a pursuit of fruitless endeavors and endless refinements

Tag: philosophy

Why We Pimp

One of the main reasons I wanted to start this blog was to show off my pimped games and talk about how I created them.  After a while, I started thinking about why we pimp out our games and I found the question compelling enough that I’m starting a new blog series called, simply, “Why We Pimp.” In this series, I’ll focus on a narrow aspect of board game pimping and look at it from the philosophical perspective.

Of course, the biggest question is the general “why?”  Why do it at all?  Board game publishers spend countless hours designing beautiful games and yet we still want more.  Manufacturing for board and table top games has never been higher and the trend now is actually over-producing the value in a game. Take Cool Mini or Not‘s (CMoN) fantasy sports game, Kaosball by Eric Lang.  This is a relatively simple sports game with minis on a game board but CMoN decided really ramp up the production value by creating countless teams, each with their own minis and game bits.

Welcome to Pimp My Board Game…

I buy games.  I play games. And then I find it’s not enough.  Not enough to spend hours on board game hobby sites reading about them. Not enough to come up with variants and rules tweaks. No. I have to go the extra mile and modify the game’s very core- its components.  I pimp games.

Not long after I started collecting and playing board games away from your mainstream titles, I started tinkering with the game bits of my favorite games to make the game uniquely my own. Sometimes these tinkerings were to enhance the experience by cosmetically improving the game while other times I would strive to improve the functionality of the game. I found this niche aspect of the board gaming hobby highly appealing, sometimes as much as actually playing the games themselves. The more I looked into “pimping” my board games, the more I found others doing the same thing.

In this blog series, I aim to explore the board gaming hobby through the pimping aspect of the industry. I will show various techniques I use to pimp out games in my collection as well as highlight past, present, and future work I’ve done or will be doing. I will also discuss the reasons why we feel the need to spend so much extra time and money improving a game beyond what a professional publisher has already developed for market release. I encourage you to comment on anything posted, sharing insight into your reasons or techniques when pimping out a favorite game or asking questions on anything you see.  Enjoy!

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