by Christian Heckmann
Still looking stable. There has been some shuffling-around in the lower twenties but the games we focus on this time still haven't been affected. So let's jump right back into the usual routine and Germanize the heck out of some games...
Eclipse, a.k.a. "Acquire the Stars", as the Dice Tower guys called it that one time. We Germans also call it "Eclipse". That might be because there never was a purely German language version of the game (the first one came package with Italian and Polish rules, the second one with Czech, Polish and Spanish instructions... I can't for the life of me remember which version I did own, my statistics here on the Geek suggest the latter one but I don't recall finding any foreign rulebooks inside the box... weird), but also because finding an appropriate German title is pretty hard. The German translation "Eklipse" does exist but for the life of me, I have never heard anyone use it. More common translations would be "Verdunkelung" or "Finsternis" (our common German word for a solar eclipse is "Sonnenfinsternis") but I don't think that they work as well in bold letters on the cover of a board game box. The subtitle "New Dawn for the Galaxy" would most likely translate to "Neue Dämmerung für die Galaxie" (funny thing, in German, "Dämmerung" can mean dawn as well as dusk, we usually add another descriptor to it to clarify, so dawn is usually "Morgendämmerung" and dusk is "Abenddämmerung").
There is no German version of
Kingdom Death: Monster and there probably will never be one. A literal translation of the title would be "Königreich Tod: Monster" (or perhaps "Königreich Tod: Ungeheuer") but I don't know what that would mean. I also don't know what the original title is supposed to express except for invoking the mood of the game. But I'm seriously curious, do you native speakers feel as awkward uttering the game's name as I do?
Nothing new on the Pandemic-front.
Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 follows in the footsteps of its predecessor. The German title is exactly the same as the English one, this time they didn't even let the intern play around with the cover in Photoshop for ten minutes or so, they just used the original, slapped a German flag and the signifier "Deutsche Version" onto it (and shrinked the "Season 2" part because they wanted to keep the alignment with the rest of the logo but wanted the lettering to be centered beneath the logo, I guess?) and were done. Come on, guys, give me something to work with. This is just lazy.
Rejoice! There will be a German version of
Twilight Imperium: Fourth Edition! It's gonna be called "Twilight Imperium 4. Edition" if the German Asmodee-website can be trusted and it'll be out this fall and there's no cover artwork yet but I'm pretty sure it'll be the same one as the original. One thing has bothered me for a while: Do English speakers really use the word "Imperium"? I mean, sure, it's a Latin word to begin with, but is it used on a regular basis in English or do you usually go with "empire" and rely on "Imperium" when you want to be uber-fancy and stuff? Because us Germans usually translate your "empire" with "Imperium" (so the Galactic Empire in Star Wars is the "galaktische Imperium" in our latitudes). Or we use words like "Weltreich" or "Kaiserreich" (which would be strange for a game set in the far reaches of space). Anyway, I don't think that we'll have "Zwielicht Imperium 4. Edition" on the shelves come fall. Although it'd be kind of funny.
This one's pretty interesting and also quite clever if you think about it.
Brass (I refuse to call it "Brass: Lancashire", because "Brass" was the original and for chronical reasons I think it should be mainly recorded like that here on the Geek, no matter what fancy new version exists nowadays...) is called "Kohle" in Germany (with the oh so clever subtitle "Mit Volldampf zum Reichtum", "Full steam ahead to prosperity" or something like this). Which is a great title. In his designer notes, Martin Wallace wrote that the title originates from the Yorkshirish - I believe that word doesn't exist - saying "Where there's muck there's brass", brass being a slang term for money. The problem is, there isn't any brass to be found in the game. In German, "Kohle" is used as a slang term for money as well. But it also means coal, one of the two resources found in
Brass. Which gives it a nice ambivalent quality. So yeah, even though the translation (and the cover artwork) seemingly moves it more into the realm of train-games than is appropriate, you did good this time, Pegasus. Don't let it go to your head. And the subtitle is terrible.
Four covers in one sweep and I'm still missing the fourth edition one with completely different artwork. I could have linked that one, too, but I don't see the merit in it, because everything I want to talk about can be found on those four covers up there. Soooo...
Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island, right? It's been through quite a few changes ever since it debuted in 2012. Information here on the Geek suggests that the original Polish, German and English version were published by Portal with the same artwork on the cover (down to the description in three languages as you can see on the first picture above), only with different components inside. It was also called "Robinson Crusoe: Adventure on the Cursed Island" (that's singular) back then. Pegasus naturally completely Pegsus'd the whole thing up with the second version by cutting off half of the artwork in order to get the game into a standardized box. As they do. Probably following Portal's lead who did something similar for the second print. They also scrapped the subtitle, because they seemed to be confused about it, due to the fact that the new Z-Man-version had premiered shortly beforehand and that was suddenly called "Adventure
s on the Cursed Island" (plural... the new version of the subtitle looks really strangely uneven if you look at it longer than a few seconds...). So for the third edition, not only did Pegasus decide to paste over what little artwork they had retained with meta-information and award-logos, they also did something almost clever. They added the subtitle "Abenteuer auf der verfluchten Insel". Translating to "Adventure on the Cursed Island". Or "Adventures on the Cursed Island". See, the neat thing about the word "Abenteuer" is that it is a so-called "Nullplural" (zero plural). You might know it from words like "sheep" or "cattle" or "tuna", words where the singular and the plural are the same (except for the articles, because in German, we have more of those than you have). Five minutes of Google-research seem to suggest that for whatever reason this usually only happens in English when animal names are concerned. In German, it applies to a variety of words. Like cake(s) (der/die Kuchen), or truck(s) (der/die Laster). Or adventure(s) (das/die Abenteuer). Neat, eh? I'm starting to think you're not half bad, Pegasus.
Man, it's hard to find comparable pictures of the box covers for different versions of Rosenberg's
Le Havre. The German one looks somehow pretty blurred in direct comparison but that might be due to the quality of the pictures. Also the lower one is the cover of the Australian version. No idea what's going on there. It's also simply called "Le Havre" in all of its iterations, probably because it's named after the French city of the same name, so nothing of interest to be found here.
Not exactly sure what's going on here. The first one was announced as the "final cover" for
Tzolk'in: The Mayan Calendar by the CGE-guys, but it's somehow missing the second designer, Simone Luciani. It also features a considerably smaller logo than the German version and the one at the bottom. Maybe I shouldn't trust whatever someone is writing here on the Geek that much. Still, us Germans call the game "Tzolk'in: Der Maya Kalender". No big surprises here.
Getting sick and tired of the Heidelbär yet? Well now you know what us Germans had to put up with over the years... There's no huge revelations to be found when
Android: Netrunner's English and German versions are compared. We also call it "Android: Netrunner" (an android is called "Android" in German as well, perhaps "Androide" if you want to be a bit less prosaic, netrunner is hardly translatable, if you went with the literal "Netzläufer", the game would sound like one about futuristic tennis or something like that...). The cover-design is the same, but of course the guys and girls at Heidelberger insisted on pouring all of their creativity into the tagline. "A Card Game of Cyber Struggles in a Dystopian Future" was turned into "Ein Kartenspiel über den Krieg im Cyberspace einer dystopischen Zukunft", roughly "A Card Game about the war in cyberspace of a dystopian future". Smooth.
And finally, I've already talked about this one back when the idea for this series of posts was born on Top Five Thursday. Let me quickly paraphrase:
The Voyages of Marco Polo ("Die Reisen des Marco Polo") is called "Auf den Spuren von Marco Polo" ("On Marco Polo's trails") in Germany for some reason. Which is extra strange, because there already was a game by Dr. Knizia with
the exact same German title. Not only does the German version occupy a different perspective than almost any other version out there (you're not really looking at Marco Polo's travels, you're just some guy following him, apparently), Hans im Glück were also trying to completely confuse potential buyers who already know the Knizia-game. Why? I don't know. Anyway, enough about that. What I find kind of interesting and didn't touch on back then is the difference in covers between the German first edition and basically all of the other ones. So the lighting is a bit different, in the German one, everything in the background is a bit bigger, especially Marco's head, and for some reason, you've got an extra guy in the caravan in the foreground. That guy is also present on all later German printings, but why wasn't he there for the first edition? I don't know. Do I want to know? Nevertheless, quite strange.
So there's another ten. Not the most interesting batch out there if you asked me, so this probably means that you'll thumb the thing into oblivion compared to the previous ten which I personally found far more interesting. I don't get you people! Anyway, look forward to next time, when we'll be talking about colors, codenames and more French communes. Oh what fun!
