This review is intended primarily for people who are wondering how the new Fantasy Flight version compares to their old Chessex or fan-made set, and for people who want to laugh at an old & angry man's unwillingness inability to recognize & appreciate improvements. (Apparently this is part of a series of reviews complainingthat new editions are not unqualified improvements over old ones.)
As the gold standard for comparison, I will use my 5th edition base set. Below, some of the things I complain about may in fact have been introduced in later Chessex editions or expansions. If I don't like something in this edition, and you point out that it's not FFG's fault, we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Component quality & cosmetic stuff
There are quite a few cosmetic changes which stand out: the miniatures, the bigger boards, the card art. Let's take a closer look in that order.
Miniatures. Bah! (You can quote me on that.) To quote myself, cruddy components are part of the charm; they let you know the gameplay's what matters.
The sculpts themselves are actually pretty nice. And... all right... I guess they are easier to pick up & move around than flat cardboard counters, so in that respect, they're an improvement. Fine. And the bases have tabs on them for holding treasures, so that's neat too. (Although, after a single play, some treasure markers were visibly torn up from getting inserted into the bases.) Also, when a wizard transforms into a werewolf or whatever, the miniature pops off the base and a new one drops in, so that's pretty neat.
(It looks like the squares are large enough, and the bases on the miniatures small enough, that you can fit all four wizards in one square on those occasions when a gang-stomping is required. 304
Whether they still fit when you add a couple Create Wall markers & four crack markers & two dropped treasures & a Tacks marker, I'm not sure.)
So, although I was prepared to dislike them, the miniatures may actually be an improvement.
The larger boards. As the above picture shows, the new boards are almost twice as large as the old ones. That's pretty nice. (If you made your own set, the effect is probably less significant; the new boards are 9 1/2" wide.) One interesting thing is that, rather than being blank for shuffling, the back side of each sector is a second sector with a new, more open layout. (I believe the issue being addressed was that some initial board configurations are not "fair," so the intent was to give shorter runs to enemy treasures.)
(On that point--yes, you can often look at a starting layout and say, "he can reach a treasure on his first turn; it's going to take me three or four turns to reach one; therefore, I'm hosed," but things change so quickly & easily in this game that it never seemed like a real problem to me. But, the new maps do add some variety, so that's good.)
Some fan versions have used colored markers to indicate each wizard's home base, so that you know which base is yours even after sectors are relocated, or home bases are swapped, etc. The thousand-or-so tokens included in the FFG version are all for other things, though; instead, they color-coded the boards themselves. This means that the green wizard always uses the sector in the image above as his or her base... and at the start of the game, your color is what gets randomly determined.
There are enough people who are "weird" about their player color--including, say, individuals who may have been the sinister orange wizard in every game for the last 20 years--that the new approach is clearly an abomination, a perversion, a violation of the laws of nature so shocking & egregious that nothing more needs to be said about it.
The card art & graphic design. Here are a couple examples of the changes:
Yeah, they have pictures now. Let's talk about that first.
The card art is bad. That is, the illustrations may be fine on their own, but they add nothing to the game, and they take up space on the cards, which causes the part that matters, the text, to get cranked down to an even smaller font size. And there are cards with even more densely-packed text than that Lightning Bolt card! I'm not getting goddamn bifocals so that I can play Wiz-War, you understand?
(For a second opinion, I turned to a select panel of art historian/Wiz-War fanatic 11-year-olds, and the unanimous verdict was, "That's not what Powerthrust should look like!")
Part of the reason for the pictures on the cards seems to be so that corresponding tokens (thorn bushes, created walls, etc. 336