R.I.P. FFG Floppy

The observant and not so observant among you may have noted that my contributions to this blog have rather dried up as of late. I do assure you I have had very good reasons for this occurring:

• I moved house. And by “moved” I mean every weekend I was transporting stuff from my old location to my new one because I was too lazy to get boxes and pre-pack everything.
• I discovered that living on your own means that you have to do everything around the house. I have yet to come home and find the lawn mysteriously cut or a phantom did the dusting.
• I am now much closer to drinking establishments than I was previously, meaning every weekend has been spent hung over.
• I brought the entire series of Farscape on DVD and have been quickly working through them.
• In anticipation of the boardgame release I started playing Starcraft on the PC. I’m nearly finished the zerg missions.
• I was devastated after being suspended from BGG and so walked the desert for 40 days and nights in self reflection, living only on a diet of goanna testies and Kangaroo milk.

So all of this shit has been sucking up my time, plus I have been rather lazy. Despite that, I broke my silence to bring some tragic news which no one else has reported.

I made the discovery last night when I opened up my copy of Starcraft the board game. Hidden amongst the miniatures and cards I was shocked to discover the following:

That’s right, the rulebook is rectangular. The square floppy rulebook is no more.

Now we have seen this rulebook before in the last in-house game FFG released, Tide of Iron. At the time when quizzed about it by yours truly on the site that Barnes is not wanted on, Christian T Peterson wrote the following:

“There is so much stuff in TOI (many molds, etc) that we needed to cut a few corners to keep the game sub-$80. Also, there is pretty much an even split of customer preference between standard and square (I prefer square myself!)
"Sad but true!"
cP
FFG”

This made it sound like the switch was temporary, a one off forever condemning TOI to be the bastard stepchild in the FFG range, cursed to look forever at his brothers with envy at their nice sexy big square floppy rulebooks. But now the starcraft rulebook is also rectangular, and evidence in the form of a PDF suggests the Burning Crusade expansion to World of Warcraft will also be rectangular.

My friends, I think it is time to come to terms with the shockingly obvious, Christian and his cronies have taken the square floppy rulebook out the back of the chemical sheds and done away with it, without so much as a granting them a going away party or a gold watch for its' years of dedicated service. Let us mourn it’s passing together.

FFG Square Floppy Rulebook

2003 – 2006

FFG Square Floppy Rulebook went missing under mysterious circumstances late in 2006. Though you may have been unwieldy, and often spilled the pieces on the board when you were handed around the gaming table, and sometimes whored yourself out to Euroes like Beowulf and Blue Moon City, we love you still. I will never forget the times we spent together in the toilet, keeping my mind of the chilli I ate the night before. Or the mornings I woke to find you sprawled across my chest opened on page 10 because I tried to cram in a reading before the next night’s game. Your three column page layout and super big example diagrams will be sorely missed. Closing the box lid will never be the same again.