10th Anniversary Available! (12 years in)

[Raynor]

After doing some more digging around the web to get a better idea of what was contained in the box, I made the decision to go ahead with the purchase of the 10th Anniversary. It arrived today and I spent the afternoon going through and organizing all the components of my aToE expansions.

To my utter astonishment and delight, everything fits in the 10th Anniversary box.
( For reference, I currently own the original game (updated to 10th anniversary edition now), Something Wicked, The Coast, Hero Pack 1, Hero Pack 2, and the Promo Expansions The Madness, and The Allies. )

It's not perfect. There's no real good place for all the vast assortment of tokens, but there never really were in the old boxes either, and everything still fits like a glove into the box when it's sitting on my shelf.

This is a big deal to me. One of my greatest frustrations with board games is organization. The more I like a game, the more likely I am to pick up expansions for it, and the more expansions I buy, the harder it is to actually enjoy the game when I pull it out. If you've ever played a game with too much set up or tear down time you'll know exactly what I mean. Organization is key to really getting the most out of your board games and sadly, as carrying around 5 boxes is impractical, the wonderful plastic inserts Flying Frog provides was one of the first things to go as I tried to keep my hobby gaming footprint small.

That's the highest praise I can give it. It unites everything I've ever loved about aToE into one convenient box. I paid $71.99 for it over on coolstuffinc.com. I packaged it together with a couple other things to get free shipping (over $100)

Considering I've paid $39.99 for the Smash up "Bigger Geekier Box" which was just a better organizational system for the game, and $41.99 for the Broken Token Caverna Organizers, which is just some custom wooden trays to make it easier to access your game pieces in Caverna, this was totally worth it.

The other BIG selling point was the printed inclusion of the web villains. I don't know if you've played any, (I haven't played them all, but the Volgarian Nutcracker is a HUGE favorite of ours. My wife and I pull out aToE every year to play a game with the Nutcracker around Christmas because it's so ridiculously thematic and fun. Exploding Presents! YES! It's just delightful.

The upgrade from an office-supply-store-laminated print version to a real high quality version of some of our favorite Villains is Huge!

And there's so much more in the box! The rest is all listed on the FFP website about the product. It looks amazing and I can't wait to play the new stuff.

So yes... I may have been rather jaded about the fact that this took about 3 years to make it to out to market, and I do understand the frustration about the unique content being locked into this product but... After really going through the contents of the box, this feels less like a straight reprint, and more like an effort to provide a single cohesive storage solution for all the expansions made so far. Considering the game was out of print - it doubles as a place to start for new fans who might want to start picking up expansions as they are reprinted.

It's just fantastic. I couldn't be happier and I couldn't recommend it more for fans of the original game. I just really hope they keep up the good work shown off here and start producing more of these epic villains.

You know I can't believe how little online presence FFG has. It was next to impossible to find out any info on this product the last few years and I was harboring some serious doubts. All the passion for games that was in their early stuff is on display here and I'm glad I went with the purchase. This really makes me want to go find a copy of the 10th Anniversary Edition of LNoE now... I may be a little late to the party on that one though.