Sunday, July 13, 2008

Repackaged Games

At lunch today (I was a guest), another guest showed me the "latest game" that she had bought: Snatch. I hadn't heard of it, which surprised everyone.

When I saw it, it was immediately obvious that it was Anagrams. It simply had redesigned letter tiles and a white cardboard tube.

It's curious how many games are simply a repackaging of other games without even acknowledging their origins. Not even including *-opoly's and games intended to bypass copyrights and trademarks.

An infamous case is Alien Encounter, which, for all it's fancy space-themed board and tokens, is simply the game of Go on a 9x9 board.

Yehuda

2 comments:

Mikko said...

There's sAnastaja, which is a Finnish edition of Anagrams. There's the added benefit of Finnish-friendly tile distribution (of course, using Finnish Scrabble tiles would work just as well), which is why I've been looking for a cheap copy. Haven't found one, yet, though - even the sale prices of about 20 euros are way too much for something like that.

Anonymous said...

Repackaging seems to be the trend . . . half the new movies in theaters are remakes of movies, big screen versions of old TV shows or sequels. It seems there's no originality in any "creative" endeavor anymore.