Alderac Micro-Expansions Looking Really Cool

Just a brief post today because I saw something that I found very cool on Boardgame Geek and I felt I had to share.

What is a micro-expansion?

Micro-expansions are a set of cards or some other small piece of an already-published game that doesn’t meet the standard of a full expansion (adding new rules, etc).

Looking at Alderac Entertainment Group‘s (AEG) micro-expansion page, they seem to like to do this a lot for games like Mystic Vale, Space Base, and Valley of the Kings.

So why am I mentioning this today?

Because of what they show as “coming in 2021”.

Yes, that is a Cat Lady and a Smash Up micro-expansion showing there.

For Smash Up, it appears to be a new faction, Goblins. Much like the Sheep expansion (which is very cool and was available for free for a while but now you can buy it), this gives you a new faction that will probably add new abilities and new interesting stuff to the game. Alderac has always done well with their faction expansions for Smash Up and I can’t see this being any different.

Then there’s the Cat Lady micro-expansion with kittens!

Designer Josh Wood confirmed a little bit on Boardgame Geek earlier this week.

“Yes! There is a Kittens Micro expansion coming soon! It adds kittens to the deck. Kittens can be paired with adult cats to be fed, or fed on their own!”

What will that do to the strategy?

We won’t know until we get more information.

It will be interesting to see what these micro-expansions add to the game experience for these two games.

You can’t go wrong with a new faction for Smash Up (other than the fact that I play Smash Up at work on lunch and right now due to COVID I am not in the office).

I also am a bit annoyed that these are probably only available from Alderac and shipping to Canada is probably atrocious (we have a post box in the US but I don’t know when our border is going to open up so I can actually get stuff there).

Still, by 2021 maybe that won’t be quite as bad. I don’t know if shipping is based on weight (and thus you don’t get a benefit buying more items at the same time), but shipping to Canada isn’t actually that bad!

Once these come out, maybe I’ll binge on micro-expansions and get the Space Base and Smash Up: Titans micro-expansions.

Bring on 2021!

It would be cool to put 2020 in the trash bin.

What do you think of these? Are you interested or do you hate not only expansions, but micro-expansions like these?

Let me know in the comments.