Kind of a different topic today. I’ve talked a lot about board games, but I haven’t talked much about one of the trends in board games, and that’s expanding an existing game. Expansions give you more content in a board game in one of several different ways. I’ll go through the main three that I see board games being expanded in this article.

The first is the simplest way, and that is there are companies expanding board games to get higher player counts. Catan was the first game to do this, that I know of, where it was out of the box a 4 player game, but you could buy the 5-6 player expansion for the game to be able to play with a larger group. For me these expansions are kind of hit and miss because some games are already pushing their upper limit with the out of the box player count. Adding in additional players often increases the amount of time the game takes and can increase how much time you have between doing something meaningful. If it doesn’t do either of those things, I think that it can be a fine expansions, but it won’t ever be my preferred type of expansions. But this one is one that is pretty simple to explain, it just allows more people to play the game at once.

The next one is the expansion that adds in content to a game. And specifically with this type of expansion, it’s an expansion that is going to add in a new mechanic or tweak to the game. To use Catan as an example again, Seafarers of Catan adds in ships and islands. These are mechanicaly additions. Most of the time, this is something that is going to be easy to add in or take out from the base game. However, sometimes it’s just tricky to know what was added in, and that can be a downfall of these expansions. Maybe I don’t always want to play with the expansion, but it might not be possible to split them out. The other problem is that you can end up with two many expansions. For Catan you have Seafarers, Cities & Knights, Traders & Barbarians, Explorers & Pirates and 5-6 player expansions for all of them. If you were to get everything for Catan, you’d be in for around $500. Now, that might be worth it to you, but you can see how you can push too far in the game play expansions. Pandemic and Carcassone do the same thing having a lot of expansions to the base game. The biggest offender of having too many expansions coming out would be Smash Up and Marvel Legendary. Both of those games seem to come out with a couple expansions per year at least, and they’ve been going at it for a while. Now, sometimes these expansions make the game a lot more interesting. This is both a good and bad thing. Sometimes these extra content/game play expansions just take a good game to a great game, so that’s a good thing. However, sometimes, an expansion will be essential to the game being enjoyable. Other times, the expansion will take a poor game to a good game. That seems like a solid thing, but if the base game isn’t fun without an expansion, you’ve basically just bought the full game in two parts. So these expansions can be a bit more troubling, but often do add in good variety to games so that if you’ve played the base game a lot, you can change it up.

Finally, you have story expansions. These expansions are not possible for every game, while the other two normally are, whether they should be made or not. Story expansions have to be for a game that has a story to it. Something like Gloomhaven which has a 100+ hours of game play story is getting an expansion that has more story coming after what happens in the base game. Games like Folklore: The Affliction and Sword and Sorcery also do this. Since these games really focus on the story, the replayability of the game, without an expansion, can be a little bit tricky. Though, something like Gloomhaven, it’s been long enough since I started playing it, that with a different group I’d be up for playing it again. How these games are often made more replayable also is that you have multiple characters to jump into the game with, so if you play a different character your experience might be different than it was the first time through. That is one thing that Sword and Sorcery does, it gives you another way to play through the main story with a different character expansions. That would fall under content/game play expansion versus a story expansion though. I really like story expansions, because it allows me to continue playing with a character that I like, or it allows me to delve further into a world that has been created. I’m excited for Tainted Grail coming out from Awaken Realms for that reason. It has the base game and two expansions with the kickstarter, and it really takes you through a large chunk of the world that they’ve built and through generations.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever come across an expansions that I would consider needed. I think that there are a few that add in interesting things to games, such as extra races and powers for Smallworld, but, I haven’t run across any that are needed. Some of it might be because I won’t buy an expansion just to make a game good, so if I don’t like the game, I’ll move on from it.

What are some of your favorite expansions? Are there any expansions you consider needed?

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