Dude! Take Your Turn!
A Gaming Life
Friday Night Shots – Expansions to be Never Played Again
(See comments below for an even better example that I should have remembered! But I haven’t played it in ages so it was completely off my radar)
Welcome to another Friday Night Shots!
This is almost becoming a monthly thing rather than a weekly thing, so my apologies for that. Topics just aren’t really presenting themselves on a timely basis.
Either that, or I just don’t feel up to writing about them.
*Waves to all of the reviews I still need to write*
However, tonight’s topic just jumped out at me earlier this week during one of our lunchtime games.
So welcome back to the bar and pull up a chair. I’ll get you a libation of your choice.
Even if it’s water.
Since last time you were here, I did manage to finally get the jukebox fixed.
It now only plays Justin Bieber every other song instead of every song.
I’m working on it.
Oh yes, back to tonight’s topic.
For those of you who like expansions (as I do), I’m wondering if you’ve encountered any that actively turned you off and said “nope, I’m just going to play the base game from now on.”
Or at least play without that particular expansion, even if you play with others.
We’ve had two instances of that in the last couple of weeks that really made me want to talk about them.
The prompt for this story came up when we played Space Base for the first time in a few months this week.
I have all of the stuff for this game, from the Shy Pluto expansion, the Terra Proxima expansion (both story-based modular ones), along with the Biodome and Dreadnought expansions that add more colonies and ships to the various decks.
Last year, we added the Genesis expansion (which I really should review), which is mainly just cards, and we love the game!
However, after finishing the two story-based expansions, we have just had no interest in including the stuff from them (except the cards that don’t involve that new stuff).
The game added a 13th area on your player board for cool stuff, little dice that you could purchase and roll each turn (not just on your turn) to possibly get you stuff, and fighter tokens that you would use to pay for those dice.
We just didn’t find them that fun. They add to the setup time, add to the play time, add to the complexity, and don’t add to the enjoyment.
It was just too much, so I went through and removed all the cards that referenced this material.
If a card from those expansions just added things like diagonal arrows or something (which actually are also from other expansions and mini-expansions), then they stayed in.
But no fighter cards.
These are just expansions we will ignore from now on.
It’s too bad when an expansion just doesn’t really improve the game much.
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Another game and expansion that is borderline on this list (I haven’t actually fully decided yet) is Vale of Eternity and the Artifacts expansion.
As you know if you read the review, I am in love with Vale of Eternity. It is such an awesome card game, almost giving you a collectible card game feel during play.
The expansion is…well, I don’t know. I need to decide for the review that’s upcoming, but I have to say that I’m lukewarm on it right now.
A big part of the problem is that it seemingly added at least 15 minutes to the playtime, and sometimes more.
We finished the base game in an average of 45 minutes, making it a perfect lunchtime game at the office.
Three plays with the expansion, and two of them ended prematurely because we had to get back to work (so probably over an hour, as of course there is setup time too) and one of them barely fit into our lunch break.
Adding time isn’t necessarily bad if it adds fun, but I’m not sure how much fun it added.
That’s what I need to decide before reviewing it.
The new cards were great and they don’t really need the artifacts in order to succeed.
In that way, it’s kind of modular as well.
Even if we end up ditching the artifacts, we will probably keep the cards integrated.
Some of them are really neat.
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The final one I want to talk about is the Suburbia 5* expansion, which succeeds in the hard task (or easy if you don’t like the game!) of making the game terrible to play.
The expansion added a bunch of new tiles, including many that used the Star mechanic, where getting stars moved up up the star track.
The star track determined turn order (so if you dominated it, you were always first player). Moving along the track gave you some income bonuses and reputation increases.
Also, each round, the track was evaluated and if you had the most (or tied for the most) stars, you gained a population. If you had the least (or tied for the least), you lost a population.
Finally, for endgame goals, whoever has the highest star power broke all ties. No longer could you deny somebody a goal because you got that one higher population or that one more blue tile to tie them, meaning that nobody received the award.
Nope. If you locked up first place on the star track, you won the goal if you were tied.
It’s been a long time since I’ve played Suburbia with this expansion, but the two times I played with it, pretty much everybody at the table just hated it.
Which is too bad, because the Suburbia Inc expansion was amazing!
Those are three expansions that I really never want to use again (ok, two expansions and one that’s kind of on the fence), even though I love the base game.
What about you?
Any expansions just dead to you (assuming you like expansions to begin with) even though you like the game otherwise?
Let me know in the comments.
Dude! Take Your Turn! 
There are two expansions that have come through my collection where we’ve sold the expansion but kept the base game. Both made the original a lesser experience.
Dream Home: 156 Sunny Street – Sure, let’s add in scoring goals that generally conflict with how the base game encourages you to build. And add in a fifth and sixth player, that’ll help, right? No. Neither of those things were helpful.
Betrayal at House on the Hill Widows Walk – Getting big-name game industry people to write haunts sounds like a fun idea! Except the ones we experienced felt like they hadn’t been playtested at all. I liked the idea of the Attic rooms, that was nice, but that just made the game longer without necessarily making it more interesting. (There is also a lot of potential for people of any political leaning to be instantly put off by some of the names of the haunt designers.)
Additional expansions I never want to see again:
Sentinels of the Multiverse – Oblivaeon – I played it in the app a few times and on the tabletop once. Even knowing what I was doing – and with another player who also knew what he was doing – it took us 3.5 hours. Beyond the fact that I can rarely get a game session that long… I don’t want to play Sentinels for 3 straight hours.
Bunny Kingdom in the Sky – Sideboard feels either extraneous or overpowered with no in between, and I get nothing out of it that I don’t already get from the base game.
Innovation: Echoes of the Past – I don’t need Innovation to have double the cards. Innovation is tons of cards and variability already!
Dominion Nocturne – too fiddly, I’ll play it digitally but I try to avoid using it on the tabletop. Increases setup and teardown time as well as messing with the core gameplay loop in a fundamental way that none of the other 15 or so expansions does.
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All sound like interesting examples! I haven’t experienced any of them except Oblivion on the app, where I doubt it has the same problem. But maybe it does?
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The blessing of Oblivaeon in the app is that it turns a 15-30 minute game into 45-90, instead of a 45-75 minute game into 180-240. Plus you can more easily just take a break and come back. I am willing to play it again in the app, I just generally won’t seek it out. In the words of Cookie Monster, it is a sometimes food.
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LOL I’m obviously not up on my Cookie Monster sayings.
It’s been a while since I’ve played Sentinels, so wasn’t even aware that the expansion added that much time. Is it just because of the villain mechanics?
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Pretty much. Oblivaeon is a 3-phase fight instead of a 1-phase fight, and it adds in two extra zones of stuff to keep track of because the fight takes place across two environments. So, there’s the main villain turn, the hero turns (and keeping track of which zone they’re in), the villains in zone 1’s turn, the zone 1 environment turn, the villains in zone 2’s turn, and then the zone 2 environment turn. Then you also have to keep track of an entirely separate deck that may or may not have effects at any given time, and each player’s turn has additional phases before and after the old phases.
So yeah. It’s a lot.
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This is a cool topic. There are very few i can think of.
The resistance expansion was not great compared to the base game.
One of the two modules in 7 wonders babel was bad and i would never play with again.
I never use the expansion stuff for quest for el dorado as the base game is so good on its own.
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Never played Babel and didn’t even know Resistance had an expansion!
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We had a similar experience with the political expansion for Terraforming Mars. The base game and all the other expansions were great, but that one just left us cold. It had the feeling like it just extended the duration of the game without actually improving the total amount of fun.
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I knew I’d forgotten one! Yes, perfect example.
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I second the hate for the terraforming mars turmoil and politics expansion. I’ve played it at least five times, and what happens is two players keep exchanging the governmental seat (and therefore the bonus). It just sucks.
As for the Suburbia expansion with the stars: IIRC I had the lead for at least one of the plays, and by replacing the rotating lead mechanic with this fame mechanic, it made the game terrible. F%@ it with a pinecone sideways! After the awesomeness of the first expansion that gave you borders – the stars expansion was an awful disappointment. I think we played it twice and swore to never again.
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We did! And that play is what ultimately turned me off of it.
Pinecone sideways?LOL I’ve never heard that before
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