I wrote recently about how much I ended up liking the deluxe special edition of The Castles of Burgundy, and I stand by every word of that, the ability text on the back of the tiles genuinely fixes the one real problem the original had. But I want to be honest about why I went in cautious on that purchase in the first place, because it wasn’t caution I invented out of nowhere. It came from a different deluxe box, a couple years earlier, that I still haven’t fully forgiven myself for backing.

I won’t name the game, mostly because the specific title doesn’t matter and I don’t want this to read as a swipe at one publisher when the actual lesson is broader than that. What I backed was a campaign promising metal coins, oversized miniatures replacing the original’s simple cardboard standees, and a neoprene mat, all stacked on top of a base game I already owned and already liked quite a bit in its plainer form. I told myself the upgrades would get it to the table more, that the friction stopping me from playing it more often was purely a presentation problem. It was not a presentation problem. The rules were exactly as fiddly as they’d always been, the setup time didn’t shrink by a single minute, and what I actually got for a genuinely significant amount of money was a heavier box that’s harder to store and, if anything, more of a production to set up than the original ever was.

The gap between those two experiences, one deluxe edition that solved a real design problem and one that just added weight to an existing one, has become the actual filter I use now before backing anything like this. I ask myself specifically what’s broken about the base game that the deluxe version is supposed to fix, and if the honest answer is “nothing, it just looks nicer,” I’ve gotten much better at walking away. Castles of Burgundy passed that test cleanly, the tile text was a real functional improvement I’d wanted for years. The other one, if I’m being fully honest with myself, never had a real answer to that question and I backed it anyway because the render images were beautiful and I was excited.

I still own it. It still doesn’t come off the shelf much. I’ve thought about selling it more than once and haven’t, which is its own small admission that I’m not quite as reformed about this as I’d like to claim I am.