I just opened up the BGG home page for the 10th time today and I noticed a new ad in the space where usually I find a contest announcement I see an ad for Acquire (the new one). "Rewarding Ambition For Fifty Years" it says. I've seen the new Acquire. This is our reward for waiting all this time?! For keeping a game in demand for 50 years?! We get 'build-it-yourself' cardboard trays? We get stock certificates thinner than any other 'card' you've ever seen? We get thin cardboard bits? This is crap. There is no way I'm paying $30 for a game that has such disposable, print & play quality. I'm sorry AH. I'm sorry your good name has been reduced to this. Hasbro is not getting my money for this or any other game until the quality comes up. If they never change (and I doubt they will), there are many other good games out there with high quality production standards.

And here's the comment at the next meeting of Hasbro bigwigs:

"I guess there's just no market for gamer-games in the U.S. We reprinted one of the classics and no one bought it. I guess we won't bother reprinting any of the classics again."



Of course, I wouldn't recommend buying this edition just to prove that there is a market. Rather I think Hasbro is so uninterested in producing gamer-games for the U.S. market that they sabotaged their own efforts on purpose.

If Valley Games has achieved nothing else, they have shown that Hasbro is willing to lease out rights to their games. So even if Hasbro does give up on gamer's games forever, fear not! It is possible that another company may do a quality reprint of Habro/AH classics.

It really is not worth Hasbro's time or money to produce gamers' games. The kind of money Rio Grande makes on its best sellers is a rounding error on Hasbro's financial statements.

Let's just be glad that they leave us our niche and get on with it. Find an old copy of Acquire on the secondary market and hope they license it out once the anniversary hubbub is over.

As someone who just bought this new version of Acquire and has yet to open it, I find this thread very disconcerting.

Glad I held onto my plastic version they did before this one. Actually, the new version is much like older ones that only had boring tiles rather than big molded buildings.

Look at the time and effort they put into doing new versions of other classics. There are wooden box (with metal/wooden bits) for Sorry!, Risk, Scrabble, Stratego, Clue, and many others. They know how to make a quality game. If it is such a miniscule fraction of their overall budget/profit, why not invest the additional cash, raise the price and give us a 'good' game? I mean, is it such a stretch to get a wooden box edition of Acquire? Especially if it is a 50th anniversary edition. If they produce a really crap version of the game and nobody buys it, what does that do for their bottom-line?

I guess I just don't understand their strategy of doing such a poor job on this. You can say it is because this is a 'gamers' game, but arguably, whether you like them or not, many of the other games they do (Scrabble, Clue, Risk, etc.) are 'gamer' games too. They went out of their way to abuse us with this game and I'd like to know why.

My old Acquire with black plastic tiles is one of the few games I regret having sold off in a big purge. It seems like a good edition of Acquire will never get made again.

One thing that must not be overlooked here. The game is extraordinary.

A lot of folks have learned to look past the shabby parts in Through the Ages because of the game inside. Acquire is a wonderful game - yes with shabby parts - but at about 30% of the price of TtA.

And of course, you can always get a vintage set on eBay if you need one. I'm happy to still have my deluxe AH edition, as well as my vintage 3M edition from the 1960's.

I think that whoever advocated reissuing Acquire at Hasbro realized that it was a challenge to just get the darned thing published, and could not invest his reputation in having them do a deluxe edition, given the modest expected sales. How many of us would have put OUR careers on the line in the name of plastic tiles?

Could you explain to me the logic of buying up companies that serve a particular market niche, having decided that that niche isn't worth selling to?

It makes people at big companies feel important to make their big company bigger. Even if it doesn't help profitability. You can see this happen all the time.

A more logical reason is that small companies may expand into markets that big companies want for themselves. Buying the small companies eliminites this risk.

Simple supply and demand. Hasbro can spend more money making a wooden box edition of Sorry! because that edition will SELL. It's not right or fair, but for every copy of Acquire sold Hasbro will sell hundreds of copies of Sorry. They're not going to dump time and money into a game that is an also-ran.

Frankly, I'm surprised Hasbro is making Acquire at all, and basically I think they are doing it because it is a good, solid game, and they want it to have some kind of life. More likely there is a champion on the management staff making sure it stays in production, even if it means it has to suffer from weak components.

In fact, if they'd have produced a wooden-box edition of Acquire, I suspect it really would have sold. To those who know about Acquire. But when you ask Joe P. Average about "board games," Acquire is not on his radar. Clue, Monopoly Sorry, Stratego, Risk, Scrabble, Life, Yahtzee, . . . these are. (There's even a wood-box nostalgia edition of Jenga. "Nostalgia"? Okay, sure.)

And I wonder how many of these nostalgia editions get played, or just take up shelf space. It's like the 3,000 different Monopolies. Collectors buy them and never play them.



Given the quality of components, I doubt it cost them that much to produce the new Acquire. I'm sure they'll profit from it.



Yes, but also mass-market games. Everyone's heard of Risk. A small percentage of those people have heard of Acquire.

A company like Hasbro will buy up a company just so they can get their hands on one element of that company. Hasbro bought WotC not for M:tG, but for Pokemon. Alllll the rest of the line (including D&D) means very little to them. And then Nintendo took Pokemon back, because they didn't want Hasbro to have it (I'm speculating here, but not much).

At the time of buyout, AH was a sinking ship. There are old-school gamers on the Hasbro staff, and they likely jumped at an opportunity to have SOME control over the AH lineup.

EDIT: To add to Drew's comments, there are two reasons a company will acquire (heh) another company:
1) Make money
2) Not lose money
Sometimes a big company will buy a smaller company just to take them out of the market and remove competition (or potential competition). It's monopolistic, but it happens all the time.... especially here in the good ol' US of A.

Sometimes a CEO just needs to look like he's doing something, even if it is something like the acquisition of AH, because his PR people will make it sound awesome.

Best thing Hasbro can do is to sell the rights fo certain games to other publishers like Valley Games or MMP that will take care of those old glories.

Something else to consider, even with the cheaper components (which I am neither condemning nor praising; I have not scene it up front and have a copy to play already), this game is priced to move; $30 for a boardgame of this caliber in an age of ever-increasing boardgame prices is a decent, "low" price.

It's very easy to simply point the finger at Hasbro in blame. But I would suspect that the Hasbro leadership doesn't sit around thinking of ways to screw the game geek community, or even thinks about them at all.

I'm not sure how all the final decisions get made, but Wizards is located on the entirely other side of the country from Hasbro headquarters. I would suspect that Wizards essentially runs semi-autonomously and that they make their product and release decisions, not the bigwigs in Rhode Island. If you don't like what the Avalon Hill brand is doing, blame the guys at Wizards.

Also, in terms of the quality of the components - plastic is made out of oil. Oil is expensive. Very expensive. Even paper is getting expensive. In fact, the whole thing is going up in price. Also, if the retail price is $30, that means that the discounters are going to be selling it for a lot less. It's easy to forget that a lot of the other games we buy and play have retail prices which are $50 or $60.

Amen! I hate when a company republishes hard to find out of print games! Screw them.

Seriously, though, Hasbro probably realizes that there is nothing they can ever do to please whiny gamer types, and re-released an excellent game at a price that people who are used to paying $25 for Monopoly will consider. What's the problem? All you haters can still buy a used copy with "acceptable" component quality.

Me? I'm happy to have any copy at all.

The presidents of corporations will seek out corporations to acquire, because the stockholders of the merging corporation will expect this to increase their stock in the surviving corporation (although stockholders of the defunct corporation will get some money as a bonus).

These stockholders of the acquired corporation then have three options with their stock: hold, sell or trade.

Typically, these types of mergers occur with hotel chains, or more recently, technology companies.

I can't remember where I learned this, but you'll just have to take my word for it.

Hey,
I have to say the new edition is pretty good. If you are a collector look elsewhere. However, for those new to the game the components are good enough. The stock certificates are sturdy. The money is standard. The trays are cheesy but at least one of the hotel chains is named Sackson! I played this game with a group of high schoolers in a Finance class and they really enjoyed it (and you know how honest kids can be!).

Take it out of the oven before it hasburned!

It comes from the same school of advice that contract employees on a much higher hourly rate are cheaper than permanent employees.

I haven't seen the ad, but if Hasbro is asserting that they've kept Acquire in demand (or even in print) for 50 years, their math is a little off. Acquire came out in 62, so we're still 4 short of the 50 year mark.

I think the deal is that it's Hasbro's 50th Anniversary, not Acquire's.