The golden era of tabletop games is clearly recognizable by the growing interest that publishers show in it, with books and essays devoted to the phenomenon. One of the very latest entries is The Overstreet Guide to Collecting Tabletop Games, published by Gemstone Publishing (part of the business empire of Steve Geppi) and written by Richard Ankey (who works for Alliance Games Distributors, the biggest US game distributor and itself part of the Geppi empire) and Carrie Wood (who works as assistant editor for Gemstone Publishing). There are contributions from Alex Carra, Robert M. Overstreet (who gives the guide his name) and J.C. Vaughn.
Physically, The Overstreet Guide to Collecting Tabletop Games presents itself well: a 224 pages, full colour paperback book rich in photos and images albeit it contains advertising, something that annoys me considering the price ($ 20) of the book. The guide is divided in a series of sections (opening with “A History of…” and closing with “Other…”), each with chapters on specific games or genre of games; there are interviews with (more or less) famous industry people (Peter Adkison, Larry Elmore, Matt Mercer…), company profiles (Parker Brothers, Avalon Hill…) and writeups about major conventions, kickstarter and tips for grading and collecting.
The game genres covered by the guide are board games, role playing games and collectible card games. Wargames get no attention at all (except in the Avalon Hill article) nor game magazines (albeit occasionally mentioned in interviews and in some articles, for example Dungeon and Dragon). Amazingly, the role playing games section has articles about the Warhammerminiature games and the Clix games. This really is just the first of the many, many problems The Overstreet Guide to Collecting Tabletop Games has in my eyes.
Despite is name, The Overstreet Guide to Collecting Tabletop Games it’s not really a guide for collectors, claims on the cover (“the all in one guidebook for both new and experienced collectors”) notwithstanding. The collecting part of the book is a couple of articles totaling six pages, some brief paragraphs and notes inside the various chapters (for example, the Dungeons & Dragons articles tells you a white box would cost $ 500 to $ 600) and some pages illustrating the most sought (in the compilers’ eyes) Magic, Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh cards (only CCGs ‘rares’ gest such special treatment). There are no list of collectable games and game products apart from CCG cards, no rarity indexes, no articles about where trying to buy them. The Overstreet Guide to Collecting Tabletop Games is instead a primer on tabletop games but, alas, it has a lot of problems in that too.
To judge the level of proficiency of writers and contributors to a periodical or book and so the level of the product itself I use my knowledge of specific fields, in this case board games and role playing games, as a gauge and the results are really disappointing. Let’s start with the role playing games section: the inclusion of Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40.000has no reason at all (writing some notes about RPGs set in those universes does not justify it) and inserting an article about Clix games is even less acceptable. It’s possible that the guide authors’ and contributors’ decided that miniature games (despite the number of games and their popularity – just think of X Wing, Infinity, Imperial Assault, Wings of War…) did not deserve their section or that space reasons prevented any such choice. But Clix games could have been easily inserted in the collectible card games section, just cancelling the ‘card’ word in the title.
Another problem is the arbitrary nature of the games covered both in their own articles and in the usual “other tabletop role playing games” article. The “History of…” article has a curious choice of games to discuss: besides (of course) Dungeons & Dragons one seminal game as Runequest is just mentioned while games such as Tunnels & Trolls, Empire of the Petal Throne Chivalry & Sorcery are discussed in some length, if we consider the four pages devoted to the history of the genre. I’m not saying that these three RPGs are of no importance, but Runequest introduced the very first game system with no classes, no levels, percentile skills, an extremely original setting with no debts to any culture and much more. How could not the two main authors recognize that? There are more (in my eyes) unforgivable omissions in this article such as no mention of MERP, no mentions of Star Wars RPGs, no mention of Vampire the Masquerade (and the World of Darkness family), no mention of Paranoia, no mention of the old school movement and of its twin brother, the family of indie/narrativist RPGs. Many, albeit not all, of these games do are mentioned in the “Other Tabletop Roleplaying Games” article but they should have been at least mentioned here.
Just two RPGs deserve their own article: Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder. Given their continuing popularity, this choice is easy to understand and the D&D article has a somewhat significant ‘collecting’ section. Everything else (besides the extremely out of place articles devoted to Warhammer miniature games and Clix games) is placed in the “Other Tabletop Role Playing Games” article but, again, the choice is very tight: Call of Cthulhu, Vampire the Masquerade, Shadowrun, James Bond, Star Wars and a list of more RPGs getting just a mention and nothing more. Here some the problems in the ‘historical’ article are partially addressed, but again the choice is extremely limited to some well known bestsellers and glaring omissions (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay? TORG?). More mistakes creep in other articles: in the one devoted to Warhammer the contributor defines White Dwarf magazine a newsletter and tells us that Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was“a supplement for WFB”.
The board games section has many of the same problems too: the usual “History of…” article aims to cover, in just two pages, the history of boardgames from Ancient Egypt to the XXI century and so it’s forced to skip on a lot of facts and the ‘current era’ of boardgames, meaning from the ‘50s to now, gest a little less than a half page – again with no mention of wargames that, nonetheless, had a significant following at least in the ‘70s and indirectly spawned both the revival of the boardgames industry and the new role playing games genre. The articles about specific games cover the most known boardgames in the US including ones that perhaps did not need so much to be present in a such guide (Battleship, Candyland…) ignoring great successes such as Carcassonne, Pandemic and Arkham Horror (there is an article about Ticket To Rideand another one about Settlers of Catan). The final article “Other board games” gives an overview of more games (including Arkham Horror and Pandemic) but it’s impossible to comment due to the sheer number of releases available.
The third and final part is the one devoted to collectible card games. The article about the origins of CCGs starts with games from the Tang dynasty of China, reaches the United States of the ‘50s with a baseball card game and at least arrives to the 1993 Magic release. I’m in a complete disagreement about tracing the origins of CCGs so much in the past: CCGs started with the release of Magic and albeit the genre is quite ‘young’ it has already a rich and varied history – it’s not enough to use an half page to describe it.And I’m not alone in this opinion: in the article about Magic the Gathering we can read “Magic is (…) the genesis (…) of the collectible card game”. Besides Magic the Gathering there are articles about Pokemonand Yu Gi Oh and the collecting aspect of the guide here has a lot more depth: there are various pages for the ‘top rares’ of the games and one particular Pokemoncard has an entire page for itself. The final article, “Other collectible card games”, covers Vampire the Eternal Struggle, Legend of the Five Rings, Battletech, Star Wars (both WotC and Decipher).
Overall, my judgement on The Overstreet Guide to Collecting Tabletop Games is negative: there are too many mistakes (including in images used), omissions and questionable choices to make it worthy of $ 20. The interviews, albeit always sympathetic, are a good read and some articles (for example the company’s histories) are somewhat interesting, but this is too little. My suggestion: avoid it.