Isn’t that what most companies do in the background anyway ?

They take their core rules, slap on a new theme and presto : new game.

It’s kind of what Wizards/TSR used to do during AD&D 2nd edition : sell the core rules + campaign packs
GURPS was built on this idea.

And I’m pretty sure plenty of hex&counter wargames rely on similar constructs.

It is cool to see a boardgame company try and do this though.

However there’s always the problem of trying to fit everything into the same hammer&nail paradigm (*)

(*) when you’ve got is a hammmer all your problems start to look like nails …

@onlyonepinman How many variants of Risk and Monopoly have we had ?
Ok … those are a bit lazy and obvious, but Pandemic, Zombicide and Settlers of Catan have had sequels and re-themed variants of the core games. The various ‘legacy’ games kind of re-use the same sort of mechanics as well.

One could argue that AoS and 40k 8th edition share a lot of their core mechanics.

I think re-using the basic framework is a lot more common than you might think at first.
It’s usually not sold as a concept to consumers, but it certainly is an efficient use of development resources if you can spend time tweaking rules sets as opposed to re-inventing the wheel.

Isn’t this similar to what Tim Korklewski is trying to do with the Morpheus Engine?  One set of core mechanics that will cover everything from mass combat fantasy to skirmish sci-fi, and a few special rules to give you your flavour.  Ragnarok: Heavy Metal Combat in a Viking Age looks pretty good.

Isn’t that what Crooked Dice with 7TV is doing? One core set of rules, lots of different settings to which the rules get adapted?

Think rpg games have been doing for years D20 and GURPS comes to mind, means that you know how base system works.

I know for Two Hour Wargames, once we rapped our heads round the base idea of how they worked ( and Ed’s intresting initial rule writing) adapting to new genres wasn’t much of a problem. It was only later when we wern’t sure if it was version 1, 2.5 or 5 that it got annoying.

The RPG world is also the place that shows how bad universal rule systems can be when used to make a game conform to the core rules (D20 Call of Cthulluh is so wrong on so many levels for example).

I think the pros and cons of universal systems have been discussed in one of the shows as well.

As such I think using Conans’ mechanics for melee focussed heroics is definitely possible.
You’d lose a lot of the flavour text in the core rules, but one definitely could create a core box with Batman and Conan as ‘expansions’ because the real meat is in the statistics and skills for each hero/villain anyway.

That loss of flavour might bother some people.

The cost of the games is another factor that is going to get trickier with this system in place.
Those who own the core rules of a system will find that adding ‘more’ games is cheap, but if you don’t own the system (or worse : own an ‘old’ version of the core rules) the price advantage dissappears.

This might even result in maps that can be used by both systems, especially if one were to include add-on terrain like the Joker Funhouse map does in Batman.