Fried Geese & Donkey: Unboxing — I’m Counting #2
A sincere thank you to returning readers who provided feedback to my first ever piece. Some of you indicated that my audience wasn’t clear, and I take that whole heartedly. I’ll be honest I’m not sure who this is for either. I envision this fits best with potential purchasers or enthusiasts of Roads & Boats. That’s about it. Seriously, though, an unboxing… blog post?.. has to be the dumbest and driest content this side of the Milky Way. Frankly, melba toast paired with sand is less dry than what’s to come and it doesn’t suit a large group of people.
But I think I’m okay with that given the context and I hope you are as well.
ROADS & BOATS, AN UNBOXING
Specifically, the 20th Anniversary Edition which, aside from the year it was printed, is identical to every other edition save the inclusion of &Cetera. In the previous article it was mentioned that I’ve recently gotten into Splotter games. A bit of foreshadowing to this train wreck. Naturally, if I were to ever call myself a Splotter fanboy I’d need to at least see this game in real life. So I bought it. After days of scouring the byte-tube I found a handful of vendors charging a road & boat & arm & leg for the game. Luckily, through perseverance, over what I could only imagine to be kilobytes of data, I finally found Roads & Boats purchasable through a reputable vendor. At MSRP, no less. One-hundred and twenty beer tokens later it was at my doorstep in all of its massive glory. BEHOLD.
At first glance you’d assume a 5-year old with an art ambition and predilection for donkeys grabbed a box of crayons and went to town. The front of the box was slightly sunken into the main volume as there is no center support. Like a taught tarp sinking from its edges. Honestly, the box felt mythical prior to ripping the shrink and listening to the box fart open. You know what I mean.
After pivoting the box top over I suddenly got a feel of that chalky cardboard residue. Either by contents shifting or box assembly, this package became a near asthmatic nightmare. Splotter Spellen supposedly assembles their own games from what I’ve read. My hope is that Joris & Jeroen’s positive displacement atmospheric air-bags (lungs) are better off than Fantasy Flight’s were in the early days. Major components are all there, as expected. Rules in German and English, wooden play pieces, map hex tiles, glass stones, the famed half-folded plastic overlay, and the chits. Oh, god. The chits.
There’s so many.
I had seen many owners use plastic snap organizers to keep their chit army under control. But you truly do not grasp the chit-astrophy until you’re sitting there, hands full. In the middle of writing this Amazon fulfillment was kind enough to lighten my pockets for said clear oil-derived compartments. Another day with these geese on the loose and I would have called animal control. The chits themselves are nothing special. They’re made from a particularly budget form of cardboard that makes them unideal for popping out with your thumb. Luckily, the poor quality worked to my advantage during disassembly as the print tended to tear into the frame rather than the pieces. They’re sturdy enough for government work and imagining thicker cardboard would likely cause this oversized box to become six sizes too big.
Art You Serious
We need to have a talk.
If you spend more than five minutes researching R&B you’ll find scathing comments pertaining to the games graphic design. Many asserting that it’s awful to near non-existent. The image to your left is of the barest tiles in the game. Personally, I think they’re gorgeous and spot on with the theme. Similar to Food Chain Magnate, I believe there is exactly as much art as necessary to support the idea. Then again, many feel the same emptiness towards FCM.
Quality of art is challenging for such a strong game that is produced in limited quantities. Take Brass: Birmingham as an example; a game where the art slaps so hard that your mom’s mom felt it through some multigenerational time-evolved smack. Production of this game is inherently expensive given the components. Splotter even briefly discusses this pain here. Quantity, to my knowledge, remains undisclosed but I would venture to guess production of this edition is only on the order of a few thousand. Brass: Birmingham has 19,000 owned on Board Game Geek alone… You can’t argue with these numbers from a simple profit and loss standpoint. Limited quantities drive tight budgets and in a game with so many components, art often takes a substantial hit. Namely, just use the last edition’s art, which was the edition’s before that, &Cetera. Even color was in the rule book only as a necessity in an attempt to further reduce costs. Colored graphic rule book boarders would pop to life in this production but any attempt may have Splotter Spelling bankruptcy. So we’re to assume.
Let me put a bug in your brain that may get the gears turning as it did mine. If the art production budget was bumped to a whopping 1/3rd the cost of the game, would it make it better for you? That’s an honest question with no rhetoric intended. For me, the charm was enough to get me interested and no increase in artistic involvement would have made me buy it any faster. And it wouldn’t feel like Splotter, would it? During my quick research for this write-up I learned that Splotter Spellen is a part time gig for Joris and Jeroen. It’s actually right there on their website so you know I don’t work that hard. Passion is exuding from these games and it’s all done in the evenings, over two years, likely at home. Amazing, isn’t it?
In any case, I’m excited to ride these promiscuously shy donkey’s off into the sunset through my first solo playthrough. And no, that’s not a euphemism.
I would love to hear your feedback on this article if you get a chance. I’m working towards iteratively improving my content and your input is warmly welcomed.
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