Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne looks at four big products driving sales in the coming weeks, and at some recent news bits.

In case you missed it, the International Longshoremen's Association and United States Maritime Alliance came to an agreement over raises and port automation (see "Dock Workers and Port Operators Reach Agreement").  Dock workers' pay will go up 62% over the next 6 years, while the agreement the two organizations came to regarding automation of East Coast ports was not released.  While a strike here would have been disruptive, given that most shipments for the gaming industry come through West Coast ports, an East Coast strike would not have been nearly as damaging as one on the West Coast.

Catan Studios has announced a sixth edition of the Catan board game (see "Catan Refreshed in Sixth Edition Version").  From the photos, it looks as if the new edition will add a few items such as a card tray for the resource cards.  However, the company is cutting the MSRP back to $49.99.  I will want to see if they are able to do this because the company is making some of the components more cheaply, although the description indicates the playing pieces are still made of wood, rather than plastic, which would be somewhat cheaper.  Maybe, Catan Studios/Asmodee realizes that the core Catan game is the entry point for the entire Catan line of products.  Eventually, those who buy the base game decide they want to add more to the game and lo, they find an entire line of add-ons and variants for it.  I also see the game box will be modified from its traditional rectangular shape to a square box, similarly to how Asmodee packages most of its other games.  I imagine the company is doing this to achieve some production efficiencies, since the company will be able to use the same box design for more games, only changing the lithography for individual games.

Four upcoming products are going to be ringing registers over the next few weeks.

Pokemon Prismatic Evolutions releases next week but box breakers are already getting ahold of packs and cracking them open, posting the results on YouTube and complaining about pull rates, of course.  I saw one estimate that one has to open 60-70 packs to get one of the higher value cards. Given the market price for Prismatic Evolutions, I expect very few of our customers to buy enough packs to pull a high value card. However I do expect a lot of people wanting to get some of the set even at market price rather than MSRP (see "Pokemon Scarlet and Violet Goes through Prismatic Evolutions").

Then on January 24, we see the release of Magic: The Gathering - Innistrad Remastered (see "Dates for Magic the Gathering- Innistrad Remastered").  Happily, this appeals to a far different market than does Pokemon and we likely will not see Innistrad Remastered selling for far above MSRP, at least not to Prismatic Evolutions levels.

Next, on February 4, we see the release of the Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Monster Manual.  Our store has actually has more customers interested in this release than either Prismatic Evolutions or Innistrad Remastered. Again, generally a different target market than the previous two items.

Finally, Magic: The Gathering: Aetherdrift pre-releases on February 7 (see "’Aetherdrift’").  Despite what Wizards of the Coast says, Aetherdrift will appeal to the same group buying Innistrad Remastered and the lack of a pre-release event for Innistrad Remastered will drive interest in the Aetherdrift set.

That's going to be a lot of money going through store registers in a comparatively short period of time. Stores that have enough capital on hand from Christmas sales are going to do very well.  I do wish that Wizards of the Coast had released Aetherdrift a bit later in February in order to give stores a chance to recover, but those four weeks are going to be a wild ride.

Comments?  Send them to castleperilousgames@gmail.com.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.