From the way I write, you’d probably think I care more about video games than I actually do, but this is (probably) the last time I’m going to mention them.
When video games are released, especially nowadays, they’re not always what you would consider to be “complete.” There are either bugs that never got fully worked out, or the companies string you along to purchase more content, which to the thoughts of some is basically holding your full gaming experience ransom for more money - an experience that you would’ve had from the point of purchase several years ago. As someone on the very fringes of this issue, I’m sure there’s a whole debate with two very good sides in there, but I don’t really mean to open that can of worms by simply invoking it. I really don’t know enough about it to care that much.
What I do know is what the companies offer in those two cases are called: Patches for the former, and Downloadable Content, or DLC, for the latter.
Have you ever noticed that some discussions around board game expansions tends to be similar to this: “Oh, I’m never going to play without this expansion again. It really made/fixed the game for me!” Or perhaps “Really? Do we really need another board for this? They’re just milking this thing for as much as they can, aren’t they?” So which expansions seem to be essential “Patches,” and which ones seem to be “DLC?” And is there anything wrong with Board Game DLC?
The Patches
Not too many games are actually “broken,” in a bug sense, when they’re released. Many more, however, may be “broken” in the unfair advantage sense. As far as board gaming goes, the two are probably pretty much one and the same. More recently, creators have acknowledged their games brokenness with increasing frequency. Take, for example, the Bathhouse debacle in Orleans, or the designers of Terra Mystica admitting that their expansion races weren’t as well-tested as they should have been (See the rules correction here: https://boardgamegeek.com/article/20667867#20667867). There are other games that we didn’t even realize were missing something until the expansion came out . Sometimes we did know a game was missing something, and the designer/s came back and delivered. In any of these situations, I would consider these expansions to be the equivalent of “patches,” the board game probably not perfected, but markedly improved in some crucial way that changes your opinion.
To start, you can blame this article on German Railroads.
I’ve mentioned before, at length, the problems I have with Russian Railroads. To sum up, I think it’s utterly bland and lacking in both theme and variability. While the theme itself may not have gotten any richer, the plain and easy choices of Russian Railroads have been given a major overhaul from a pretty minor component change by way of just the player boards. The small circles provided you with a morsel of customization in the original, but now you’re telling me I get to place whole swaths of track? All over the place? And they’re all different? They can help you set yourself on a path, and if you have one you want to get you have to set a goal for yourself to get there first, and other players might be directly competing with you to get to the same spot.
In Rahdo’s talkthrough he compares it negatively to Caverna, but I think that comparison is apt for all the right reasons. You don’t just have a single endgame goal, you give yourself smaller checkpoints to reach along the way. If someone snags your track/building, you have to adjust mid-course to reach your destination. And if you waited until the end of the game to do all of these things, that’s your own fault. I like games that make things your own fault, make you deal with the consequences of your choices.
This expansion has taken Russian Railroads from a bland game I had no intention of owning to a bland game I might one day purchase. However, I find myself feeling like I might have to make a choice between this and another game with an even meatier expansion: Orléans. But more on that one later.
After German Railroads, I got to thinking about other games and their expansions. Which would I never play without again?
Merchants & Marauders is another game that I first played on the base level. It was fun! It was like Firefly, except even more open-world (due to the lack of missions) and I could become a pirate without fearing the game’s retribution at every single turn. Do you think pirates feared retribution at every single turn? I don’t. Otherwise they probably wouldn’t do it!
I still have a problem with the game’s treatment of weather. It’s ever-present, and it’s everywhere, and it bogs down the game immensely. However, the expansion at least brings into play an actual storm that weaves its way around the Caribbean. Now this? This is weather I can handle. It's just as thematic, capricious, keeps the game moving at a fair clip, and we can still use the other event cards for their Naval movement and ignore their boring, artificially game-lengthening events! That’s a house rule and not an official rule, but at the very least the expansion can facilitate such a thing to taste.
The other additions in Seas of Glory are mostly modular, and I haven’t played with them all. Contraband, however, is essential to my enjoyment the game. It’s heavily thematic, and I love how it puts even peaceful merchants at risk of being hunted by the roving Naval ships. They also quite literally “patched” the Galleon to make it more balanced! I don’t know that these three things were worth the price of the entire expansion, but they certainly do vastly improve the game into a territory where I’ll never go back.
Concordia’s expansions, however, are an interesting situation when it comes to determining what is 'essential' and what is not.
Concordia out of the box is awesome. The game elements are all there, in full force, with enough adjustment for player counts to have a good experience, even if it tips better toward 3 and 4. Swapping player counts and maps allows for a different feel by adjusting the level of interaction between players. The Britannia/Germania expansion introduced two maps that made some tweaks to the strategies of the game and provided better maps for its lowest and highest player counts. It was, in my opinion, a crucial addition to the game.
Then, late last year came Concordia: Salsa. It’s been hailed widely as another essential expansion. I’m not entirely sure I agree in full. Or rather, I agree, but with an important caveat.
Salt is great. It immediately gives a player at the very least perceived leverage over their competitors. The wild card aspect is useful, and salt can be produced and used fairly easily. The prohibitive cost would keep a player from dominating all of the salt cities right off the bat, and being the second player to build in a salt city feels very much worth the heightened price of admission. The cities’ versatility in end-game scoring is nice, too. This is the best, most essential piece I think Salsa adds. It both loosens the game up and makes it more intense at the same time. It’s a flavor - add it to taste - but I don’t care what my doctor says; if it’s Concordia, I’m all about ignoring my recommended sodium intake.
Will I still enjoy the game without it? Sure. Does the base game “pale” in comparison to this? No. Mac Gerdts’ concoction still deserves to be appreciated on its own straight out of the kitchen.
Salsa also added two new maps. The Hispania map is THE definitive two-player map for this game, at least in my opinion. It preserves the land/sea colonist ‘feel’ from the base Imperial map while keeping things tight. The Byzantium map is interesting, too. I’ve played it with 5 and found it incredibly rewarding. It’s another new flavor that’s in the same spirit as most of the other maps, the experiment of Germania notwithstanding. If you don’t yet own the game and want to, I think you can safely skip Britannia/Germania and jump straight to Salsa if you want to round out your player counts a bit better. If you already own Britannia/Germania, the maps here are not -essential-, but, again, provide a different, parallel flavor for the game.
I’m still not sure how I feel about the forum tiles yet, even after several plays. They give the players a better initial starting nudge in a direction by improving one of their actions (or expanding their warehouse) for the duration of the game right there during setup. However, now you will know who will architect to start the game no matter what their place in player order is. You will know who doesn’t have to acquire any brick to build three times on their opening move. And no one else had any say in how or why that happened. There’s no doubt this makes for a more appealing game to a broader audience. The wide-open nature and the old ‘stale’ stable of opening moves has been mixed up. The first round being somewhat “easy” or “automatic” never bothered me, because every city has value with the potential of the whole game ahead. At least with the starting forum tiles the abilities all seem fairly balanced; you still have to play a good game to win.
The randomness of the tiles throughout the game works both in its favor and against it, and this makes Concordia less predictable, which is something that may have been considered one of its faults. For me, I treasure a good game that pits player vs. player on equal terms. The starting line is the same for everyone, and the layout of the board is the same for everyone. Drop the green flag and turn everyone loose on the Mediterranean, every player for themselves! The forum also imbues the entire game with the same tension as the closing rounds with its impending claim of the last Personality cards (if your games usually end that way). How many turns are left? Who’s going to get the card/tile you want if you don’t take it ASAP? Should you step the market forward or let it wait, hoping something good is still there the next time around? This aspect of the forum is appealing, for certain, but also gives AP-prone players one more thing to agonize over.
For players who tend to like lighter games with more special abilities and who like to do more “stuff,” Salsa will surely give them a reason to put Concordia on their radar and they’ll consider Salsa to be an essential part of the game. For everyone else, salt is essential, though not so much to make it worth the price alone. The whole package, however - salt, maps, and forum - is still a nice addition to the game. Whether you go with this or the first Map expansion, one or the other at the very least is essential to rounding out the player counts of the base game. I suppose what I mean to say is that Britannia/Germania WAS essential, but Concordia 3.1 has now been replaced by Concordia '95. Or rather, for you younger folk, Concordia 8.1 became Concordia 10?
Finally, I’d like to touch on a few more expansions that I feel are essential additions to their base games:
The Ladies of Troyes: The additional secret scoring cards are exactly what Troyes needed to elevate it to real excellence, allowing players to much better second-guess their opponents’ objectives. The unstealable purple dice are a godsend, giving players some modicum of sanctuary from the nefarious die-buying that could leave a sour taste in the game for some. Additional personages and events are just icing on the cake. The extra board with the towers however… meh. It’s the only thing this otherwise fantastic expansion has going against it.
Castle Panic: Wizard’s Tower: Base Castle Panic is a way-too-easy tower defense board game. The Wizard’s Tower gave the monsters just enough bite to give this game a good sense of drama and suspense. Plus, the cloth bag it comes with for holding the monster tokens is a really nice accessory.
Eminent Domain: Escalation: Deckbuilders can have a way of growing stale, especially when the base game of Eminent Domain had such limited technology to choose from, and games with more players tended to lead to some getting denied a good set of planets to obtain that technology. Escalation fixed all of that, from asymmetrical starting decks to a much wider variety of technologies and planets and more. Escalation is Eminent Domain unleashed.
Among the Stars: The Ambassadors: The original space-station-building card-drafting game was fine, if a bit aimless. The Ambassadors may crank up the set-up time, but the payoff is much, much higher in terms of giving the game real long-term strategy beyond just "get more of this color? okay."
Tokaido: Crossroads: The base game of Tokaido felt like a concept, albeit an interesting one. Tokaido: Crossroads made it feel like a game with meatier choices.
Elder Sign: Unseen Forces/Gates of Arkham: Elder Sign was actually a really easy game. Some of the games I played actually involved handling TWO Ancient Ones and not just one in each playthrough. We still won. The yahtzee-style dice-roller needed something new, and these expansions delivered, even if the core gameplay never really changed.
And that’s all for now! I’ll be back next week with more on the “DLC” of board gaming expansions.
When video games are released, especially nowadays, they’re not always what you would consider to be “complete.” There are either bugs that never got fully worked out, or the companies string you along to purchase more content, which to the thoughts of some is basically holding your full gaming experience ransom for more money - an experience that you would’ve had from the point of purchase several years ago. As someone on the very fringes of this issue, I’m sure there’s a whole debate with two very good sides in there, but I don’t really mean to open that can of worms by simply invoking it. I really don’t know enough about it to care that much.
What I do know is what the companies offer in those two cases are called: Patches for the former, and Downloadable Content, or DLC, for the latter.
Have you ever noticed that some discussions around board game expansions tends to be similar to this: “Oh, I’m never going to play without this expansion again. It really made/fixed the game for me!” Or perhaps “Really? Do we really need another board for this? They’re just milking this thing for as much as they can, aren’t they?” So which expansions seem to be essential “Patches,” and which ones seem to be “DLC?” And is there anything wrong with Board Game DLC?
The Patches
Not too many games are actually “broken,” in a bug sense, when they’re released. Many more, however, may be “broken” in the unfair advantage sense. As far as board gaming goes, the two are probably pretty much one and the same. More recently, creators have acknowledged their games brokenness with increasing frequency. Take, for example, the Bathhouse debacle in Orleans, or the designers of Terra Mystica admitting that their expansion races weren’t as well-tested as they should have been (See the rules correction here: https://boardgamegeek.com/article/20667867#20667867). There are other games that we didn’t even realize were missing something until the expansion came out . Sometimes we did know a game was missing something, and the designer/s came back and delivered. In any of these situations, I would consider these expansions to be the equivalent of “patches,” the board game probably not perfected, but markedly improved in some crucial way that changes your opinion.
To start, you can blame this article on German Railroads.
I’ve mentioned before, at length, the problems I have with Russian Railroads. To sum up, I think it’s utterly bland and lacking in both theme and variability. While the theme itself may not have gotten any richer, the plain and easy choices of Russian Railroads have been given a major overhaul from a pretty minor component change by way of just the player boards. The small circles provided you with a morsel of customization in the original, but now you’re telling me I get to place whole swaths of track? All over the place? And they’re all different? They can help you set yourself on a path, and if you have one you want to get you have to set a goal for yourself to get there first, and other players might be directly competing with you to get to the same spot.
In Rahdo’s talkthrough he compares it negatively to Caverna, but I think that comparison is apt for all the right reasons. You don’t just have a single endgame goal, you give yourself smaller checkpoints to reach along the way. If someone snags your track/building, you have to adjust mid-course to reach your destination. And if you waited until the end of the game to do all of these things, that’s your own fault. I like games that make things your own fault, make you deal with the consequences of your choices.
This expansion has taken Russian Railroads from a bland game I had no intention of owning to a bland game I might one day purchase. However, I find myself feeling like I might have to make a choice between this and another game with an even meatier expansion: Orléans. But more on that one later.
After German Railroads, I got to thinking about other games and their expansions. Which would I never play without again?
Merchants & Marauders is another game that I first played on the base level. It was fun! It was like Firefly, except even more open-world (due to the lack of missions) and I could become a pirate without fearing the game’s retribution at every single turn. Do you think pirates feared retribution at every single turn? I don’t. Otherwise they probably wouldn’t do it!
I still have a problem with the game’s treatment of weather. It’s ever-present, and it’s everywhere, and it bogs down the game immensely. However, the expansion at least brings into play an actual storm that weaves its way around the Caribbean. Now this? This is weather I can handle. It's just as thematic, capricious, keeps the game moving at a fair clip, and we can still use the other event cards for their Naval movement and ignore their boring, artificially game-lengthening events! That’s a house rule and not an official rule, but at the very least the expansion can facilitate such a thing to taste.
The other additions in Seas of Glory are mostly modular, and I haven’t played with them all. Contraband, however, is essential to my enjoyment the game. It’s heavily thematic, and I love how it puts even peaceful merchants at risk of being hunted by the roving Naval ships. They also quite literally “patched” the Galleon to make it more balanced! I don’t know that these three things were worth the price of the entire expansion, but they certainly do vastly improve the game into a territory where I’ll never go back.
Concordia’s expansions, however, are an interesting situation when it comes to determining what is 'essential' and what is not.
Concordia out of the box is awesome. The game elements are all there, in full force, with enough adjustment for player counts to have a good experience, even if it tips better toward 3 and 4. Swapping player counts and maps allows for a different feel by adjusting the level of interaction between players. The Britannia/Germania expansion introduced two maps that made some tweaks to the strategies of the game and provided better maps for its lowest and highest player counts. It was, in my opinion, a crucial addition to the game.
Then, late last year came Concordia: Salsa. It’s been hailed widely as another essential expansion. I’m not entirely sure I agree in full. Or rather, I agree, but with an important caveat.
Salt is great. It immediately gives a player at the very least perceived leverage over their competitors. The wild card aspect is useful, and salt can be produced and used fairly easily. The prohibitive cost would keep a player from dominating all of the salt cities right off the bat, and being the second player to build in a salt city feels very much worth the heightened price of admission. The cities’ versatility in end-game scoring is nice, too. This is the best, most essential piece I think Salsa adds. It both loosens the game up and makes it more intense at the same time. It’s a flavor - add it to taste - but I don’t care what my doctor says; if it’s Concordia, I’m all about ignoring my recommended sodium intake.
Will I still enjoy the game without it? Sure. Does the base game “pale” in comparison to this? No. Mac Gerdts’ concoction still deserves to be appreciated on its own straight out of the kitchen.
Salsa also added two new maps. The Hispania map is THE definitive two-player map for this game, at least in my opinion. It preserves the land/sea colonist ‘feel’ from the base Imperial map while keeping things tight. The Byzantium map is interesting, too. I’ve played it with 5 and found it incredibly rewarding. It’s another new flavor that’s in the same spirit as most of the other maps, the experiment of Germania notwithstanding. If you don’t yet own the game and want to, I think you can safely skip Britannia/Germania and jump straight to Salsa if you want to round out your player counts a bit better. If you already own Britannia/Germania, the maps here are not -essential-, but, again, provide a different, parallel flavor for the game.
I’m still not sure how I feel about the forum tiles yet, even after several plays. They give the players a better initial starting nudge in a direction by improving one of their actions (or expanding their warehouse) for the duration of the game right there during setup. However, now you will know who will architect to start the game no matter what their place in player order is. You will know who doesn’t have to acquire any brick to build three times on their opening move. And no one else had any say in how or why that happened. There’s no doubt this makes for a more appealing game to a broader audience. The wide-open nature and the old ‘stale’ stable of opening moves has been mixed up. The first round being somewhat “easy” or “automatic” never bothered me, because every city has value with the potential of the whole game ahead. At least with the starting forum tiles the abilities all seem fairly balanced; you still have to play a good game to win.
The randomness of the tiles throughout the game works both in its favor and against it, and this makes Concordia less predictable, which is something that may have been considered one of its faults. For me, I treasure a good game that pits player vs. player on equal terms. The starting line is the same for everyone, and the layout of the board is the same for everyone. Drop the green flag and turn everyone loose on the Mediterranean, every player for themselves! The forum also imbues the entire game with the same tension as the closing rounds with its impending claim of the last Personality cards (if your games usually end that way). How many turns are left? Who’s going to get the card/tile you want if you don’t take it ASAP? Should you step the market forward or let it wait, hoping something good is still there the next time around? This aspect of the forum is appealing, for certain, but also gives AP-prone players one more thing to agonize over.
For players who tend to like lighter games with more special abilities and who like to do more “stuff,” Salsa will surely give them a reason to put Concordia on their radar and they’ll consider Salsa to be an essential part of the game. For everyone else, salt is essential, though not so much to make it worth the price alone. The whole package, however - salt, maps, and forum - is still a nice addition to the game. Whether you go with this or the first Map expansion, one or the other at the very least is essential to rounding out the player counts of the base game. I suppose what I mean to say is that Britannia/Germania WAS essential, but Concordia 3.1 has now been replaced by Concordia '95. Or rather, for you younger folk, Concordia 8.1 became Concordia 10?
Finally, I’d like to touch on a few more expansions that I feel are essential additions to their base games:
The Ladies of Troyes: The additional secret scoring cards are exactly what Troyes needed to elevate it to real excellence, allowing players to much better second-guess their opponents’ objectives. The unstealable purple dice are a godsend, giving players some modicum of sanctuary from the nefarious die-buying that could leave a sour taste in the game for some. Additional personages and events are just icing on the cake. The extra board with the towers however… meh. It’s the only thing this otherwise fantastic expansion has going against it.
Castle Panic: Wizard’s Tower: Base Castle Panic is a way-too-easy tower defense board game. The Wizard’s Tower gave the monsters just enough bite to give this game a good sense of drama and suspense. Plus, the cloth bag it comes with for holding the monster tokens is a really nice accessory.
Eminent Domain: Escalation: Deckbuilders can have a way of growing stale, especially when the base game of Eminent Domain had such limited technology to choose from, and games with more players tended to lead to some getting denied a good set of planets to obtain that technology. Escalation fixed all of that, from asymmetrical starting decks to a much wider variety of technologies and planets and more. Escalation is Eminent Domain unleashed.
Among the Stars: The Ambassadors: The original space-station-building card-drafting game was fine, if a bit aimless. The Ambassadors may crank up the set-up time, but the payoff is much, much higher in terms of giving the game real long-term strategy beyond just "get more of this color? okay."
Tokaido: Crossroads: The base game of Tokaido felt like a concept, albeit an interesting one. Tokaido: Crossroads made it feel like a game with meatier choices.
Elder Sign: Unseen Forces/Gates of Arkham: Elder Sign was actually a really easy game. Some of the games I played actually involved handling TWO Ancient Ones and not just one in each playthrough. We still won. The yahtzee-style dice-roller needed something new, and these expansions delivered, even if the core gameplay never really changed.
And that’s all for now! I’ll be back next week with more on the “DLC” of board gaming expansions.