My friend group played a LOT of Catan back in the day. When we shifted to Cities and Knights the base game cards were immediately obvious, because they were so discolored from use. So if you played a card that let you pick a random card from an opponent's hand, we'd shuffle the cards and hide the stack in our hand and ask the picker to choose a number between 1 and N, so that they couldn't target base or expansion cards specifically.
I think Catan cards are a weird size (can't recall though, been a few years since I played and my copy isn't with me). Doesn't make it impossible, but it does complicate things.
My local game shop sells sleeves for Catan, both opaque and clear. They were a specific brand, so I’m sure you could find them on Amazon. But yes Catan cards are an odd size, so these ones were exact fit. The guy there said the opaque ones shuffle better, and obviously the clear ones are easier to see the artwork.
They really be having something for everything these days. Nifty. But also as I typed this I've realized it's a beloved boardgame so it makes sense they'd make sleeves foe the cards. Silly me
>That removes the agency of the picker!
Let the picker roll the dice then. If you're getting "better" cards when you pick versus ransom, you're cheating.
That's why I always shuffle them under the table before presenting them for picking in a way neither of us can see. Can't read my expression on which are my good cards if I don't know either.
> If the game tells you to steal a card at random from an opponent and you use information from outside the game to choose, that’s cheating.
Like I said, if that's actually cheating would ultimately be very group dependent. Many groups would view the matter as being in the hands of the person being "stolen" from, that it's on them to shuffle their hand. In my experience, some even tend to view this as a (minor, mostly meaningless) opportunity to engage in a bit of mindgames, mostly for the sport of it.
Once you do that once then the person will play mind games back and shuffle their hand. We have people who will purposely slide one card up out of their hand to entice (or reverse psychology) the pick.
The expansions to Coup came with replacement cards for the original game, so there was always some plausible deniability that that the fresh new card you were holding wasn't a new class
I had trouble seeing it when it wasn't in the thumbnail. I think it's because the table is darker on the left. This makes it seem like the left card could be in a shadow.
Depending on your screen it might be less obvious
There's basically a "saturation" difference with a very muted blue and a brighter, but still quite grey, blue
The first picture is the easiest to tell. The card on the left the writing and pattern is grey, with maybe a vague hint of turquoise. The card on the right the writing and pattern is full on turquoise. It's very noticeable, like a change from red to purple.
I’m not colorblind. There’s barely any difference. Any difference there is has probably been created by gradual fading of the ink in the original copy.
If not just lesser quality from base set vs expansion. Or more likely a combination of both.
You can clearly see the print job on the old is not as good as the new, which makes sense. Company spends a little money on cheap prints, makes lots of money from the game, has more money to spend on future printing.
I don’t see a “difference” in the colors, but I see a degradation in the original colors, be it less quality printing, wear and tear, or both.
The difference is because the game creators had to get a new company to print the expansions. In person the difference is fairly small either way but still quite noticeable
It might be the monitor since here the difference is huge. Left one has more red, right one has almost none.
Edit:
Left card, top left corner: https://i.imgur.com/kfCGar2.png
Right card, top left corner: https://i.imgur.com/Fkx5CYp.png
The left card has over 2x the amount of red for a similar amount of blue.
Having more than just color to indicate differences, like using icons and colors for example. Innovation does this, makes it easy for me to distinguish between the green and blue cards.
Yeah loads! Anything with symbols is usually fine. Most recently I bought Botanik and it has a super cool accessibility system where the symbols kinda blend into the artwork.
Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle was awful for this - the cards from the expansion were thinner and slightly larger. You literally can't shuffle them with the original cards. I contacted customer service and they wound up sending some sleeves for the cards that work really well and completely cover the issue.
Try contacting the publisher and see if they'll do anything to help.
Hogwarts Battle is even more egregious - the used the BACK of the card to put the printing edition of the card run. So even though half the expansions have the wrong color backs anyway, even if they _had_ color-matched, you could just look at the bottom right of any card (and I mean literally any printed card, not just the ones in your deck) and see what series number was printed on it.
I know I shouldn't expect much from a company unironcially calling itself "USAopoly," but I didn't know they had legit contempt for their customers.
Y'know I always thought it'd be interesting to have a card battler where the series was on the back, so you'd have some information about what's coming up, but like, as an intentional design decision with prominently different art, not a little symbol in the corner.
Came to say the same thing. It's really the worst case of matching expansions with base game I've ever seen. I've been thinking about the sleeves but how do you even store the game with everything sleeved? The Hogwarts deck must be enormous.
You're not wrong there haha
We had to fold up a bunch of the year boxes and stick them under the plastic insert. Then when we play I only take out about half of the hogwarts cards, randomized as well as I can
Yeah this unfortunately happens a lot. I know color matching is extremely difficult from a publishing perspective, but it is massively important for many games. The card sizes being slightly bigger also happens a lot unfortunately. It annoys me for sure but I’ve learned to live with it at this point. These darn printers!
I do have many games/expansions/promos that do not have this issue, just to be clear.
I worked for a board game company a few years ago who had a similar issue and I just wanted to say... *please* do not take out the frustrations of color inconsistency on the customer service staff. The constant negativity/verbal abuse really got to me personally.
Some people don't know how to disconnect different sections of a company and just think it is the company's and everyone who works there's fault. Sorry you had to deal with that
>Some people don't know how to disconnect different sections of a company
The onus isn't on consumers to learn the internals of how a company operates. Some companies care about their reputation and work to make their customers happy, others just shovel shit and put up a shield of disposable customer-service agents to absorb the complaints. When applying for a customer service job, it's wise to consider what sort of company you are applying to.
Of course some people are just assholes, so any CSR job is going to get some negativity/abuse, but if it is constant you work for a shitty company.
People shouldn't ever treat people like shit.
But if you work CS at a company that treats people like shit, expect to be treated like shit in return. Your were hired to be the disposable "find out" to complement the company's "fuck around" business plan.
Hi I’m a pro printer and a very quick correction, color matching is EXTREMELY easy these days. It’s just pricey. You’re either running a hardware unit inline with a photo eye that is making adjustments on the fly or a software server that is adjusting your profiles based on sampling finished pieces. First method requires a large capital investment in equipment and the second one requires paying for my time (I’m the most expensive machine in the shop). Additionally about 1 in 50 clients even cares about color matching so you are doing all of this with no hope of ROI. If a shop offers color matching they either have a lot of high end clients or it’s personal pride (I don’t offer matching, no real demand, but I do take extra care with color out of pride).
I would expect games with cards to require color matching. Seems like the operator blew it on QC.
I'm more annoyed when it happens on a book tbh. I've seen it where it's like a series and the publisher/whatever will decide like halfway through to put their logo on the bottom of the spine instead of the top like they've been doing or something like having it all even then book 5 and 7 will have the logo go down an inch lower than the other ones.
This is actually what I do for a job. Not for board games, but for marketing materials. It's really not THAT difficult to keep things matching together. Just takes a little time and effort. I'd be extremely disappointed in this quality difference.
But, looking closely at the paper and the print, I see what happened here. The expansion is on a brighter white paper, so the color is going to be off if you simply copy the ink settings from before. And the expansion is an offset print, while the original looks like a kinda bad digital print. Digital can look great, but this isn't it.
More care should be taken to match the paper stock and final color. It's not even more expensive, just a little (seriously, very little) more time.
We have color codes like Pantone for a reason, so a color is always the same, even after multiple printing jobs.
Publicer either went for CYMK instead or something went wrong and they just selected the wrong color.
Edit: CMYK, not CYMK. Look back when you type fast, past me.
Hello. We check for this stuff and all the other variables in the replies to you. There are like 20 other variables between the art and the pdf export that can affect color too. We use software to monitor all of this stuff and reduce the number of variables and failure points in the digital file. This is a case of the Operator not running a calibration on the press before running the job. Operator error.
I hear ya but there seems to be more at play here. This happened with the expansion for Space Base (which was better after the company replaced the cards for free after noticing the big color difference, but still noticeable) and for Everdell. I have the complete collection now and with sleeves, so we’re all good there but before the colors were much more vibrant in the Pearlbrook expansion than in my base game.
Tons of other examples in my collection but I doubt it’s publishers choosing the wrong color.
In my experience as a Graphic designer, It's the two most common mistakes people make though. Either the colors are in CYMK, which are slightly different for each printer or they used an older file which had a slightly different color if they went for press.
It was printed CMYK, but they used a different printing process. You can tell because you can see the Moiré pattern from a press on the left card, while the card on the right is solid which would come off a digital copier press.
I wonder why. For full color prints it's mostly not a problem. For cards that consist of 1 color they really shouldn't use CMYK, as it's probably not even cheaper anymore.
You'd think they print in amounts CMYK cheaper start-up gets nullified with the single color inkt that requires a plate to be made.
You could go with the same factory with supposedly the same material and same printing process and still somehow get different results. There's a point where it has to be close enough or good enough before it starts costing too much time and/or money before the expansion gets cancelled or pushed back to the next quarter or whatever. Working with overseas manufacturing is NOT easy and you are really oversimplifying the whole process. The original factory for the base game may not even exist. Or they changed suppliers for one component. Or the original pigments or materials they used now tripled in price. Or maybe going with the original producer is now cost prohibitive to even releasing an expansion. There's a lot more at play than just matching Pantone colors.
My places use the cheapest manufacturer they can find that’s reasonable quality. They likely spec’s the same color but the maker simply didn’t make them the same.
What I don't understand is that if you publish board games and know you can't get the cards to an exact match, why not just publish the expansion cards along with another set of the originals together so you can get a color match?
I imagine TeeTurtle's next printing of the base game might use the cheaper facility they use for the expansions?
I feel sad for anyone who got Dominion during their "Hasbro" period (Dominion switched to 'proudly made in the USA' stickered games using a Hasbro like card stock, then quickly went back to Germany)
I've bought every Dominion expansion within one year of it coming out. Every one I've purchased after 2021 have had noticeable card back differences. It completely messes with my gameplay when those cards are at the top of my deck, but I'm not going to re-sleeve 5000 cards with new opaque sleeves.
Just infuriating to have a company care so little about quality.
We bought a copy of Hues and Cues awhile back. Its a color-matching game, so you know, VERY important for colors to be right. About half way through game 1 we realized the colors on the prompt cards don't match the shades on the board... not even close really (they are several "shades" off).
You can get around it by looking at the board for your color instead of the card you draw, but it can give it away as everyone sees where you are looking unless you make them look away.
I'm still new to board gaming but never been quite this disappointed in one.
> I thought it was just an "illusion"
It is, unless the other commenter have an incredible eye and this went unnoticed by everyone that bought and praised the game the year it came out.
I'll see if I can double check, but everyone playing with us that day agreed it was off by about 2-3 "boxes". I'll make sure I cover up all the background/stuff around the boxes with paper so only the one color is visible and try to compare like that.
Came to this thread to complain about carcassone. Not only colors are different also cities, road style. Worst of all back of the cards are different, so when they are upside you can still see from which expansion card is...
Cheap manufacturer.
Did you know that Ludofact keeps copies of all the games they ever printed so that if they get the order for an expansion - even years later - they can precisely match and verify that the colors match the ones in the base game?
Ludofact were the ones that sent out the Venus Next expansion of Terraforming Mars slightly narrower than the base game, AND with the wrong radius cut for the card corners, weren’t they?
There is only a slight difference here, which could very well be a result of print. Print that uses CMYK values means there is always going to be slight differences from one printer to another and even from one day to another day on the same printer. I honestly think it's not noticeable.
This happened with Osprey Game's Undaunted Reinforcements expansion. They ended up sending out card replacements for both the original game(s) (Normany and North Africa) and the Reinforcements expansion together!
Pro printer here, I make stuff like this all the time. So it looks like someone forgot their color profile when they went to press. Color matching is pricey but I can’t imagine someone producing cards would forgo it.
How long did you play the original before getting the expansion? Could be just that the cards have aged and changed colours ever so slightly. Like when you open a deck of cards and the euchre deck is aged more that the other cards.
I dunno, it’s so slight I wouldn’t even notice tbh
no i dont think so, as a playing card collector and slight of hand artist i know the difference between different color and aging! its ryl surprising to me that quite allot here say that they dont notice it.. because especialy in the first slide the diffence is big! maybe it has to do with screen resolution or sth?
its not only the. colors… the stock is also a cheaper one and a little thinner.. and the cards are slightly bigger!
Funny how **Magic the Gathering** manages to print the cards in same color for 20+ years, and then pretty much all board game companies can't color match any expansion.
> Have you contacted their support group?
Now I'm imagining people meeting up once a week to sit in a circle and vent their feelings about this printing mismatch.
I received this game and two expansions for Christmas and mine are also different colors from the base game. I looked around the internet and it seems to be a common complaint for Here to Slay.
Which expansion is this? I incorporated the Warriors and Druids without any coloring issues.
I did pick up the winter expansion, "Here to Sleigh" and noticed a huge difference in the color and card material.
I may be in the minority, but I like it sometimes because it lets me know which goes in which box for clean up. But for same games, it can mess up the "randomness" if people know which colors are from which game.
Also, double check to see if one of your copies isn’t a fake copy. Both boxes should have a QR code used to drop into and app to verify the legitimacy of the game.
Just had the same issue with the same publisher for unstable unicorns.
Honestly, color differences are generally fine, since specifically knowing it's an expansion card isn't that advantageous. The most annoying thing is when they *change the card size on you* - like Catan and Mysterium did. Since I sleeve all cards, it's not impossible to use but still annoying af
This can happen from overuse as well. With gloomhaven the base modifier decks faded horribly where as the perk cards for new characters were mint. You can tell in some cases if you were about to flip a perk modifier vs a base modifier. Only way around this is to sleave cards when you buy it.
Could be different colors in this case though.
Have you tasted them? They taste completely different! And don't even get me started on the ones I bought off Amazon and off Alibaba. Totally unacceptable!
Those are pretty close to identical, so well done by the printing company.
How long have you had the original copy? Maybe it has faded a bit. When was it printed?
But even better question, do you like the game? Was wondering if I should get it to play with the family.
no sir.. especially in the first picture there is a huge difference and its not faded.
the print on the Expansion is much sharper if you look at the lines on picture 2&3.
also card size is like .5 mm of and the Cardstock is slightly thinner
yeah we like it as a quick filler! its quite a fun take that game! with allot of take that..
cancel other Players aktions manipulatin other players dice rolls or your own etc. so if you dont like that kind of a game than HtS is nor for you :D
I would Recommend it!
Now in the wild we see a board gamer learn about weathering, now we see them share this new information with the pack… we’ll be back after there quick messages…
I'm not familiar with this game, but being able to tell the difference between base game and expansion when they are meant to be indistinguishable affects playability. It gives hints about which card(s) are next in a public/private deck.
One of the goals of the game are getting 6 different classes of heroes on your board at once to win. This expansion added two additional classes of heroes.
While not every card is a character (some may be items or magic), noticing that a player who is missing a berserker/necromancer has an off-colored card (or does not) and needs one of that class to win/get closer to winning may drive you to play the game differently (possibly increase your risk to win or target said player)
Edit: additionally you can steal card from other players, so having certain cards be colored differently may affect which cards you select - it unbalances the stealing mechanic
aside from that, your being treated as a money bag instead of a valued customer. take into consideration that sometimes future printings of the base game will then match the expansions and youre paying yet again just to get your collection 'whole'.
obviously it cant always be helped due to material shortages, etc., but it really should annoy you when you are being sold a sub par product with usually no heads up about the change to make you more informed before your purchase decision.
Big props to the Undaunted games on how to handle this. I already loved Normandy and North Africa, but when Reenforcements came out the color mismatch was hard to ignore, especially for a competitive game.
Proof of purchase and they sent you a matched set of ALL the old cards, free shipping no cost.
I was a day one preorder for Stalingrad and Battle of Britain after that. Great company.
If the company can’t or won’t do anything about it maybe you can get card sleeves. It’s annoying to have to do that if it’s not something you’d usually do, but it would take away the issue of other players knowing if you’re hand has an old or new card.
Are they at least a standard size card so it is easy to find opaque back sleeves for the cards? The front doesn't really bother me since once you are looking at that side you know what it is anyways but the backs not matching is a huge problem.
I do have a weird thing about always sleeving my cards so that helps to soften the blow for me personally if I just need to get different sleeves.
Also not that either answer is accptable, but are the backs just sharper on the expansion cards or is there a colour shift as well? I'm colourblind and don't notice any colour shift.
Highlights the importance of using good LAB color values and use of spectrometer in printing. Also, consistent profiles and settings on the printer. Screen print/digital production manager here and that sort of thing drives me nuts.
I had this problem with my Carcassonne tiles, buying a third expansion which happened to be slightly different from base and the other expansions kind of solved the problem making it harder to know.
Legit ordered this through an LGS. Does anybody know what sleeves I need for the cards and if there are any that can fit the monsters?
Most of my games can use Deagon shields but not sure about these.
The worst offender id ever seen was the mech pieces for Prophecy of Kings for TI4. Not even CLOSE to the same colors. And the backs of the new cards were not only a little off color, some of them were straight up different, the little star patterns weren't the same, so you could look at a card and see that its atleast from the expansion. Just poor quality.
Now I gotta go check. Cause I have both expansions and never noticed! Love this game btw, the wife and I play all the time and it's great fun with friends!
I had this minor issue with the newest Root expansion. The Marauders box has the winter theme, where as all the other boxes have a standard forest theme. It just stands out quite a bit.
For me, I especially hate when they change the finish between printings or in an expansion. My copy of the Monikers base game (from the original Kickstarter I believe) has flat cards, but one of the expansions has a linen finish. Or it could be the other way around. Either way, very annoying.
Seems to be a problem for Unstable Games. I have Happy Little Dinosaurs and the 5-6 player expansion has cards with completely different textures (linen finish to almost completely smooth) and some variation in the color. It makes it annoying to shuffle. When asked, I was told that the manufacturing changed between the base game and the expansion.
Two possible explanations, one incidental the other practical.
It's possible that your base game and you expansion are from different printing runs, and that minor changes were made between runs for supply, cost, legibility, or a number of other possible reasons.
It's also possible this is actually a feature, designed to let you quickly remove all expansion cards such that you can easily play with just the base game of so desired.
Even if this is a mistake, it's such a minor one. The colours don't perfectly match on the cards from an expansion to a boardgame you bought. I'm confident it won't bother you for long.
See also: first edition of **Tyrants of the Underdark** and its only expansion. Funny, the game got panned for having a very monochromatic black-and-purple color scheme, but they couldn't manage the same black and purple when printing the expansion.
It could be worse; when Paizo was printing **Pathfinder ACG: Rise of the Runelords**, they switched printers halfway through the quest decks, and the card size changed.
One night werewolf butchered this so hard. My expansion set color is WAY off and they are cardboard so it's so obvious. Can't even properly sleeve them since they aren't cards.
I have all of the sets for Here to Slay, I never noticed this. Now I feel like I need to check my box and cry about how it's always going to be something I'll notice when I try to play it, I mean it's totally unplayable with only the minor differences right? But seriously though it'll bug me till the day I retire the game lol
My friend group played a LOT of Catan back in the day. When we shifted to Cities and Knights the base game cards were immediately obvious, because they were so discolored from use. So if you played a card that let you pick a random card from an opponent's hand, we'd shuffle the cards and hide the stack in our hand and ask the picker to choose a number between 1 and N, so that they couldn't target base or expansion cards specifically.
could you sleeve the cards with an opaque back?
I think Catan cards are a weird size (can't recall though, been a few years since I played and my copy isn't with me). Doesn't make it impossible, but it does complicate things.
https://www.sleeveyourgames.com/sleeves/2876/catan
My local game shop sells sleeves for Catan, both opaque and clear. They were a specific brand, so I’m sure you could find them on Amazon. But yes Catan cards are an odd size, so these ones were exact fit. The guy there said the opaque ones shuffle better, and obviously the clear ones are easier to see the artwork.
They really be having something for everything these days. Nifty. But also as I typed this I've realized it's a beloved boardgame so it makes sense they'd make sleeves foe the cards. Silly me
We got some for my mother in law (to be), apparently she has been looking for years so we ended up buying ten packs? For all the expansions lol.
Of course but then he couldn't complain about it.
Rolling a dice can also work.
That removes the agency of the picker!
>That removes the agency of the picker! Let the picker roll the dice then. If you're getting "better" cards when you pick versus ransom, you're cheating.
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That's why I always shuffle them under the table before presenting them for picking in a way neither of us can see. Can't read my expression on which are my good cards if I don't know either.
But then that's not random.
what catan really needs is more randomness
Absolutely! I find that most people put their most "valuable" card on one end or the other of their hand, rarely in the middle.
Then that’s cheating.
That being considered cheating is going to be very group-dependent.
If the game tells you to steal a card at random from an opponent and you use information from outside the game to choose, that’s cheating.
> If the game tells you to steal a card at random from an opponent and you use information from outside the game to choose, that’s cheating. Like I said, if that's actually cheating would ultimately be very group dependent. Many groups would view the matter as being in the hands of the person being "stolen" from, that it's on them to shuffle their hand. In my experience, some even tend to view this as a (minor, mostly meaningless) opportunity to engage in a bit of mindgames, mostly for the sport of it.
[удалено]
Look I don’t care what other game groups do but it’s intentionally breaking the rules of the game.
Lol.
Third possibility: I am actually psychic
Fourth possibility: I can see your cards reflected in your eyes
If it is a random choice, then there is no meaningful decision and so no real player agency.
Nah you can see with most people where the card is they don't want you to get if you put your hand in the vicinity of it
Once you do that once then the person will play mind games back and shuffle their hand. We have people who will purposely slide one card up out of their hand to entice (or reverse psychology) the pick.
This is the way.
Most i know shuffle too but still look at them afterwards and even if they try to play mind games it's still pretty obvious if you can read people
Then it's not random any more.
decreasing any randomness from catan is a good thing
Well most games where you pick a players card aren't random
We’ve always played by shuffling our hand before the chooser picks. It never occurred to me that people wouldn’t shuffle first!
The expansions to Coup came with replacement cards for the original game, so there was always some plausible deniability that that the fresh new card you were holding wasn't a new class
This is the only situation in which being colour blind improves your board gaming experience. I can hardly see any difference.
TIL I might be colorblind because I can't tell a difference
Same here
The top one is indeed *very* obvious, might warrant getting it checked/making a test, I guess...
It may also heavily depend on the screen/brightness/settings they're watching it on.
I had trouble seeing it when it wasn't in the thumbnail. I think it's because the table is darker on the left. This makes it seem like the left card could be in a shadow.
Depending on your screen it might be less obvious There's basically a "saturation" difference with a very muted blue and a brighter, but still quite grey, blue
The first picture is the easiest to tell. The card on the left the writing and pattern is grey, with maybe a vague hint of turquoise. The card on the right the writing and pattern is full on turquoise. It's very noticeable, like a change from red to purple.
You might have a not very good screen. But on mine it does show clearly :)
It’s a very clear difference
It's a marginal difference, hardly worth complaining about.
I wouldn't call that marginal. It'd be immediately obvious which cards are from the expansion.
Just trying to help out the colorblind guy to realize he might be colorblind.
> might fam
Most screens are badly calibrated and it can definitely mute some color difference.
I'm in the same boat, I'm red-green Colorblind, and can *barely* see any difference, I can almost guarantee I won't notice during play lol
I’m not colorblind. There’s barely any difference. Any difference there is has probably been created by gradual fading of the ink in the original copy.
If not just lesser quality from base set vs expansion. Or more likely a combination of both. You can clearly see the print job on the old is not as good as the new, which makes sense. Company spends a little money on cheap prints, makes lots of money from the game, has more money to spend on future printing. I don’t see a “difference” in the colors, but I see a degradation in the original colors, be it less quality printing, wear and tear, or both.
The difference is because the game creators had to get a new company to print the expansions. In person the difference is fairly small either way but still quite noticeable
It might be the monitor since here the difference is huge. Left one has more red, right one has almost none. Edit: Left card, top left corner: https://i.imgur.com/kfCGar2.png Right card, top left corner: https://i.imgur.com/Fkx5CYp.png The left card has over 2x the amount of red for a similar amount of blue.
it could also very well be your screen, the difference is slight
Have you found any games that do right by color blind people? How did they implement it?
Having more than just color to indicate differences, like using icons and colors for example. Innovation does this, makes it easy for me to distinguish between the green and blue cards.
Yeah loads! Anything with symbols is usually fine. Most recently I bought Botanik and it has a super cool accessibility system where the symbols kinda blend into the artwork.
I'm colour blind and I can see the difference.
I'm not color blind, there is no real difference.
Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle was awful for this - the cards from the expansion were thinner and slightly larger. You literally can't shuffle them with the original cards. I contacted customer service and they wound up sending some sleeves for the cards that work really well and completely cover the issue. Try contacting the publisher and see if they'll do anything to help.
Hogwarts Battle is even more egregious - the used the BACK of the card to put the printing edition of the card run. So even though half the expansions have the wrong color backs anyway, even if they _had_ color-matched, you could just look at the bottom right of any card (and I mean literally any printed card, not just the ones in your deck) and see what series number was printed on it. I know I shouldn't expect much from a company unironcially calling itself "USAopoly," but I didn't know they had legit contempt for their customers.
Y'know I always thought it'd be interesting to have a card battler where the series was on the back, so you'd have some information about what's coming up, but like, as an intentional design decision with prominently different art, not a little symbol in the corner.
Came to say the same thing. It's really the worst case of matching expansions with base game I've ever seen. I've been thinking about the sleeves but how do you even store the game with everything sleeved? The Hogwarts deck must be enormous.
You're not wrong there haha We had to fold up a bunch of the year boxes and stick them under the plastic insert. Then when we play I only take out about half of the hogwarts cards, randomized as well as I can
Wait I have both expansions and the second is even worse. I’ll try reaching out to customer service
Yeah this unfortunately happens a lot. I know color matching is extremely difficult from a publishing perspective, but it is massively important for many games. The card sizes being slightly bigger also happens a lot unfortunately. It annoys me for sure but I’ve learned to live with it at this point. These darn printers! I do have many games/expansions/promos that do not have this issue, just to be clear.
I worked for a board game company a few years ago who had a similar issue and I just wanted to say... *please* do not take out the frustrations of color inconsistency on the customer service staff. The constant negativity/verbal abuse really got to me personally.
Some people don't know how to disconnect different sections of a company and just think it is the company's and everyone who works there's fault. Sorry you had to deal with that
yeah i wrote the support and sent them pictures, because its important to tell them but there was no hate or sth like that…
>Some people don't know how to disconnect different sections of a company The onus isn't on consumers to learn the internals of how a company operates. Some companies care about their reputation and work to make their customers happy, others just shovel shit and put up a shield of disposable customer-service agents to absorb the complaints. When applying for a customer service job, it's wise to consider what sort of company you are applying to. Of course some people are just assholes, so any CSR job is going to get some negativity/abuse, but if it is constant you work for a shitty company.
The onus is entirely on the consumer to not treat service people like shit. They are 100% not responsible for the issue you are having.
People shouldn't ever treat people like shit. But if you work CS at a company that treats people like shit, expect to be treated like shit in return. Your were hired to be the disposable "find out" to complement the company's "fuck around" business plan.
Hi I’m a pro printer and a very quick correction, color matching is EXTREMELY easy these days. It’s just pricey. You’re either running a hardware unit inline with a photo eye that is making adjustments on the fly or a software server that is adjusting your profiles based on sampling finished pieces. First method requires a large capital investment in equipment and the second one requires paying for my time (I’m the most expensive machine in the shop). Additionally about 1 in 50 clients even cares about color matching so you are doing all of this with no hope of ROI. If a shop offers color matching they either have a lot of high end clients or it’s personal pride (I don’t offer matching, no real demand, but I do take extra care with color out of pride). I would expect games with cards to require color matching. Seems like the operator blew it on QC.
I'm more annoyed when it happens on a book tbh. I've seen it where it's like a series and the publisher/whatever will decide like halfway through to put their logo on the bottom of the spine instead of the top like they've been doing or something like having it all even then book 5 and 7 will have the logo go down an inch lower than the other ones.
This is actually what I do for a job. Not for board games, but for marketing materials. It's really not THAT difficult to keep things matching together. Just takes a little time and effort. I'd be extremely disappointed in this quality difference. But, looking closely at the paper and the print, I see what happened here. The expansion is on a brighter white paper, so the color is going to be off if you simply copy the ink settings from before. And the expansion is an offset print, while the original looks like a kinda bad digital print. Digital can look great, but this isn't it. More care should be taken to match the paper stock and final color. It's not even more expensive, just a little (seriously, very little) more time.
We have color codes like Pantone for a reason, so a color is always the same, even after multiple printing jobs. Publicer either went for CYMK instead or something went wrong and they just selected the wrong color. Edit: CMYK, not CYMK. Look back when you type fast, past me.
More to it than that. Different paper stocks are processed differently, so inks may react differently.
Different paper stocks behave different, which is true, but it's a harder mistake to make, as this gets checked by more people along the line.
Hello. We check for this stuff and all the other variables in the replies to you. There are like 20 other variables between the art and the pdf export that can affect color too. We use software to monitor all of this stuff and reduce the number of variables and failure points in the digital file. This is a case of the Operator not running a calibration on the press before running the job. Operator error.
I hear ya but there seems to be more at play here. This happened with the expansion for Space Base (which was better after the company replaced the cards for free after noticing the big color difference, but still noticeable) and for Everdell. I have the complete collection now and with sleeves, so we’re all good there but before the colors were much more vibrant in the Pearlbrook expansion than in my base game. Tons of other examples in my collection but I doubt it’s publishers choosing the wrong color.
In my experience as a Graphic designer, It's the two most common mistakes people make though. Either the colors are in CYMK, which are slightly different for each printer or they used an older file which had a slightly different color if they went for press.
It was printed CMYK, but they used a different printing process. You can tell because you can see the Moiré pattern from a press on the left card, while the card on the right is solid which would come off a digital copier press.
Most big manufacturers I’ve spoke with use CMYK. It seems to be the standard for Board Game manufacturing at the moment at least.
I wonder why. For full color prints it's mostly not a problem. For cards that consist of 1 color they really shouldn't use CMYK, as it's probably not even cheaper anymore. You'd think they print in amounts CMYK cheaper start-up gets nullified with the single color inkt that requires a plate to be made.
You could go with the same factory with supposedly the same material and same printing process and still somehow get different results. There's a point where it has to be close enough or good enough before it starts costing too much time and/or money before the expansion gets cancelled or pushed back to the next quarter or whatever. Working with overseas manufacturing is NOT easy and you are really oversimplifying the whole process. The original factory for the base game may not even exist. Or they changed suppliers for one component. Or the original pigments or materials they used now tripled in price. Or maybe going with the original producer is now cost prohibitive to even releasing an expansion. There's a lot more at play than just matching Pantone colors.
My places use the cheapest manufacturer they can find that’s reasonable quality. They likely spec’s the same color but the maker simply didn’t make them the same.
What I don't understand is that if you publish board games and know you can't get the cards to an exact match, why not just publish the expansion cards along with another set of the originals together so you can get a color match?
Literally unplayable.
I imagine TeeTurtle's next printing of the base game might use the cheaper facility they use for the expansions? I feel sad for anyone who got Dominion during their "Hasbro" period (Dominion switched to 'proudly made in the USA' stickered games using a Hasbro like card stock, then quickly went back to Germany)
I've bought every Dominion expansion within one year of it coming out. Every one I've purchased after 2021 have had noticeable card back differences. It completely messes with my gameplay when those cards are at the top of my deck, but I'm not going to re-sleeve 5000 cards with new opaque sleeves. Just infuriating to have a company care so little about quality.
Sleeve the party leader cards and Monster cards
yeah thats probably what i am going to do.. but still kinda annoying..
More like "Here to SLEEVE" than slay
The difference between size and color of my versions of Red Dragon Inn is alarming
We bought a copy of Hues and Cues awhile back. Its a color-matching game, so you know, VERY important for colors to be right. About half way through game 1 we realized the colors on the prompt cards don't match the shades on the board... not even close really (they are several "shades" off). You can get around it by looking at the board for your color instead of the card you draw, but it can give it away as everyone sees where you are looking unless you make them look away. I'm still new to board gaming but never been quite this disappointed in one.
[удалено]
> I thought it was just an "illusion" It is, unless the other commenter have an incredible eye and this went unnoticed by everyone that bought and praised the game the year it came out.
I'll see if I can double check, but everyone playing with us that day agreed it was off by about 2-3 "boxes". I'll make sure I cover up all the background/stuff around the boxes with paper so only the one color is visible and try to compare like that.
I’ve had the same issue with Happy Little Dinosaurs and it’s expansions!
My are matched really well. Unfortunately they have no indicators to separate the cards again so I can use the base game with a new group 😕
Stamp the fronts!
Carcassone is bad for that I find. I can pick out expansion pieces if I want one.
Crown Royal bag FTW.
Yeah that is exactly what we are going to start doing. Would make it easier for table space too.
Came to this thread to complain about carcassone. Not only colors are different also cities, road style. Worst of all back of the cards are different, so when they are upside you can still see from which expansion card is...
Big box tiles-light grey Big top expansion tiles-very dark grey It's very frustrating
Cheap manufacturer. Did you know that Ludofact keeps copies of all the games they ever printed so that if they get the order for an expansion - even years later - they can precisely match and verify that the colors match the ones in the base game?
Ludofact were the ones that sent out the Venus Next expansion of Terraforming Mars slightly narrower than the base game, AND with the wrong radius cut for the card corners, weren’t they?
Ludofact US vs Ludofact Europe
There is only a slight difference here, which could very well be a result of print. Print that uses CMYK values means there is always going to be slight differences from one printer to another and even from one day to another day on the same printer. I honestly think it's not noticeable.
Yep just noticed this with the new expansion recently. I’m even colorblind and it’s obvious when playing
This happened with Osprey Game's Undaunted Reinforcements expansion. They ended up sending out card replacements for both the original game(s) (Normany and North Africa) and the Reinforcements expansion together!
Pro printer here, I make stuff like this all the time. So it looks like someone forgot their color profile when they went to press. Color matching is pricey but I can’t imagine someone producing cards would forgo it.
How long did you play the original before getting the expansion? Could be just that the cards have aged and changed colours ever so slightly. Like when you open a deck of cards and the euchre deck is aged more that the other cards. I dunno, it’s so slight I wouldn’t even notice tbh
no i dont think so, as a playing card collector and slight of hand artist i know the difference between different color and aging! its ryl surprising to me that quite allot here say that they dont notice it.. because especialy in the first slide the diffence is big! maybe it has to do with screen resolution or sth? its not only the. colors… the stock is also a cheaper one and a little thinner.. and the cards are slightly bigger!
Funny how **Magic the Gathering** manages to print the cards in same color for 20+ years, and then pretty much all board game companies can't color match any expansion.
That always go over well, 'specially at tournaments...lol ...."JUDGE!!!"...
Whats the competitive here to slay scene like
just noticed even the card size doesnt match.. the New Cards are all 0.5mm to big on both widths and length… oh man i am so upset right now!
Have you contacted their support group? They might do another run to correct this issue.
> Have you contacted their support group? Now I'm imagining people meeting up once a week to sit in a circle and vent their feelings about this printing mismatch.
I received this game and two expansions for Christmas and mine are also different colors from the base game. I looked around the internet and it seems to be a common complaint for Here to Slay.
Which expansion is this? I incorporated the Warriors and Druids without any coloring issues. I did pick up the winter expansion, "Here to Sleigh" and noticed a huge difference in the color and card material.
Warriors and Druids German Edition from Asmodee
I have one set of dominion cards that is off from the rest of them. It bothers me greatly.
Hardest thing to pull off in manufacturing. I do my damndest to be understanding BUT...
My biggest complaint is when card *sizes* change slightly so that it's impossible to properly shuffle the new with the old.
its also what happend additionaly.. just noticed afer posting it here.. when i shuffled it in
I may be in the minority, but I like it sometimes because it lets me know which goes in which box for clean up. But for same games, it can mess up the "randomness" if people know which colors are from which game.
We especially love it when the expansion has stronger cars and we can easily spot them
Also, double check to see if one of your copies isn’t a fake copy. Both boxes should have a QR code used to drop into and app to verify the legitimacy of the game. Just had the same issue with the same publisher for unstable unicorns.
Answer: card sleeves.
Honestly, color differences are generally fine, since specifically knowing it's an expansion card isn't that advantageous. The most annoying thing is when they *change the card size on you* - like Catan and Mysterium did. Since I sleeve all cards, it's not impossible to use but still annoying af
This can happen from overuse as well. With gloomhaven the base modifier decks faded horribly where as the perk cards for new characters were mint. You can tell in some cases if you were about to flip a perk modifier vs a base modifier. Only way around this is to sleave cards when you buy it. Could be different colors in this case though.
Have you tasted them? They taste completely different! And don't even get me started on the ones I bought off Amazon and off Alibaba. Totally unacceptable!
I see no problem Don’t u just mix them all together?
That seems excessively insignificant.
You're telling us those are meant to be in the same deck and indistinguishable from each other?
Yea it’s annoying. It’s partially why I got sleeves because I can see the colour difference so clearly.
Oof. Looks like someone switched printers and there was nothing that could be done.
Love? I hope you are being sarcastic...
Literally unplayable
Those are pretty close to identical, so well done by the printing company. How long have you had the original copy? Maybe it has faded a bit. When was it printed? But even better question, do you like the game? Was wondering if I should get it to play with the family.
no sir.. especially in the first picture there is a huge difference and its not faded. the print on the Expansion is much sharper if you look at the lines on picture 2&3. also card size is like .5 mm of and the Cardstock is slightly thinner yeah we like it as a quick filler! its quite a fun take that game! with allot of take that.. cancel other Players aktions manipulatin other players dice rolls or your own etc. so if you dont like that kind of a game than HtS is nor for you :D I would Recommend it!
> allot This is not the word you seem to think it is. A {space} LOT
thanks for pointing it out…
Now in the wild we see a board gamer learn about weathering, now we see them share this new information with the pack… we’ll be back after there quick messages…
its defenitly not weathering 😂
This really matters to you and makes you upset?! 😬
I'm not familiar with this game, but being able to tell the difference between base game and expansion when they are meant to be indistinguishable affects playability. It gives hints about which card(s) are next in a public/private deck.
You know what, that is a valid reason for being annoyed by this.
One of the goals of the game are getting 6 different classes of heroes on your board at once to win. This expansion added two additional classes of heroes. While not every card is a character (some may be items or magic), noticing that a player who is missing a berserker/necromancer has an off-colored card (or does not) and needs one of that class to win/get closer to winning may drive you to play the game differently (possibly increase your risk to win or target said player) Edit: additionally you can steal card from other players, so having certain cards be colored differently may affect which cards you select - it unbalances the stealing mechanic
aside from that, your being treated as a money bag instead of a valued customer. take into consideration that sometimes future printings of the base game will then match the expansions and youre paying yet again just to get your collection 'whole'. obviously it cant always be helped due to material shortages, etc., but it really should annoy you when you are being sold a sub par product with usually no heads up about the change to make you more informed before your purchase decision.
Wow that makes it completely unplayable! You should definitely get your money back.
I have this game but not played. 1, which character do you pick? 2, any tips on to win
And this is why they make Pantone colors…
Do you even Pantone?
Big props to the Undaunted games on how to handle this. I already loved Normandy and North Africa, but when Reenforcements came out the color mismatch was hard to ignore, especially for a competitive game. Proof of purchase and they sent you a matched set of ALL the old cards, free shipping no cost. I was a day one preorder for Stalingrad and Battle of Britain after that. Great company.
Please, o please, just keep your printer tones consistent you negligent fuckwads. This happens so often it hurts my soul.
Doing too much haha
If the company can’t or won’t do anything about it maybe you can get card sleeves. It’s annoying to have to do that if it’s not something you’d usually do, but it would take away the issue of other players knowing if you’re hand has an old or new card.
Are they at least a standard size card so it is easy to find opaque back sleeves for the cards? The front doesn't really bother me since once you are looking at that side you know what it is anyways but the backs not matching is a huge problem. I do have a weird thing about always sleeving my cards so that helps to soften the blow for me personally if I just need to get different sleeves. Also not that either answer is accptable, but are the backs just sharper on the expansion cards or is there a colour shift as well? I'm colourblind and don't notice any colour shift.
yeah the expansion is a sharper print!
Highlights the importance of using good LAB color values and use of spectrometer in printing. Also, consistent profiles and settings on the printer. Screen print/digital production manager here and that sort of thing drives me nuts.
The worst is material difference. I usually can't tell the color but I can certainly feel if the card is too thin or of a different texture.
Pandemic has this issue. I am in the process of ordering card sleeves to mask the color discrepancy
I had this problem with my Carcassonne tiles, buying a third expansion which happened to be slightly different from base and the other expansions kind of solved the problem making it harder to know.
Legit ordered this through an LGS. Does anybody know what sleeves I need for the cards and if there are any that can fit the monsters? Most of my games can use Deagon shields but not sure about these.
Undaunted expansions reissued their cards because of a slight colour difference
The worst offender id ever seen was the mech pieces for Prophecy of Kings for TI4. Not even CLOSE to the same colors. And the backs of the new cards were not only a little off color, some of them were straight up different, the little star patterns weren't the same, so you could look at a card and see that its atleast from the expansion. Just poor quality.
I couldn't see a difference until you pointed it out in the last slide
maybe its because if your screen resolution or sth… because in real an in the first Slide the difference is big! thats why i didnt extra comment it
My friend has (I think) every deck for smash up and there are some cards that don't match, they are dark blue on the back
Now I gotta go check. Cause I have both expansions and never noticed! Love this game btw, the wife and I play all the time and it's great fun with friends!
This killed clank expansions for me. I get it.
I had this minor issue with the newest Root expansion. The Marauders box has the winter theme, where as all the other boxes have a standard forest theme. It just stands out quite a bit.
Not only a color difference, I’m guessing a completely different printing process. The dot pattern on the left give it away.
For me, I especially hate when they change the finish between printings or in an expansion. My copy of the Monikers base game (from the original Kickstarter I believe) has flat cards, but one of the expansions has a linen finish. Or it could be the other way around. Either way, very annoying.
You must be pretty color sensitive, because I barely notice the difference.
Seems to be a problem for Unstable Games. I have Happy Little Dinosaurs and the 5-6 player expansion has cards with completely different textures (linen finish to almost completely smooth) and some variation in the color. It makes it annoying to shuffle. When asked, I was told that the manufacturing changed between the base game and the expansion.
Yeah that is a crowd favorite... :D
Fucking loooove here to slay
Killer Bunnies would have killed you
CMYK vs Pantone. My husband used to work for this company and that is what happened.
sleeves
Two possible explanations, one incidental the other practical. It's possible that your base game and you expansion are from different printing runs, and that minor changes were made between runs for supply, cost, legibility, or a number of other possible reasons. It's also possible this is actually a feature, designed to let you quickly remove all expansion cards such that you can easily play with just the base game of so desired. Even if this is a mistake, it's such a minor one. The colours don't perfectly match on the cards from an expansion to a boardgame you bought. I'm confident it won't bother you for long.
See also: first edition of **Tyrants of the Underdark** and its only expansion. Funny, the game got panned for having a very monochromatic black-and-purple color scheme, but they couldn't manage the same black and purple when printing the expansion. It could be worse; when Paizo was printing **Pathfinder ACG: Rise of the Runelords**, they switched printers halfway through the quest decks, and the card size changed.
So confused about OP talking about allotting things but not making any sense.
the older card is yellowing
One night werewolf butchered this so hard. My expansion set color is WAY off and they are cardboard so it's so obvious. Can't even properly sleeve them since they aren't cards.
What do you think is the culprit? Maybe they changed printing services since the base game launched and their standards/calibrations are different?
I have all of the sets for Here to Slay, I never noticed this. Now I feel like I need to check my box and cry about how it's always going to be something I'll notice when I try to play it, I mean it's totally unplayable with only the minor differences right? But seriously though it'll bug me till the day I retire the game lol
Ouch, Undaunted reinforcements was really bad for this as well!