Kerred

I see the phrase 'ahead of it's time' used a lot like a long with words such as 'underrated' or 'epic' or 'literally', or 'ironic'. I read how ahead of it's time is used for literally any popular game that it alters the meaning of the phrase.

Anyways here is a list of games I feel would have sold or been more known had they been released several years in the future:

• Jurassic Park Trespasser: the YouTube channel ResearchIndicates and one of the most informative Let's Play videos of all time best explains this game.

JPT had a rather ambitious physics engine AND open world environments which seemed pretty much undoable at the time, along with non gameplay breaking story flow with Attenborough himself. But just like with No Man's Sky the hype engine and promising too much got the devs way over their heads and failed. Valve was able to continue what JPT started with Half Life, but I imagine if it had more time JPT could have been an immersive classic.

• Time Splitters Future Perfect an FPS with sharable Map Creation content. The problem I feel was many people didn't try this as Halo's Forge wasn't out yet to bring to light what user content can really do, and less accessible online play at the time.

• Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3 Okay this doesn't count, but I just want to mention this because the official Sony Network Adapter wasn't even out yet when this released. You have to use a specific brand of Linksys or D-Link USb to Ethernet adapter on your PS2 to get it to work 😄. So I classify this ahead of it's time due to the first party product not existing yet.

• Psychonauts. This was an easy one, non Mario platformers weren't the trend among the ocean of best selling Xbox titles. Thankfully A Hat In Time much later showed the more mainstream appeal of small dev platformers.

• Dragon Quest 1 & 5 in the US. Not in Japan as you could shut down Japan for a day with the release of a new Dragon Quest game (tip for invaders). DQ has always struggled in the US partly due to, oddly enough, taking so long to reach the US. It's a mix of too early and too late, with DQ 1 inventing the traditional console RPG format, and DQ5 being Pokemon before Pokemon, to quote Tim Rogers. But early DQ games releasing far too late on the NES life and not releasing on SNES I feel could have made DQ games closer to FF games in the US

• Puzzle Quest Challenge of the Warlords: a Match 3 game in the early days of Xbox Live arcade.

The timing would have had to be tight on this, had it come out around the time of monument Valley it would have been perfect to expose casuals to a match 3 game with more depth to it

But it was too easily for the match 3 craze, and now too late for the oversaturation of match 3 mobile games.

• Eternal Darkness Lovecraft is all the rage among public domain IPs nowadays. Eternal Darkness was all the fun of bizarre 4th wall breaking spooks combined with non frustrating old school Resident Evil like gameplay. more of a wrong place wrong time kind of thing, in an attempt to bring a more mature crowd to the GameCube is underperformed.

I would love to see Nintendo at least attempt to emulate it on the Switch somehow.

I find it interesting to see how board games change to coinside with the times. Some examples below. Please excuse anything I may have wrong as this is solely from memory and I can follow sources if you feel I recalled something wrong. I'm also not a good writer so I apologize for any poor wording regarding a particular topic, and will delete this topic if needed.

I come across many demos and copies of various editions so I have a habit of looking at all the little things.

• Puerto Rico's latest edition had prototype images of purple colonists instead of brown at one point. The latest edition also changes the concept of colonists arriving on a ship to a work office where they get a paying job to work.

• Sid Meier's Civilization 2009 Edition by Fantasy Flight Games had an odd one: at some point Mao Zedong was replaced with Wu Zetain. No gameplay changes, just an image swap, which I rarely see in a board game as it seems costly to make such a small change and go through all the processes to get it proofed then resume production. A user on the BGG.com page for this game said it was related to overseas manufacturing having an issue depicting Mao in a situation where he could lose. (Can link the BGG page if interested). That is the only source I could find, and I doubt it would be easy to track down an old FFG employee to get better info.

• Great Western Trail 2nd Edition replaced TeePees with Outlaws and diversifies the workers.

• MicroMacro's first printing in the US had Ages 8+ on it. The second printing changed it to 10+ and added a symbol on the cases to signify how family friendly it was, but everything else is exactly the same Not sure if other languages made this change.

• the game Scout supposedly delayed a printing at the height of it's Spiel Des Jahres hype in the US in order to make more readable (colorblind friendly?) Cards.

• Splendor added gem symbols next to the numbers in the cards to be monochrome friendly, which seems to be a trend with Asmodee as they have their own logo for colorblind friendly games. And might just be me but the chips feel slightly lighter, can't confirm

• Among all the other changes in Cash N Guns edition, the rule of shouting Banzai in the rulebook during the hold up is gone. At first I just thought it shortens the rulebook, but I also recall FFG ending the Banzai shouting at L5R events, but I haven't been to a regional event myself so I might have read it all wrong from memory.

Some other things of note:

• Deception Murder in Hong Kong has a "newspaper" card. My friend saw it, laughed, and said it translated to the headline for Tiannamen Square. This makes me wonder if it's still in the lastest 2023 printing of it's still manufactured in China

• Battle Cry by Avalon Hill/Hasbro seemed to disappear without a trace and no comments at all about it. The Gettysburg games by Academy games are STILL on preorder with ACD for the past 4-5 years I think. Battle Cry had a lot of Union and Confederate flag stickers you put on the flag poles.

• The board game Endeavor back in the late 00's mentioned in the rulebook I read about the use of slavery tokens in the game and how it related to the times.

• Carnegie mentions in the rules intro how it stresses how the game only focuses on the positive aspects of Carnegie.

What are some little changes you have noticed in printings of games that most die hard board games might miss?