I’ve been pretty
reluctant to make a favourite expansions list because I’m not the sort of
person who expands every game I like. I also don’t buy into the idea of ‘essential’
expansions. For an expansion to be essential it implies the game NEEDS the expansion
ie. there is something wrong with the base game that it fixes. If I don’t like
a base game I’m not going to keep putting money into it to try and make it
better. For those who use essential to mean it’s just that good, then that’s
fair enough and I will look into that kind of expansion for some of the games i
love that need a new lease of life to get them to the table more often or with
a new audience.
Here’s the Yellow Meeple’s top 5 expansions;
·
Dominion:
Prosperity impresses me every time we play with it. It’s hard to pinpoint
why it makes Dominion so good, but the chance to do big money turns is really
satisfying. These days I don’t think we ever play without it whereas our other
Dominion expansions don’t get a lot of love by comparison. It really doesn’t
change the base game that much, but the new treasure/action combination cards
can make things really interesting and of course every new set adds variety so
much that you’ll never need to play the same game twice.
·
Flash
Point Fire Rescue: Extreme Danger adds a huge variety of maps to the base
game of Flash Point Fire Rescue. The new maps bring with them new challenges,
such as exploding cars, windows which are easy to smash for easy access and
multi-storey buildings where you can use ladders to access the first floor.
However, the base game rules remain unchanged and overall the game balances the
larger maps well. I’d happily expand Flash Point further if I ever got bored
but there’s enough variety already to keep us busy and we still need to keep
increasing the difficulty too.
·
Pandemic
of the Brink is an expansion we bought just before Pandemic Legacy was released
so it probably hasn’t got the play time it deserved. We had reached a point
where we needed to add variety to our Pandemic games and On The Brink
definitely does this with 3 different expansion elements in the box. We are yet
to try the bioterrorist as I tend not to enjoy the one versus many hidden
movement style of game, but it’s definitely something we’ll try when we have a
couple more players than our usual two.
·
Elder
Sign: Gates of Arkham is my favourite expansion to Elder Sign, having tried all three. It definitely changes the game
much more significantly than Unseen
Forces and for me felt pretty similar to the new expansion, Omens of Ice, incorporating a few of the
same mechanics. In Gates of Arkham you
fight against the forces of Cthulu moves from the museum setting to the
streets. The first key change is that not all of the locations are revealed at
the start and the second are the gates that open to other worlds, linking them
to locations on the board so that they must be completed. Gates of Arkham definitely increases the difficulty but also
changes the game enough to make it feel different to playing the base game.
·
Ticket to
Ride: United Kingdom and Pennsylvania is the first expansion we’ve wanted
to buy for Ticket to Ride. For a long time we were happy with Ticket to Ride
Europe, even though we only tended to play it with my parents. With two players
the Europe map lacked a lot of interaction and the UK map seems to quit the
2-player game better. It also provides more of a challenge for gamers because
of the tech tree element. The Pennsylvania side is definitely weaker, but I
think it will still get played and is the right choice for an introduction to
set collection or stock market type games.
What I’ve included here
are the expansions we love to play with and they typically correspond with
those classic games we play the most often. It’s worth noting that I’ve
excluded the 3 more collectable game we own – Marvel Dice Masters, X-Wing Miniatures and Imperial Assault, all of
which we’ve expanded and at least for Dice Masters and X-Wing we wouldn’t be
playing without expanding.
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