[quick note: if you’re a BGG user, I posted this over at that site too and would appreciate a “thumb” if you have one to spare – thanks!]
If you read the blog items that I post on my website, you know that I’m rather scatter-shot with what I write about. I always have multiple projects going on at the same time, and I sort of blab about whatever is currently going through my head on which ever project currently has my attention.
As I read back through my posts about the new edition of Jump Gate, I realize it would be difficult to put together a big-picture summary of everything going on with this game … so I figured I’d write it down as plainly as I can.
tldr: The 3rd Edition of Jump Gate improves nearly every facet of the game — components are better, rules are cleaner and fit the theme better, gameplay is tighter and more consistent between numbers of players.
I wanted to do 3 things with this edition: Get back to a POD-delivered game via the shop at TheGameCrafter.com (I’d had my fill of self-fulfillment with the 2nd edition), make use of the best packaging and components available there, and attempt fix the main gripes and inconsistencies players had pointed out with the original versions of the game. So, here is what resulted …
New Components: It all started with TGC’s new Small Pro Box: a beautifully-made, full bleed art, telescoping setup box. It compares very favorably to the boxes used for smaller games by traditional publishers. Before this, their packaging options had been rather ho-hum, imo, and this changed the game. Next, came the Buck Rogers space ship miniatures in their parts catalogue. These things together got me thinking about making a travel-sized version of the game.
Things had to be kept small to fit in the box. So, 4×4 planet mats became poker-sized cards, poker-sized resources and navcomp cards became half-sized “mini” cards, etc. This meant new artwork for all of the printables along with those cool new spaceships. Also, maximum player count was reduced to 5 … 6-player games were difficult anyway.
Changing the Rules: As long as I was redoing all of the art and components, I figured it was a good time to also address some of the issues brought up by players over the past couple of years. Instead of my customary detailed ramble on all of the changes, I’ll point you to a couple of earlier blog posts that give details and reasoning: here and here.
The most important changes include removing the Jump Gate as a scoring item, replacing “Nothing” resource cards with Sand, replacing NavComp special actions with wildcard codes, modified Scanning/Harvesting/Landing rules, and a little more hidden information about resources. No extremely huge shifts away from the original game … just a lot of touches and tweaks that add up to quite a bit. This took significant re-testing of the game with each of these tweaks, and it made me happy to see each of the things clicking into place.
Now with the much improved packaging and components, and the much improved rules, I am very excited to have this Third Edition available for people to enjoy. You can get more information, download the rules, and buy it here: https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/jump-gate
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