We live in an age of endless remakes and reboots, from this year’s reheated films Beauty and the Beast, Ghost in the Shell and The Mummy, and video games brought from their 16-bit origins into HD to the subtler nostalgia of ‘80s and ‘90s-inflected works influenced by the cool-again style of decades past. Board games are certainly no stranger to the return of beloved classics, whether through long-awaited reprints or new editions, but there’s also a growing trend of treating tabletop brilliance as just the leaping-off point for brand new experiences. Take Whitehall Mystery, the spiritual successor to Letters from Whitechapel (with a dash of ‘80s classic Scotland Yard) that trims the hidden movement masterpiece back to its tense roots. Or Medici: The Card Game, a drastically reworked version of the middle chapter of Reiner Knizia’s acclaimed auction game that actually does away with the auctioning altogether. What about 13 Minutes, a seriously condensed dose of Cold War simulation 13 Days packed into a pocket-sized box? It’s a similar story with Caverna: Cave vs Cave, another impressive two-player adaptation based on the genius designs of Uwe Rosenberg, and Codenames Duet, which makes a previously sidelined co-op variant for the word game its main focus. Of course, we also have Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game, marking a long-awaited return for the samurai-battling card game series begun in the ‘90s that draws from its rich history while updating it for a modern world. These are all examples of the endless invention of games designers, who often do so much more than just stick the same old bits in a brand new box – although, as the new version of Modern Art proves, sometimes simple perfection is best left largely untouched.