Keep Circulating The Tapes / Tabletop Games

• The Fantasy Flight Games license to Anima: Beyond Fantasy expired in 2016, and currently the game is out of print in English. The makers have been looking for a new publisher/translator, but in the meantime, keep passing around the books.
• The BattleTech magazine Battletechnology falls into this category as well. Originally published in-house by FASA, it was later "farmed out" and passed through several different publishers before finally ceasing publication, leaving behind a tangled mess of ownership. The result is that it will never be compiled or re-printed. Furthermore, by Word of God, material from Battletechnology will not be used in the Tabletop Game unless it is non-contradictory and the original creator can be tracked down. (Several mechs from the magazine have appeared; in those cases, they were either created in-house to begin with or the writer is now a member of the BattleTech creative staff.)
  • The original Battletech novels printed when FASA still produced the game fell into this for a long time as they went out of print after FASA closed. Fortunately, Catalyst Game Labs reprinted most of them in electronic form under the Battletech Legends name, though a few books remain out of print. The most notable one is The Sword And The Dagger, which was the very second Battletech novel ever printed and unlike all the others has never received a second printing even under FASA (which reprinted most of its early novels). Catalyst has been tight-lipped about why it hasn't been reprinted, but speculation on it includes its Early-Installment Weirdness about the setting including a few things that outright contradict later canon, and some legal weirdness about its printing (it was originally supposed to be written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, but they ended up subcontracting it out to Ardath Mayhar) that could have made it enough of a headache that Catalyst just prefers to not bother with it.
• The original Dune board game is considered a classic, but is direly out of print, and going to stay there due to rights issues.
  • Now has a Serial Numbers Filed Off reprint (without the Dune license) from Fantasy Flight Games, with the Twilight Imperium setting in place of Dune's.
• Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition and all prior editions are completely out of print. With 3.5's staggering popularity, prices for used copies of the more common books are slowly on the rise. Wizards of the Coast used to sell PDFs of all of its current products and any TSR products as well, but they were all pulled from websites like RPGNow and DriveThruRPG in Spring 2009.
  • Every edition has this. Check the prices on eBay for some of the favored old AD&D modules and editions. Check the prices for Planes of Conflict or Menzoberranzan or The Ruins of Myth Drannor or Spelljammer: Adventures in Space. As of 19 Sep 2011, the asking price for some of these sets (the original Ravenloft boxed set or Hellbound: the Blood War) is higher than the retail price for the products when they were new.
  • In January 2013, WotC opened a DriveThruRPG subsite, "Dungeons & Dragons Classics", and started releasing supplements from every D&D edition, up to and including 4th, with the intent of having hundreds of titles available.
• The Fantasy Trip went out of print in the 80's but survives to this day, thanks largely to PDFs of the rulebooks circulated between friends and via the Internet. In part due to its continuing popularity, Steve Jackson recovered the rights to it, and a new edition was published in 2018.
• Games Workshop is notorious for this. All of Games Workshop's Specialist Games (including Battlefleet Gothic, Gorkamorka, and Epic 40,000 among others) and all models associated with them were discontinued in 2013 (purportedly because GW was switching from pewter to resin for their models and didn't want to recast all the models for their old games). Blood Bowl was eventually re-released, but a rumoured revival of Battlefleet Gothic failed to materialize and most of the less popular Specialist Games are presumed to be gone for good. Some enjoy strong cult followings and secondhand models can fetch prices online well above and beyond their original sticker-price (which is particularly impressive given Games Workshop's usual pricing schemes).
  • As if the loss of the specialist games wasn't enough of a blow, they were joined the following year by the company's original tabletop product that had put them on the map: Warhammer (much to the community's collective shock). The game was controversially replaced with Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, which GW at the time assured everyone would still be compatible with their old models, but the model lines for several Warhammer armies (Bretonnia and Tomb Kings) were discontinued with the shift and over the next few years much of the "Oldhammer" models would join them, replaced with new armies that had new aesthetics, units, and rules. This led to a burgeoning trade in both old models and army resources, and multiple fan-projects spun off to preserve the classic rulesets for those who disliked Age of Sigmar's gameplay (with The 9th Age and Warhammer Armies Project being the most widely followed), plus a bumper year for rulebook sales for Mantic's WHFB-esque Kings of War. Games Workshop themselves seemed to note the setting's continued popularity and have announced a soft-reboot of the original game with classic rules, dubbed The Old World, but have indicated it is unlikely to include full model lines for all of the armies that used to be in the game.
  • Games Workshop also has a tendency for incredibly small production runs for tie-ins and printed materials, and only the novels and rulebooks ever get digital releases. A product selling out in minutes and never being released again (or in rare cases getting a similarly tiny reprint) happens all the time, leading to ludicrously high secondary market prices (many times the sticker price) and widespread use of scans.
  • Inquisitor has had a particularly prominent life following the death of Specialist Games, having originally stood out for its small, highly personalised forces (four models being about standard in White Dwarf battle reports), its complex and often fiddly rules, and its intended 54 mm scale, immediately distinct from the 28-32 mm scale of their core games, the 6 mm scale of Epic and Warmaster, or Battlefleet Gothic, which - with its Mile-Long Ship models being meant to just indicate a rough location rather than representing the actual size - is where human concepts of scale go to die. For a while, a massive amount of Inquisitor was hosted on the GW site in PDF, from the relatively hefty corebook and Thorian faction expansion to one-off articles about new character types or warband concepts. The fact that this was PDF meant that it was very easy for anyone who had the material to continue sharing it after GW pulled the plug, and as of 2023 "Inq28" still has a small but enduring community, mostly taking advantage of the largely scale-agnostic core rules (distances and weapon ranges are given in in-universe yards rather than inches, for example) to play it in smaller areas with standard GW or third party miniatures.
• Just about any Home Game of a Game Show, likely due to this being a very niche market that doesn't often see re-issues except on popular franchises such as Family Feud or Password.
• Renegade Legion went out of print in the '90s, and unlike many other games, has not been re-issued in PDF form. There is a new version coming out, but it has major changes to both the setting and the game system, leaving the original versions still unavailable. Some incomplete poorly-scanned PDFs are available in the corners of the Internet.
• Far Future Enterprises is doing a good job keeping much of Traveller available in .pdf format, but the licensed work of Digest Group publications during the MegaTraveller era is unlikely to ever be included. A fan bought the rights when DGP folded and has refused to sell them, to the point that Marc Miller has declared DGP materials uncanon, only usable in Broad Strokes fashion.
• Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 have changed all through the 1990s and 2000s, but the old sourcebooks are still circulating.
  • This was often out of necessity. For example, the original 3rd Edition Ork codex was released in mid-1999. It remained the "current" codex until a 4th Edition was released in late 2008.
  • Warhammer Quest likewise.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Two of the first movie cards, namely the "Pyramid of Light" and "Blue-Eyes Shining Dragon", haven't seen a booster pack/Promotional release, and the only ones existing are the ones who went into the movie, and kept them in good condition, or mostly worn out. "Blue-Eyes Shining Dragon" did eventually get released in a booster pack, but getting "Pyramid of Light" is still a problem.
  • Quite a number of cards are only released as short prints in some areas. Usually these are magazine promos for the likes of Shonen Jump, which just went all digital and means its last few promos got even less time to saturate. If you're in the US, good luck getting Slifer, Obelisk, or Ra without forking out some serious cash.
• Magic: The Gathering: In 1996, Wizards created the Reserved List — a list of cards they promise to never reprint — to appease collectors and players who were concerned after the release of Fourth Edition and Chronicles devalued cards. Some of these cards are very desirable and expensive, so if you want to play with them, you have three options: fork over hundreds of dollars for cardboard, make a proxy^how? Typically by writing the desired card's text on a basic land or some other random card you don't care about. Another option is taking a random sleeved card, printing out the desired card and slipping it in front of the random card. (which not all groups are okay with), or get some counterfeits.