I have certainly been guilty of the thinking the next release will be the best game yet but they rarely are. I have Godzilla, Deadpool & Aerosmith sat in the cave and they're all great games.
I’ve kinda been there, done that, with board gaming. We had 850 games at one point and it was just a culture of ‘Cult of the New’ and ‘FOMO’ (Fear of Missing Out). Everyone just buying the next new thing, playing it once or twice, and moving on.
As board games are much (MUCH) cheaper than pins (although I have sold a game that was as much as an EM!), there was a lot more buying, selling and trading than there is here. Every now and then, you got a genuine innovation in design (e.g. deckbuilding, which is basically the Elwin of board gaming), and then just billions of variants of the same thing. I got disillusioned buying stuff eventually because the possibilities were mostly a lot more enticing than the real games.
With pinball, I’ve now reviewed 117 different pins (and I’ll have played more, but not enough to form an impression) and there’s only a handful I want to play enough to have in the house - and they’re not usually the newest ones either. That said, my experience is that if I carry on liking something that much, I will always like it that much. I’ve had Mage Knight and Blue Moon in my top five board games for nearly a decade. So, anyone who owns a beat-up Fathom who wants to wait 18 months to get a new Fathom, that is 100% worthwhile.
As for the new stuff. . . .Valhalla now or Tank force in 2024 . . . there's no competition.
It’s a shame you don’t have access to hundreds of pins within cycling distance, as we do, as I’m happy to wait 18 months to own things I’m permanently playing on location. There are pins that just suck all the air out the room because, if I see them on location, I won’t play anything else. And, at that point, I’m better owning the pin so I have the emotional time to try some other stuff.