Another little purchase this morning: caving in to my completionist urges for Orléans and buying the third promo mini-expansion from DLP games in Germany.
I love a game with little tiny plug-out/plug-in mini-expansions and I wish more games did them. I usually play Orléans with a semi-random stack of about a dozen number I and a dozen number II place tiles (I say semi-random because I tend to try to keep most of the tiles from the base game plus a sprinkling of expansion ones).
The game can get very wonky with particular combinations of place tiles but...
I feel conflicted about modular expansions. On one hand they’re great for variety and I really like games like Underwater Cities where the modules let you tweak the various game elements to exactly how you like it.
But on the other hand, it can make a game difficult to set up when you open a box and there are a half dozen baggies of things that aren’t needed for that session. And often I find myself just gravitating to the ones I like and playing with them every time (which isn’t it a bad thing, but it feels bad seeing all that stuff I don’t use!). I’d love nothing more than to use a modular expansion as an excuse to deep dive into the depth of a game, but it never happens (especially now my old group has dispersed and my new local group has 3 game hoarders - myself included).
I have a few friends who insist on playing a base game alone before playing with expansions, the damn Puritans! With such a rotation of games invariably this becomes never playing with the expansions. When the expansion is just a singular thing, it’s much easier for me to intergrate it so that no one notices we’re playing with the expansions.
Some expansions, sure, shuffle 'em in and nobody notices.
Something like Firefly, well, there are a bunch of new things you can do introduced by expansions; I have brought people in from a standing start to the fully-expanded game but it’s a fair old effort for them to learn.
The new Railroad Ink kickstarter is becoming completely insane with modular expansions, especially if you pledge at a higher level. Since the game can only accomodate one or two expansions at a time, and some of them completely change the game, it’ll take a huge number of plays to get through. This is great for replayability but trying to “master” each one will take a while, as will figuring out which dice are worthwhile expansions and which are novelty fluff that don’t add to the strategy…
For most games I’ll play with new people without the expansion content, if only because then it adds an incentive for them to play again with the advanced stuff added!
I think it works better for shorter games. You can easily play 2-4 games in an evening, changing a little each time. Part of the reason I’ve backed It’s A Wonderful World is because my group love to play Sushi Go several times in a row, so something similar with a mini campaign that changes things up each time is ideal.
With ‘feature length’ games it does become more of a hurdle. It’s great for those avid fans who really want to play variations of that one game they love to death*. But if every game had modular expansions it would soon stop me being such a completionist. Something like Inis with one or two main additions and a few quality of life little things that are easily added are my favs.
.* Roll for the Galaxy: Rivalry was that for me - it’s a terrible value proposition unless you really love the game. I’m still surprised the publisher greenlit it at all! An expansion that’s more expensive than the base game itself, with many difficult to produce components, for a 5 year old game that sold quite well but was by no means a smash hit. I wouldn’t be shocked if it only gets a few printings and then becomes a mythological thing that’s impossible to get hold of.
Just imagine all those colorful custom dice, flying gracefully from your fingers. Elegantly hitting the dice tray with a luxurious clack before rolling over its perfectly balanced axis.
It’s not a good rulebook. Whilst it broadly covers the core of the game so it’s certainly playable, it’s definitely not comprehensive and we’ve had to form agreements at home about how we interpret some of the bits around the edges. The expansions similarly could have done with a bit more clarity.
Have you tried using baggies with label boxes? For example Taverns of Tiefenthal I have each module bagged up and have written instructions of what to do for each (obviously summarised down but enough to make sense if I’ve played recently).
Rivalry did seem nuts. I said as much on the BGG forums, and Tom Lehmann did pop up to explain the reasoning that it was essentially 3 expansions in 1 and would have been 50% more expensive if produced separately. Simply means I’ll never buy it though
I think the sort of mini-expansion I mean is something like the place tiles in Orléans or extra tiles in Carcassonne or something like that, where the extra content can more or less be stored with the base content and you can just add some in or take some out as you please, rather like adding varying amounts of chilli and/or garlic to a meal to cater to different people’s tastes.
Carcassonne is a great example. I like to throw in some of the tiles from the expansions and remove some of the tiles from the base game so that it negates the advantage of memorising the tile distribution. I hardly ever play with any of the expanded rules from any of the expansions, just the tiles. I find that doing it in this way can sometimes be good for playing with new players, because it can level the playing field. It happened last time I played Orléans, for example. A place tile came out that I’d not seen before, so I grabbed it because I wanted to try it out to see what it did, and it turned out to be a bit rubbish for the game situation. I got absolutely stomped by my partner playing her first ever game, with the highest score I’d ever seen!
For what I normally think of as “modular expansions” (i.e. stuff that bolts on whole new sections of rules and mechanisms), then yes your point is absolutely spot on, but that’s slightly different to what I was thinking about.
I tracked down a copy of Space Hulk: Death Angel last week, which had been simmering on the buy list for a while. I’m very much not a 40K person, but I love the game play. The lack of reasonably priced expansions is frustrating, but I’m trying to put that out of my mind.
I won a BGG auction for Space Hulk: Death Angel but the seller never followed through with shipping any of the auction wins (for anybody, as far as I can tell). I was sad- I really want to check it out.
I’ve only experienced Space Hulk via some truly poor video game adaptations (compounded by being played on problematic hardware), but the gameplay loop is just so damn satisfying. It’s so brutal though, I’ve always been concerned that the tabletop versions(s) might prove frustrating and have never taken the plunge. It’s one of only a few GW games that’s ever really appealed to me (Forbidden Stars and Heroes of Blackreach (not even a GW game) being the others).
Death Angel is a solo card game, and very different to Space Hulk, the tactical miniatures game that doesn’t play like a tactical miniatures game because of the tight corridors and movement rules. They are both good, but I much prefer the latter, I suppose mainly because competitive games always beat solo games for me.
The tabletop can be nicely balanced depending on your setup, but I found the Death Angel card game to be absolutely brutal on a new player It’s very loved, though, always meant to go back to it.
I’ve had Space Hulk on my shelf since last summer, when I found a new copy of the 2014 printing. Finally got the minis assembled over the winter, and everything punched.
It’s on the list of “games to finally get played”, though I’m not sure when that will be. It’s a growing list, lol.
don’t tell anyone but I like it that way 
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Something like Inis with one or two main additions and a few quality of life little things that are easily added are my favs.
It’s very loved, though, always meant to go back to it.