Dude! Take Your Turn!

(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.

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.

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.