John Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing ends with its few remaining characters in a desperate spot. Faced with an alien creature that can infect, assimilate, and emulate human bodies, the survivors don’t know who among them might secretly be an alien, or whether their pyrrhic efforts have eliminated the infection. They’re stranded in the Antarctic with their research base destroyed. Their resources are gone, there’s no meaningful shelter left, they’re freezing to death, and they can’t even trust each other enough to work together.
Top 10 (More!) Required Board Game Expansions
23.03.2024 - 01:51 / boardgamequest.com
In 2015, Tony wrote a Top 10 list about the ten required expansions. Well, it’s been nearly a decade and board gaming has only grown exponentially since then. I wanted to take the time to go through all of the expansions that have been released in the last (nearly) ten years to discuss what expansions feel required for their base game these days.
While expansions may have different shapes and sizes (and prices) compared to what they were in 2015, the idea behind expansion content seems to be roughly the same: add more to the base game, and/or tweak large portions of the original game to change or fix portions of the design.
However, for this list of required expansions, there are a few things I considered when curating these titles. First, does this expansion help fulfill the original thesis of the base game? Second, does this expansion surpass the base game and create its own unique identity to establish a new experience? And finally, does the existence of this expansion make the base game feel inadequate by comparison?
So, without further ado, let’s look at our Top 10 (More!) Required Expansions.
If any titles on this list are reviewer favorites, this would be the one. While Root has several big and small box expansions, I feel that the one that adds the most to the game’s life and excitement is the smallest: an alternative playing deck. By replacing the original deck with this new one, players experience larger actions with more nuanced interactions, allowing the cards to play a larger role in the game than ever before. This is not a beginner-friendly choice, nor one to play with those adverse to randomness, but for those looking for the most chaotic game of Root, the Exiles and Partisans Deck is certainly required.
Required expansions often come to fulfill the original game’s thesis in a more cohesive way than the base game provided on its own, and Xia: Embers of a Forsaken Star is no different. By adding new sector tiles, a new cargo type, new ships, and an entirely new economy system (just to name a few items!), this expansion takes the cake for the most transformative expansion here. It would be higher on this list if it didn’t simply feel like a band-aid on a flawed game.
Another expansion that fits into the band-aid on the base game category, Star Wars: Outer Rim – Unfinished Business incorporates three years of feedback into one expansive, well, expansion. Unfinished Business touches each part of the base game’s design in ways large and small, from something as little as throwing in some new characters, to something as large as debt tokens to make player negotiation shine in new ways. Truly one of the most sweeping expansions I’ve played.
For a game as heavy and as complex as Anachrony to
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