Laying Blame

As most of you know, I'm pretty active over on BoardGameGeek. I'm not one of their most active or recognizable members, it's true - but if you've had a rules question on an Asmodée game, I'm frequently the one to answer.

It means that I see a lot of complaining about how far behind the French our Dungeon Twister releases are. People point fingers at Asmodée more often than not.

I'd like to point a few things out, however, and suggest another possible villain to this picture.

When Dungeon Twister was first released in English, there were four French sets that we lacked. That is, we were four sets behind. Looking now, there are ... four French sets that we lack. Asmodée has kept pace with the French releases - we have neither gained nor lost ground.

The American audience is different from the French audience. When I'm demoing expansions at conventions, the first question most players have is "Are these pieces available for multiplayer?" In France, the multiplayer expansions are reportedly the slowest-moving expansions. The difference is extreme enough that we may not get Fire and Blood in its current form - Asmodée is talking about an "Ultimate 3/4 Player" set that will include red and green characters from all of the English sets released thus far. That means we will have multiplayer for some characters before the French do!

And, finally, the new villain:
The American release of Dungeon Twister was delayed for a year or so, because Asmodée (France) licensed the rights to a North American release to Upper Deck, who then failed to publish. Most of you probably didn't know that - I don't think I'm even supposed to know about it. When UDE eventually dropped the project, Asmodée decided to go forward. Since they started from scratch, it set the original English release back by at least a year.

Dungeon Twister was the one of the first games that was not yet available in English to crack the BoardGameGeek's Top 100 games - it was far from the last, however.