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Tony Dehner
United States
Waterloo
Iowa
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According to my profile, out of 262 owned games in me and my wife's collection, a whopping 104 are actually board game expansions. That's almost 40% of me and my wife's collection.
This is the first blog entry in a series I'm hoping to do about expansions. Some of the topics I'm planning to cover include:
*my favorite expansions;
*what I consider to be the least essential expansions;
*my favorite games that, in my opinion, don't need expansions;
*me and my wife's opinions on expansions in general (spoiler alert: they're different)
For now, let's take a look at the main offenders. Note that this doesn't include every game we own that has a lot of expansions: these are simply the ones that we've either collected obsessively or that have gotten out of control quickly.
HeroScape - just...HeroScape. I got into this game shortly before Wave 3 was revealed, and by then I was already obsessively visiting Targets, Wal-Marts and Toys'R Us looking for figures, in many cases duplicates so I could field decent armies of commons. I stuck with it, and am only missing the Flagbearers and the Ticalla Jungle sets. (I opted out of both Marvel and the D&D stuff. That's not why I got into this game.) I'm only disappointed about the end of the line because I never did get my jungle terrain. I haven't given up hope, though.
Carcassonne - our "gateway" Euro game. When we were getting started, we bought the Carcassonne bundle (from our then-favorite online store, Newspiel) containing Inns & Cathedrals and Traders & Builders. Over the years, we gradually added the rest of the series and also bought every other version of the game while we were at it. We even bought the Catapult. We seem to have actually hit the wall with this one, though: we ended up passing on Wheel of Fortune and weren't even curious about Bridges, Castles & Bazaars. These days, when we're in a Carcassonne mood, I'm more likely to suggest Hunters & Gatherers or The City.
Dominion - we have everything currently available except for Prosperity: we've barely touched Seaside and have barely looked at Alchemy. Both Gretchen and I love this game, as do all of our friends, and it's currently the one game that Gretchen is 100% behind getting expansions for. I suspect we'll own the entire series eventually, but we're slowing down until we've played what we have.
Arkham Horror - this one's fairly daunting, because although we own over half of the currently available expansions, the only big box expansion we have is Dunwich, and Miskatonic is looming on the horizon. We have friends who also collect AH gear, so we'll probably get everything eventually, but as with Dominion, we're pacing ourselves.
Memoir '44 - Currently, the Commands and Colors family occupies the #1 spot on my Top 10, and this is by far the one I've played the most, so Memoir '44 might just be my favorite game. I've gone crazy buying all of the expansions for this one, encouraged by the fact that Days of Wonder has shifted towards making M'44 more of a "system," where there are a lot of expansions that are dependent upon each other. I can see where this would be annoying to some, but I'm loving it. In fact, I'd be more annoyed if each expansion were a standalone product, and basically written as if none of the other expansions existed.
BattleLore - here's where things get really stupid. We've played BattleLore twice. When I finally decided to buy into this game, Mayday Games was running a clearance sale, and I was able to get the Epic and Call to Arms expansions for about $15 total. Then we found several OOP expansions at a game store in Ames and bought them on general principle. Still need to get this one back to the table, because we haven't even played with the War Council or any of that stuff.
Power Grid - our most recent obsession: we received this as a Secret Santa gift, along with the New Power Plant Cards and the China/Korea board. Since we now had four maps and two full sets of power plants, I declared that we had more than enough PG stuff to last us for a good long while. (I think you see where this is going.) A mere couple of weeks later, Gretchen was at a game store in Des Moines, a dangerous situation because we always try to buy something, and she left with the France/Italy board. Then, we decided that if we were going to have all of these maps, we might as well have a box to put them in, so we ended up getting Brazil/Spain & Portugal as well. We should probably play PG sometime soon.
Part 2 of this series will be along...eventually. For now, what games do you own that you've obsessively bought expansions for?
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Keep playing (expansions)...
), I would love to play some BL + as many expansions as one wants to cram into a single session (or even just one 
) through the wonder of online board gaming.
