How Much is Too Much?

I sometimes talk about what makes the games me and my friends play different from the games that the average person plays. One big thing that makes them different is the idea of expansions.

Expansions are simply put, add-ons to an existing game. Imagine you own Monopoly, and there was an expansion set released that added more Community Chest or Chance cards to the base game. Maybe there could be some new player tokens in the expansion too. Of course you probably will never see an expansion for a mainstream game like Monopoly. I think that most people don’t want to have to buy one thing to be able to play another. But to hardcore gamers, expansions go over very well. Just look at the game company Fantasy Flight Games. They make expansions for a lot of their games, and they seem to sell very well. Some games have several expansions, and sometimes it seems like it might just be to much. I’m gonna talk about two games that have a lot of expansions, Runebound and Arkham Horror.

Runebound is a Fantasy adventure game where the players each take control of a Fantasy type Hero character and travel around the board defeating various challenges that are represented by four decks of cards. The four different card decks are separated by four different colors, green, yellow, blue and red. These represent different difficulty levels with green being the easiest and red the hardest. The Heroes can also take the gold they win in beating these challenges to the market and buy more powerful items to aid in their quest. Their quest is to be the first Hero to beat the Red challenge card that contains the Evil Dragon Lord Margath and thus save the world.

Now the game comes with many components like; dice, plastic figures, cardboard counters, the game board and of coarse a lot of Cards! Since the game was released in 2005 there have been several expansions that add even more components, including even more cards! To date there have been three “Large Expansions” that add more characters, counters and even new game boards.

Then there have been 18 “small” expansions that just add more cards! More cards to the Market deck, more cards to the challenge decks and even cards that change the conditions to win.

To demonstrate the massive amount that these expansions add to the base game let me throw some numbers at you. The base game comes with 12 Hero Characters to choose from. If you add all the new Heroes from all the expansions you would now have 34 to choose from, that’s kinda cool. How about the market cards? The base game comes with 84 market cards, that’s 84 items and and allies you can buy with your hard earned gold. But add in all the market cards from the expansions and that total shoots up to 327. That can make it hard to draw that one kick butt item your looking for, unless you use one of the market variant rules that are out on the net. Then there is the challenge decks which were made up of 72 cards in the base game but when you add the cards from the expansion you are looking at 252, and that’s not counting the challenge cards that are for specific storylines. That many adventure cards, some argue, can upset the balance of the game, especially when you are drawing Red Cards looking for Margath. With that many cards it can be harder to find the guy.

This exponential growth also extends to the game Arkham Horror.

What is Arkham Horror? Well let me steal a description from Boardgamegeek.com;
Arkham Horror is a cooperative adventure game themed around H.P Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Players choose from 16 Investigators and take to the streets of Arkham. Before the game, one of the eight Ancient Ones is chosen and it's up to the Investigators to prevent it from breaking into our world. During the course of the game, players will upgrade their characters by acquiring skills, allies, items, weapons, and spells. It's up to the players to clean out the streets of Arkham by fighting many different types of monsters, but their main goal is to close portals to other dimensions that are opening up around town. With too many portals open the Ancient One awakens and the players only have one last chance to save the world. Defeat the Ancient One in combat!

Since it was released, also in 2005, there have been 4 expansions printed.
Two of them were termed “small expansions” that added more cards.

The other two were “full expansions” that not only add more cards but whole new board sections.

With all this laid out on the table the game is huge!!!

You can see from this picture how big this game is when set up to play, what you don’t see is how much more has been added to the base game. Not just in what is out on the table, but in new rules and mechanics. I could break down the numbers again for you on all the cards that were added but I don’t think I need to. I think it is enough to say that the number of Items, and Monsters and Characters, has almost tripled!! But like I was saying, it’s not just the sheer amount of stuff that makes this game somewhat unwieldy, but all the new rules and complexity that are being added with each new expansion. For example, the original rulebook was pretty big at 24 pages. If you added all the rulebooks from the expansions to it, the original rulebook would be 56 pages! Wow! Add to that the rumors that there is another expansion due out at the end of the year, oh boy!

Admittedly, you don’t have to play with all the expansions at once, as a matter of fact they are all designed to be playable without having the other expansions. But these are very long games and when you do have time to sit down and play them you just can’t sway the feeling that you want to use everything. I know that I am not the only person feeling overwhelmed, there is a forum on Boardgamegeek.com were fans of the game are discussing the rumored expansion and how they propose handling this now massive game. Here is a link to that discussion; http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/322334

You know, I do believe that variety is the spice of life, and it really is great that these games have so much of that variety, but how much is too much?