Expansions: The good, the bad and the ugly part 1

Your favorite game has hit the table countless times. It’s still your favorite, but something isn’t right. Perhaps it feels a little samey or stale when you are making some of the same moves for the 20th time, or seeing the maybe you see some of the same strategies play out as the last game. When a game hits the doldrums like this nothing can give it a shot of new life quite like a well-timed expansion.

When expansions get out of hand...
When expansions get out of hand…

Board game expansions are add on packs that allow a designer inject new cards, gameplay, and strategies into an existing game.  For a popular game, this is a win for everyone involved. The publisher seeks to keep the game relevant and active in the gaming community, and the gaming community in turn gets some new content to revive a game that maybe they have seen too much of.  Seems like a pretty sure thing, right? However, not all expansions are created equal. Depending on the type of game and the designer’s approach to adding new bells and whistles, expansions can sometimes be more of a headache than they are worth.  Over the next few posts I’d like to explore the good, the bad, and the ugly of board game expansions.

The best expansions take a good game and make it great. They elevate and evolve the gameplay experience in a way that makes it feel impossible to going back to playing the game without the expansion. Instead of just adding a bit more variety these expansions introduce new concepts that blend seamlessly with the original rules, and make for a deeper game.

Innovation adds several new gameplay mechanics that blend seamlessly with the original.
Innovation adds several new gameplay mechanics that blend seamlessly with the original.

One expansion that meets this criteria is Innovation Echoes of the Past. Innovation itself is a fantastic game I covered in my short civilization game article. It has a lot of tactical depth, and since every card in the game is unique and not all cards are in play in any given game, the original game always plays out differently. So what could a game with that much variety in the core box possibly need an expansion for? More of the chaos and unpredictability of the base game of course!

Echoes of the past is that one ingredient that really makes a recipe sing, the garnish on top of a great meal. The cards in this expansion only come into play intermittently, as players can only draw one of them at a time. However they are powerful and introduce several gameplay concepts that weren’t in the original game, so when they do come into play it is significant and changes the course of the game. It is a fantastic expansion that I would not play without!

The Leaders expansion gives 7 Wonders more long term strategy.
The Leaders expansion gives 7 Wonders more long term strategy.

Another expansion that fits into this “essential” category for me is 7 Wonders Leaders. 7 Wonders is another game I covered in my short civilization post, and is also a great tactical game, with moment to moment decisions often mattering more than long term planning. The Leaders expansion is great because it gives the game a more long term strategy. Players draft four powerful leader cards at the beginning of the game, and can use these early decisions to guide the more tactical decisions down the road. For example if a player drafts a leader that gives bonus points for science cards, they can seek out more of those cards during the game to really hone that strategy. The base 7 Wonders game is an award winning treasure of a game, but I am always eager to throw this expansion into the mix.

Boarders in Subrubia Inc are worth a lot of points, but can hem you in if you're not careful.
Boarders in Subrubia Inc are worth a lot of points, but can hem you in if you’re not careful.

Suburbia INC also elevates the core game Suburbia and adds small tweaks that make the whole game better. This very sim city-eque tile builder was already good, but the expansion adds boarders, that throw the whole spatial aspect of the game for a loop. and end of round scoring goals that can be tempting to chase even if they don’t meet your end game goals. It is another example of evolving a base game just that little bit and I would not play Suburbia without it.

In all three cases these expansions elevate the original game. The sign of a great expansion in my mind is if it feels like it belonged in the game to begin with, where it blends in seamlessly with the original. Expansions are a wonderful part of the modern board game hobby because they can give new life to a game you already know you enjoy. Sometimes trying a whole new game can be a bit daunting, having to teach new people, including yourself and the always present concern that it might just not be a good game. An expansion is a much safer bet, like adding more toppings to your favorite ice cream sundae. However, it’s not always rosey, and in my next post I’ll touch on the bad side of expansions and how they can go awry.

Building Rome in 90 minutes or less

The Civilization PC series has been a hit since the early 90s.
The Civilization PC series has been a hit since the early 90s.

With the announcement of Civilization 6 last week my mind has been abuzz with excitement. Civilization is a grand strategy  PC game covering massive spans of time. The board game industry has been producing similar games for years, and some say Sid Meier, the creator,  was even inspired by the great boardgame Civilization from Avalon Hill in 1980. But the problem, for both the video game and the board game, has been one of time investment. Avalon Hill’s grand epic took as much as six hours, and its sequel Advanced Civilization ballooned to eight. Covering such a grand scale with any sort of detail seemingly requires a massive time investment, and as the years go on, it is no wonder that fans of such strategy games flock to the PC game. There the computer can handle all of the complexity and bookkeeping, and players are able to save and play over several days or weeks without taking up the entire dining room table.

The allure of this civilization theme in boardgames did not die out with the advent of the more convenient computer version. In recent years many board games have tried to capture the feeling of building a civilization without the complex and time consuming nature of older civilization games. Some games use the theme like a coat of paint, merely motioning towards the progression of humanity over generations, while others abstract the essence of the great Sid Meier classic, and condense it to a reasonable play length. Here are a few games that will make you feel like you are building an empire, and also perfectly fit how much time you might have in an evening.

A player's city in 7 Wonders towards the end of the game.
A player’s city in 7 Wonders towards the end of the game.

7 Wonders is a smash hit board game for doing the impossible. The game takes the theme of building a civilization and boils it down to a thirty minute game you can play with up to 7 people. Its secret is a simple card drafting system. Players receive a hand of cards, select one, and pass the remaining cards to the left or right. Since players all choose simultaneously, there is no time spent waiting for others to take their turn, and the game takes the same amount of time regardless of how many are playing. However, within this simple system, there are some tough decisions that mirror those in other civilization games. There are resources to manage and trade with your neighbors, military conflicts, scientific discoveries, great buildings, and of course the titular wonders. Now while it is an excellent game where the civilization theme comes through, it is not like the grand strategy games of years ago. 7 Wonders is an abstraction of those classics that focuses on the feeling of building up an ancient city instead of covering all of human history.

Cards splayed out in Innovation to show more icons.
Cards splayed out in Innovation to show more icons.

Another card game that abstracts the civilization theme is Innovation. Created by the mad game scientist Carl Chudyk, Innovation boils civilization down to its fundamental technologies throughout the eras and creates a confrontational and chaotic card game out of them. Players play cards of five different colors into stacks in front of them. Each card is a technology represented by a unique action that players can take with that card along with several icons that represent aspects of a player’s civilization. Players can use attack cards inno_flyeragainst those with fewer icons of a certain type, or follow the actions of other players with whom they have the same or more icons, creating a back and forth battle of trying to stay ahead in the six different icons. The piles of cards can then be spread out up left or right to reveal more icons from past technologies, escalating the battle even further. Unlike 7 Wonders, which covers ancient civilization, Innovation covers the full history of human invention, from the wheel to nuclear fission. Players draw through 10 stacks of cards that represent the different eras of history, and attempt to claim ever increasing victory point achievements for each era.

Both games succeed in condensing the feeling of building a civilization into a tighter more focused package, but not without losing something in the translation.  For example, there is no map in either game, and outside of the “neighbor” concept in 7 Wonders denoting specific interactions with the players to your left and right, there is no sense of place. This sacrifice in favor of brevity necessarily removes the exploration and travel aspects that were part of the original Civilization boardgame and the PC game series. To condense the experience each game focused on one aspect of the theme. In the case of Innovation, the game itself is the tech tree of a grander strategy game, while 7 wonders captures the city building and advancement found in the PC game.

The map in Deus give the game more of a sense of place than other light Civilization games.
The map in Deus give the game more of a sense of place than other light Civilization games.

One lighter civilization game from recent years manages to bring in the map but still keep the game length from exceeding that 90 minute sweet spot. Deus uses hexagonal tiles to represent a map with different resources to exploit and barbarians to conquer. All interactions with the board and other players, however, are done through cards played to different columns in a player’s tableau (the play area in front of them). Each column represents a different color of card and corresponding type of building that might be part of an ancient civilization. When a player builds a card, they place a token on the map representing that building.

Different card columns represent different aspects of your civilization.
Different card columns represent different aspects of your civilization.

Blue cards and ship tokens represent naval buildings,  green farm buildings represent production, soldiers represent your military etc… In this way the game combines what is essentially a card game with a spatial element not found in the previous two games.

Each of these games extract an element of the grand civilization games on the PC and hones it into a game of its own. 7 Wonders captures the sense of city building, Innovation makes the tech tree live and breathe, and Deus captures the map and the balancing act of managing different aspects of a civilization. The key to keeping these games short is focusing in on a part of a larger whole, but still making it feel like a complete game in its own right. All three of the games capture that wonderful civilization theme, and will keep gamers plenty busy while they wait for Civilization VI.