touch – have been rejected by others. Seung Chan suggested that while playing a game, I become a German, but I’m not sure what that power entails: the desire to drink wine or beer while playing? Feel free to share your own superpower and heroic name in the comments section.

I’ll close this time with a suggestion from Ida Seitter, who wrote a column on Uweekly.com, the online magazine for Ohio State University, on how to fight the winter blues:

Another good way to waste some time is have a board game night. It sounds stupid, but games are a good way to have fun with a group of people without staring at the television. A couple games I find entertaining are: Cranium, which you can play with a bunch of people; Scrabble, which you can play with just one other person; and Scene It, if you just can’t turn off that TV. Don’t forget that you can make pretty much any board game into a drinking game if you love the sauce!

Some things never change, do they?

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