Fallen Land — A Six-Year Wasteland Chronicle
A six-volume dossier slid across the indexing desk this evening, smelling faintly of irradiated dust and barbecue smoke. The cards inside span more than five years of channel time — from a 2019 take-a-look on a game Daniel (@dungeondive) had bought blind off Amazon, to a 2024 definitive review of the second edition that arrived at his door direct from the publisher.
The Keeper notes, with quiet satisfaction, that this is the first run in the wing’s catalogue to track a complete relationship arc with a single game: 2019 first contact, a long quiet stretch waiting on a second edition, three 2023 returns (revisit, expansion, unboxing), and two 2024 capstones that confirm Fallen Land’s permanent slot in the collection. Across all six, two threads carry: that retail availability after Kickstarter is, for Daniel, a moral position rather than a marketing detail; and that the documentation is itself part of the design, a signal that the team is confident the game survives the walk-through.
The Exhibit Catalogue:
- Fallen Land: A Post-Apocalyptic Board Game — Take a Look — 2019 first contact, framed by a long Arthur’s Toys reminiscence
- Returning to the Apocalyptic Wasteland of Fallen Land — 2023 hiatus broken; five-things tour of why the game stuck
- Fallen Land — Expansion — Descendants — quality-of-life storage doing as much work as the new 66-card Town Events deck
- Fallen Land — Detailed Unboxing and Reboxing of the Second Edition — comp copy from the publisher; a giveaway, a scenario book, a glowing-orange map
- One Thing I Love About…Fallen Land 2nd Edition — a four-minute appreciation of documentation as a signal of designer confidence
- My Definitive Review of Fallen Land 2nd Edition (Solo) — Brotherhood out of St George, Bruce Lee’s nunchucks, and a permanent shelf slot
Filed under F for Fallen, where the catalogue clerks have begun discussing whether to start a separate sub-shelf for Games That Should Have Been On The Top 50.
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– The Keeper
Notes that a game purchased blind in 2019 because a stranger on Facebook said “I think you’d like this” has produced six volumes of dossier and counting, and finds this a more reliable rubric for taste than any ranking algorithm.