Overlooked Spiel des Jahres winner Mississippi Queen returns next year

It’s funny how things work out sometimes. This month, we featured Mississippi Queen as the latest game in our All the Jahres feature in Tabletop Gaming magazine. Now, the long out-of-print board game is coming back.

In the September issue of Tabletop Gaming, James Wallis noted that Werner Hodel’s 1997 winner of the Spiel des Jahres had seemingly drifted out of mind and memory for most players, an unfortunate side effect of claiming the Game of the Year prize after three enduring classics – Manhattan, Catan and El Grande – and showcasing a simpler style of gameplay that those more innovative games left feeling a tad outdated in the wake of their innovation.

That said, Mississippi Queen is still a perfectly enjoyable gaming experience today, as players race their paddle steamers down the stretch of water, burning their limited supply of coal to manage their acceleration and turning in order to manoeuvre down a river made up of different hex tiles – normally ramming islands and each other along the way.

It’s been several years since Mississippi Queen was last reprinted, although it can be found for eBay for a reasonable price, but it seems that history isn’t content to let it slide totally out of consciousness just yet.

French publisher Super Meeple has announced that it will put out a new edition of the game next year, which will feature brand new artwork and bundle in Mississippi Queen’s only expansion, The Black Rose, which bumped the number of players up to six and added a rogue steamer controlled by the player at the back of the pack.

The Black Rose rules – including sand bars, refuelling stations and floating logs – will be separated out as ‘advanced’ rules in the new rulebook, with the ‘basic’ rules essentially recreating the original 1997 game with some minor changes.

Super Meeple has only confirmed a French edition of the new edition for now, which may include the rules in other languages, but has indicated that it plans to bring the game back into English in the future via a partnership with another publisher.