Consider, for a moment, a really nice piece of furniture. It’s well-built, functional, the proper size, and does everything you might ask a piece of furniture to do. It’s perfect! Unless you discount the fact that it’s not stained or painted. So you do that, and now’s it perfect AND black! (I like black furniture.) Which is great, until you decide you want to be able to easily move it within the room that it’s in, to change its functionality. So, add some casters or different feet, and once again, it’s perfect, black, and now mobile!

Now consider games. We want games to be as amazing as possible when they’re released, and we want those games to be loved and played as much as possible. But, sometimes, interesting information comes out of those plays, and that information might suggest that a game, no matter how successful or fun, might be improved with a tweak here or there.

Consider Agricola. When the new version arrived in 2016, there would’ve been nothing wrong with simply re-releasing the very successful game as it had been for the previous nine years. But, a lot of data from the online version and years of forum posts, session reports, and tournament play all suggested that there were ways to make the game better. Cards were rebalanced, added, or dropped. The action boards were redesigned and tweaked. For people introduced to the game for the first time, this would be a better, more balanced version of the game. For people with the original version of the game, their copies remained both playable and enjoyable, and upgrading to the new edition was a completely optional choice.

Sometimes, obsessing about the smallest details may suggest a change to a game. Patchwork is an example of a very popular game that has become a staple for 2-player game fans. Its success and simplicity are both valued features, and it doesn’t seem that any changes would – or even should – be made. However, as Uwe Rosenberg (the game designer) and the folks at Lookout Games collected the wealth of data from the online game and the thousands of plays now being logged by fans, a very small change – moving one of the one-square leather patches one space further on the time track – began to be considered. This is a change that will be negligible to the majority of players, and certainly is a small enough change that players will not be clamoring to change their existing sets. But, the goal is always to put the best game possible in the box, and for all of the people who have yet to buy and experience the game, this tiny change may make the game better, whether they overtly realize it or not.

Even long-lived games need the occasional tweak. There’s a rigorous process the board and delivery cards go through when Mayfair revises one of their crayon rail games, and the recent release of Iron Dragon was no exception. Each delivery in the game was evaluated, and small tweaks to the value of deliveries – to better reflect the “true value” of the route, or to adjust the viability of areas on the map – were made to improve the overall game experience. With the brand-new steampunk art and revised theme of the game, it’s important that the game mechanisms also work the best they can.

It’s very easy, with technology and this Internet thing that the kids seem to like, to be tempted to continually revise game rules based on feedback and the thousands of house of play that occur after a game is released. Posting a new PDF is a simple process, but a continual stream of changes can imply that your game is somehow “not done” or incomplete, even if your revisions consist of small rewordings and the occasional grammar faux pas. Publishers always have to balance the perception of changes versus the reality of the impact those changes will have both on the game and the reaction to the game. It’s always our hope that fans will recognize these changes for what they are: giving players the best possible game that we can!