With the bouts of feeling the need for shopping therapy usually being short, and crowdfunding fulfilment delays being long, the result is a string of surprise parcels months and sometimes years later. Often after having forgotten completely about the game I backed. Especially if the game, as so often happens, comes out much later than promised. Kudos to Wayfarer Games, who promised A Wayfarer's Tale - The Journey Begins for August 2025, and my parcel arrived on August 1, 2025. Couldn't have organized that better.

Apparently a year ago I felt I needed the deluxe edition of the game, and then still paid extra for laminated maps. Unpacking the game I am wondering what I was thinking. I like the deluxe components, but the game comes with 5 pads of maps (the regular version has only 4 maps), and each pad has 30 pages, which are printed double-sided. I could thus play this game 300 times before running out of map sheets. That is extremely unlikely. I have 155 board games currently, if the database I keep on BGG is correct, and I play every game only a few times before switching to the next game.

Having bought the laminated maps, that can be used repeatedly with dry erase markers, I will most certainly use that version, and not the paper maps and permanent markers that come with the game. But I do realize that this is mostly due to a very theoretical need to be able to replay a board game an unlimited number of times. In reality I'd get bored of the game long before that. On the other extreme, I have legacy games that I played through completely, and which have now been permanently altered with stickers and the like to make it impossible to reset them. I should just throw away the box, but as I remember fondly playing those games, I have trouble bringing myself to just chuck them out.