No Export for You/Tabletop Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Tabletop games produced outside of the US rarely make it to our shores, to the point that it's easier to list the exceptions.
    • Games Workshop's products.
    • Maid RPG
    • Engel got a few books brought over to the US, before the US version of the line unceremoniously imploded, with the majority of books remaining untranslated.
    • In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas got a loose adaptation by Steve Jackson Games -- very loose; they have some of the same concepts, but the execution is hugely different.
    • The card game King's Blood was originally Japanese.
    • The RPG, miniatures game, and card game Anima: Beyond Fantasy were originally Spanish. Even there, though, most of the sourcebooks haven't come over yet.
    • Mutant Chronicles and its Spinoffs... but not the RPGs that led into it, Mutant (in either edition) and Mutant RYMD.
      • Considering the fact that the third edition of Warzone was published by Excelsior and Mutant Chronicles: Collectible Miniatures Game was published by Fantasy Flight Games, and both companies have their HQ in the US, this is doubly odd.
    • Kult.
    • Qin: The Warring States has made it over, but the translation process is understandably sluggish, almost to the point of Development Hell.
    • Victoriana RPG and it's Abney Park Spinoff Airship Pirates
  • For boardgames it's very different, with many German and other European games being released in the US.
    • Another more likely candidate is Japanese CCGs and miniatures games, especially if they have an Anime to tie into them -- examples include the various tabletop Pokémon spinoffs, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Bakugan.
  • Magic: The Gathering has the entire Three Kingdoms block, based on (you guessed it) Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Originally produced for an Asian audience, the set only saw an English printing in Europe and Australia, never officially making it to US shores. Only a few cards from the set have ever officially made it here as reprints.
    • The Unglued and Unhinged expansions were only printed in English, due to the large majority of the plays on words, puns, and other jokes that didn't translate well into other languages.
    • The ante cards in early sets never made it into Porteguese print editions. Why? Well, it turned out that Brazil was/is the major market for these editions - and gambling is illegal there.
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