When they reprint a game and there was errata in the previous printing, do they fix the errata from the previous one?

Can you tell from the outside of the box that Twilight Imperium is a later print?

Do they pull out the older ones in favour of the newer ones?

I'm not aware of any of the printings of TI3 having errata changes in the rules or on the cards. The errata in TI3 are relatively minimal, though.

Yo Alexca,

As far as I know ("afaik", as the Incredible Allmighty Dam would say) and as far as Miss Powell told me, no, they don't. No correcting version. Sad, but that's it. Especially games like TI3, which "owns a special place in FFG line-up" (memory quote). They won't. So you got these error ***** I might not teach you since you surely already know, like, er, the cost of the pds on the race sheets (man, I begged in vain for new ones, that's so sad), the direct hits cards, and all.... but oh well. Forget it anyway. The only thing you can do is spot the logo of FFG : old one is orange, new one is Silver, but even silver logo boxes contain the same games versions than the orange ones, so...

FFG publishes errata and updates to the rules online, right here on this website (go to Catalog, pick the game you want and then go to Support). The FAQ file is updated and replaced periodically, with new material for each update being highlighted, usually in red. The rulebook in the box is never updated, even after reprinting. This way you don't need to spend time figuring out what edition of the rules you have, just come online and download/print the FAQ pdf to stay up to date.

Thanks guys. That was very helpful. I wish they would revise those errata when they reprint the game as it runs out and needs to be reprinted. -Sigh. But, oh well, I know it must be difficult to do so; I don't know if it is or not.

It wouldn't surprise me if it would be expensive to do that. I don't know how printing works, but it's possible that reprinting something as it was previously may be "cheap", whereas making changes may require things to be changed that could be more expensive.

sigmazero13 said:

Another factor would be volume. Printing things is expensive if you only want a few, and cheaper if you want a lot. Some printing places won't even deal in quantities of less than a couple thousand units (I'm told I have upwards of 750 business cards sitting in a warehouse somewhere because the company that makes them for us won't print less than 1000 cards per order.) Reprinting any board game would, I imagine, be done in smaller quantities than the initial launch, thus it would be more expensive to order a new print run of updated rulebooks.

Depending on the requirements of the printers, they may also have had to print off more rulebooks than they actually needed for the first printing, and the extras were stored for later reprintings of the game. Just because they're reprinting the game doesn't mean every component is being made fresh, after all. They'd also want to have overstock on various components so they can replace defective or broken peices (those of us who have had to avail ourselves of FFG's customer service know how quick and considerate they are in shipping out such things.)

I'm sure there are a thousand other reasons I don't know about, those are just a couple I can think of. It would be nice to have updated rules in the body of the rulebook, I agree, but I think this way works out better for everyone in the big picture.