Alles anzeigenA few days ago, a Kickstarter campaign was launched for the ‘Crypto Cartel’ card game. Even though the author and campaign leader meanwhile admitted that he was "inspired" by our classic card game Bohnanza by Uwe Rosenberg, the game described on Kickstarter shows not only a relatedness or inspiration, but appears as 1:1 image of the game mechanism of Bohnanza.
When do you talk about pure inspiration and when about plagiarism in a game? Picking up, reinterpreting, modifying and developing an existing mechanism is a recurring theme in the game industry. And if sufficient differences between original and adaptation can be found, there is no reason for an author or publisher to be alerted. However, as in the case of ‘Crypto Cartel’, if the complete gameplay, including rules for hand cards, card storage and scoring (to name just a few), are adopted without significant changes, we, as the publisher that launched Bohnanza in 1997 and has been distributing since then (Rio Grande Games has the distribution rights for the US market for many years), must speak out:
For the ideas of authors like Uwe Rosenberg, who, like many others in his profession, has been developing games for over 20 years.
For all creative minds, who live for and from games and who, with extraordinary ideas, can create new game worlds and transform the already existing game mechanisms into a completely new game.
All this cannot be found in ‘Crypto Cartel’. It is not a modification, not a re-creation, but the complete takeover of an already established and successful game, which was only extended by action cards. This is not an inspiration for us, but a plagiarism.
Therefore, AMIGO appeals to all campaign supporters and fans out there to ask themselves whether they really want to support or even tolerate the appropriation of others' ideas or their intellectual property. We think that in the end, game designers like Uwe Rosenberg, who work on their games for years and live off their ideas, must bear the damage.
Besides, in our opinion it is highly disrespectful to an author and his work to use his ideas without prior contact and consent, even without a public reference to the author of the original.
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Crypto Cartel bei Kickstarter [nur echt mit Buchstabendreher in der URL]
