Oh boy, starting off strong with a topic here. Expansions baby! It’s not like this is a completely nebulous and exceedingly complex category. I guess the best place to start is as they say at the beginning.
A tale of two expansions
I recently had two very different mental experiences with some expansions and I wanted to share the mental conundrum. As usual with these rants I am not sure I have any specific to say on the topic, it’s more to just present some ideas and make you think…or something
About a year ago I backed for the first expansion to Clans of Caledonia that was released, and I hope to have it tabled shortly after this goes live. The expansion is a module style expansion that introduces several different elements some of which are relatively small but requested by players, like being able to see what contracts were coming up rather than have them be a “blind pull”, to relatively substantial new board that allows an alternative to fulfilling contracts and loosening up the games and a few things in between that add some rules overhead but give you more to do during your turn. At first I was excited about the campaign and a bit hesitant but there were things that drew me in, even though I was a bit skeptical of the “big ticket item”, which is trains….its always trains.
Overall I don’t know if my group is experienced enough to throw all the expansions in at the same time. I enjoy Clans but I legitimately don’t feel like I bring it to the table as often as I would like. I think it is a little too heavy for the casual groups and I just have too much other stuff to play with the heavier weight group. That being said the expansion seemed like it would improve what I loved about the game and add a few more things off to the side that I could either choose to interact with or not and I decided to go for it.
The second game I want to bring up in this is Snowdonia. My history with this game is a bit more complex. I got the original version of Snowdonia many many many years back and played it. It is an interesting almost pure worker placement game with quite a few interesting ideas. It utilizes the “place all workers, then take all actions” that is visible in older iterations of workers placement rather than the “place a worker and do an action immediately” general rules you see nowadays. The real interesting bit of the game was that the game timer was set by a bad that draws resources. There was a set number of each resource in rotation plus some event cubes. That means if players were hoarding all the resources and not using them then they would get into a situation where a lot more event cubes were drawn and these did things like complete tiles tiles and drain points out of the game. The second very interesting bit was contract cards and their dual usage. See each contract card came with a special ability, so picking it up could later make one of your other actions considerably stronger if you could set it up, it also could be worth points, if you could pay for the requirements. These requirements were often either rubble or completed train tracks and build station spaces. But this isn’t a review, this is a story. After getting this game and playing it several times and much later an omnibus of Snowdonia and it’s scenarios was released called the “Master set”. I hopped on this Kickstarter and ended up getting the game and trading off my original game and while I appreciate having all the scenarios as I said above I usually just end up playing the base game so I am not getting a lot of value for it.
Now they are releasing a “Special Edition” of the base game and a “Grand Tour” expansion. This expansion keeps the game effectively the same but changes that main way that the game is presented. In the original the train route you were building was represented by cards that went around the board. So to make a new scenario all you had to do was get a new set of cards and maybe some card overlays for the actions. However, in the new set every scenario has a board with specific places to show the train route. This means that you can’t actually play all the extra scenarios in your Master Set in the Special edition, because it isn’t really build to handle that. Sure you can get the new scenarios in the expansion and have it work and with the new design being the “new way of printing things” it means each new potential scenario would need a double sided board and if I am being honest I play this so little that I don’t really see the need of even all the scenarios I have currently so I am finding it very hard to be even slightly excited about this expansion even though I think the game underneath it all is quite good. Even weirder it makes me ask if I want the game to even be on my shelf at all with how little I want to get it to the table.
So what do I want out of an expansion then?
You can see my conundrum from the issue above. They both seem to add the same things, a few more rules upgrades to make the game better and more options and scenarios to expand the options in game play, one revitalizes my want to play the game more and the other makes me wonder if I even want to still own it. Both of these thoughts are being brought on from expandable material, so the question then becomes what do I want from an expansion?
I think the most succinct answer is: more of the game I love. Look we get expansions because we already like the game! That is a very important aspect of it. Maybe the expansion includes new ways of enjoying the game, for example new heroes in Guards of Atlantis II or more of LITERALLY EVERYTHING in Millennium Blades. They don’t add more base game ideas just different ways to experience it. This is true in quite a few other expansions where you just get more of everything, more choices, more factions, more fighters, more cards. Sometimes it is slightly improving on the game such as the fixes within Clans of Caledonia I noted above.
On the other hand, if I didn’t like the game I don’t feel like an expansion is going to make me want to play it, even if it does fix issues within it and make it a game I would enjoy. Having to buy in both a game and then an expansion just to get a good experience seems like a stretch especially when there are so many other games I can play. But, then what about a game I already own and I feel is mostly OK comes with an expansion that makes it great. I usually have a question for this which is “at what cost?” An expansion often adds things and the added items would usually mean that you do more in the game and the game therefore would take longer, unless the game also ends up taking things out (did I like those things it took out? That may be a negative then). The other things that games sometimes do is become less tight and focused as part of an expansion. A great example of this is Barrage, the game in it’s base form is a very tight and competitive fight to create electricity. The expansions often open but what you can do for points but at the expense of making it easier to pursue different objectives than your opponent and end up reducing the interactivity that made the original game so good (A problem that seems to rear it’s head even in my copy of Clans of Caledonia according to early reviews). Then again, sometimes the cost to add things is nothing because it removes a small piece of the original game or a neutral part of the game that had nothing going on, in which case as long as the time doesn’t balloon too hard then we are all happy, and the last thing we ever want to see is another one of those boards that’s off to the side that everyone forgets about until someone see’s how it can make them massive points.
Then there are also some weird edge cases. For example the expansion for Argent: The Consortium, where what really does excite me in it is the ability to streamline the game a bit with the “summer break” scenario that makes your ramp of of workers more significant and actually helps to on board players much better without giving them too much to worry about in the early game. There is of coarse more everything in the game but I feel the game has so much that I don’t know know if I have played enough to expore it.
Is this going anywhere? Do we actually have a conclusion?
OK so, how do we actually feel about expansions? I think that they can be a good thing but they are hard to pull off well. I do really enjoy the module system that a lot of expansions put out where you can put in the pieces you want without too, but then you usually have to pay for some other pieces that you really don’t…. Sometimes the solution for an expansion that “fixes” the game is really to have an almost second edition of the game that releases with some items removed, like an “essential edition” or something, but then you fall into the problem of making people have to re-buy a game that they already have which puts people off your game and segments your users because there are now two games floating around with significantly different experiences.
Maybe the answer is you should have just made a better game in the first place and play-tested it better so that you didn’t need to make an expansion later to fix all the problems in your original design. That seems harsh and for anyone who has ever tried to make a game, or anything really will tell you, that is way harder than it sounds. Demanding perfection especially when you may be dealing with deadlines and expectations of publishers may just not be reasonable. I guess there may not be a perfect solution to the problem. Maybe we will always hate expansions a little bit as they slowly alienate the player base. Or maybe we will make replicators and everyone can join the utopia that the word comes out of it and play whatever board game they want in whatever version they want.
It’s fun to dream isn’t it?