Everything that sucks! And some things that don't.

"A different style of reviews, a bit crass and kind of raw, still enjoyable (currently with creepy teddy bears)." (Ray/Andy) / "You're pretty funny sometimes" (Gary) / "Pretty good blurb, but better stick 'rage bait' in there somewhere." (Greg)

Recommend

Germanizing Games (New And Improved!) - Furchtbar schön!

Posted by Christian Thomas Nonnenbroich

Germanizing Games

20 Apr 2019

Christian Nonnenbroich

(Harblnger)

Germany
Sprendlingen
Rheinland Pfalz

Here's a disclaimer: Even though this series of posts is called "Germanizing Games", unless further reinforced, I don't suggest that all of the games featured on this article have original English titles. "Germanizing" is just a handy word that doesn't one-hundred-percent describe what I am doing here. Also this list isn't meant to be comprehensive when it comes to box cover artwork and it's not supposed to focus on this. Excursions into this subject are to be understood rather as a bonus than the centerpiece of these articles, which is the differences and similarities between English and German titles of board games (no matter which one is the original). That said, I don't own all of the board games out there, I can't double-check everything, I have to work with what the Geek gives me. If there are factual errors in what I write here, I'll be thankful for corrections.

Right, where were we?

Board Game: Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia

I feel like this early-ish Jamey Stegmaier/Alan Stone design has kind of fallen out of favor with the BGG-crowd ever since Stonemaier has published higher-profile stuff in recent years. I like it. Haven't played it in a while, but... I like it. Just wanted to clarify that. But we're not here to talk about stuff like that, no, we're talking translations. Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia was translated by the German branch of ADC Blackfire (I don't really know what the relationship between this one and the two other ADC Blackfires, the ones from Romania and Czech, is...) and they chose a... strange name. I mean, it's technically correct. The German version of Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia is called "Euphoria: Die perfekte dystopische Gesellschaft erschaffen". As said, kind of faithful, but it still sounds a bit off, perhaps because for some reason, they went with the infinitive instead of the rather addressy form of the original, turning it into the equivalent of "Euphoria: To create the perfect dystopic society". Why perfect instead of better? I don't know, perhaps because us Germans tend to not do things halfway?

This one's weird. Like... really weird. As is so often the case, I don't know exactly which one came first. Designer Bruno Faidutti is French and the first French edition of Citadels was called "Citadelles", so perhaps that's it and the English version is far closer to the original? Anyway, for the German version, publisher Hans im Glück went deep into bad pun territory for... really no reason whatsoever. In German, we've got the expression "Ohne Furcht und Tadel", usually used when describing heroic knightly types, literally meaning something like "without fear and reproach". The German version of Citadels changes that to "Ohne Furcht und Adel", basically "without fear and nobility". I kind of see what they did there, but it is definitely quite heavy-handed.

I'm cheating a bit, yet again. See, the upper image is from the second edition of Tales of the Arabian Nights, the lower one is technically the German version of the first edition of Tales of the Arabian Nights, but that version was published 14 years after the original and is supposedly far closer to the second edition and OH MY GOD, I DON'T KNOW EITHER! The thing is, it's called "Geschichten aus 1001 Nacht", literally "Tales of a thousand and one nights". Apparently, the base material for the game, the stories princess Scheherazade told to a Persian king for a thousand and one nights straight, were known under that name in English as well, before the name "Arabian nights" became more popular. In Germany, we still know it under that name, "Geschichten aus den arabischen Nächten", or however one would translate the English title, never caught on. So yeah, that's what the German version of that game (kinda) is called. Also the tagline reads "Ein Spiel um phantastische Erzählungen und abenteuerliche Reisen", "A game about fantastic tales and adventurous voyages".

Board Game: A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition)

Oh Heidelberger... What have you done this time? I suppose in an effort to strengthen some form of brand-recognition, the guys and girls at Heidelberger decided to firmly link the German version of A Game of Thrones: The Card Game (Second Edition) to their board game based on the same property (they already did so with the first edition, though, so that's not that new). They dropped the "A" from the title (probably because German buyers could get confused and ask "So this is only 'A' Game of Thrones, right? Where are the other ones?") and smashed the subtitle "Der eiserne Thron" ("The iron throne") into the midst of it without any regard for the consequences, giving us the great title of "Game Of Thrones: Der eiserne Thron - Das Kartenspiel (zweite Edition)". Say that five times in a row...

And another one where I'm not only not a hundred percent certain which one's the original and which one is the translation, also I need three covers to fully do this game justice. Oh, also squeamish readers, beware, there's gonna be strong language ahead. Courtesy of Amigo, not of yours truly. Don't shoot the messenger... Anyway, since the designer of No Thanks!, Thorsten Gimmler, is German, I guess the German title is the original one, even though most of the other language versions seem to have flocked to the English naming conventions, mostly adopting their equivalents of No Thanks!. Not so here in Germany, mind you, because remember? Nation of poets and philosophers and stuff. So we don't know No Thanks! under the name "Nein danke!", as you would assume naturally. No, in Germany, for the longest time, the game was called "Geschenkt... ist noch zu teuer", roughly "For free... is still too expensive". Rolls right off the tongue. Also in Germany, we use the expression "Geschenkt" (which usually means something like "gifted" or "bestowed") as an equivalent to your dismissive "Forget it!". So far, so weird. Now, in 2017, Amigo Spiele released a new version with new artwork and a new title. What that new title was, you ask? Well, I'm glad you did. It's "Schöne Sch#!?e". I'm gonna go out on a limp here and assume that the strange characters in the middle of the second word are supposed to conceal the fact that the game's "real" name is "Schöne Scheiße". It's a multilingual release, though, so an English rulebook was provided and that calls the game "Shitty Luck" (or rather "Sh#!?y Luck"), which is probably appropriate (or... isn't?) but a closer translation of the German title would probably be something like "Nice shit" or perhaps a bit less vulgar "Fine mess". To round things out, the tagline of that version says "Aus dem Tagebuch eines Pechvogels", "From the diary of a jinx".

2 Comments

Sat Apr 20, 2019 7:00 am

Post Rolls

[+] Dice rolls

| Locked Hide Show Unlock Lock Comment

View Previous {{limitCount(numprevitems_calculated,commentParams.showcount)}} 1 « Pg. {{commentParams.pageid}} » {{data.config.endpage}}

[ShowHide] Thank you for helping us moderate the site. [Community Rules]

Edited
Posted
- Reply
- Quote
- Edit
- Delete

View More Comments {{limitCount(numnextitems_calculated,commentParams.showcount)}} / {{numnextitems_calculated}} 1 « Pg. {{commentParams.pageid}} » {{data.config.endpage}}

Contributors

Christian Thomas Nonnenbroich

Germanizing Games (New And Improved!) - Furchtbar schön!

Search

Subscribe

Categories

Contributors