Finding the sweet spot for board game expansions

When are expansions essential, and when are they unnecessary? What's the sweet spot?

When I first started really getting into board games, there was nothing more exciting than an expansion. Whether it was another set of Carcassonne tiles and rules (Wrede, 2000), a bigger change like CATAN: Cities & Knights (Teuber, 2008), or another set of radical alien powers in Cosmic Encounter (Eberle, Kittredge, Norton, Olotka, and Wilson, 1977/2008 latest ed.), getting my hands on another expansion felt like I was unlocking something in my collection.

The appeal was fairly obvious, but in retrospect, I suspect I fell into a classic trap. I was excited to get more life out of my games, but like so many gamers before and after me, I didn’t need to get more life out of my games — not for the most part, at least. I was instead excited to explore more in the games I was playing, and that remains true to this day. Of course, there’s a substantial change from my earlier days of board games and today, and it’s largely my own doing: There are just so many games to play, I rarely found myself playing with an expansion. Often it was because I was teaching somebody a game for a first time, or maybe I’d not played it for a significant time, and I just wasn’t ready for an expansion. Those are usually the best cases; there are plenty of games for which expansions add no real value, and there are more still where expansions make them worse.

I won’t be talking much about the expansions that make games worse, though I know some exist and have experienced them. It’s not that I have a policy of not talking about games I don’t have time for, but honestly, this is a wholly recreational newsletter, and talking deeply about games I don’t like just doesn’t sound like a great use of my spare time. I will, however, talk about some expansions that I really enjoy, as well as some expansions I’ve played recently.

Before we get to that point, I’ll talk about some trends I’ve seen with expansions, because I do think there’s something interesting happening there. For some time, and still today, publishers will offer up an expansion with their game in a crowdfunding campaign, perhaps as a stretch goal. At its worst, this is an attempt to eke out more life from the campaign, and it’s sometimes made possible because a publisher has extracted content from the base game. That’s not a hard and fast rule, but it’s one I’ve seen over and over, especially with miniature-based games. (In those cases, the expansions are just a mechanism to deliver more miniatures to the buyer.)

At its best, there’s some genuine fun to be had here. Few publishers have done this as well as Allplay, whose games typically come with a small expansion as a backing incentive. The mechanism is similar, but there’s no surprise expansion; no content is unlocked by the performance of the campaign. If the game has an expansion, you’ll know about it. While I do have some fundamental concerns about this approach, which I’ll try to at least discuss, Allplay’s expansions have born out well for me. Particular highlights have included Oddland (Schumacher, 2025) and its accompanying expansion, The Big and the Bold, and River Valley Glassworks (Hill, Pinchback and Riddle, 2024) and River Glass and Other Sundries. In both cases, the expansions offered something more, but they also offered something different. Importantly, they also offer something small.

I expressed some concern with the offering of expansions before the game’s release. How do you know what a game needs in an expansion before it’s even been widely played? That’s long been my opinion, but I think it’s one I formed with an eye toward those big-box Kickstarter games more than anything. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I see the reasoning. Designers are constantly trimming interesting, effective ideas from their games in an effort to see publication. Of course, great designers also trim out uninteresting, bad ideas, but the fact remains that great designers have great ideas that just don’t see the light of day. If an expansion exists as a method to unleash those ideas, perhaps there’s plenty of value after all. I still wonder how often I play with expansions. It’s a real blindspot in my statistical understanding of my game-playing. I think I need to improve there.

Xylotar | Photo by Matt Montgomery

I just received a review copy of the Xylotar (Wray, 2024) expansion set Xylotar: Unhinged (2025), which adds two small additions to the game. One of the two, Bonus Beats, adds two powerful single-use cards to your arsenal. Some manipulate your bid, giving you flexibility or more points. Some capitalize on other players missing bids. Some will replace your cards, giving you an unexpected high-value card. The other, Off-Key Cards, adds cards that are ranked 1/2 above another value — and if you win those cards, you’ll lose points at the end of the round. These are great examples of expansions that don’t make radical changes to the game — they instead offer a bit of variety and make the game a bit more wild. That chaos is perfect for an expansion.

Another expansion that offers some significant optional chaos is Sky Team: Turbulence (Rémond, 2024), which adds some variety to one of my favorite recent games. Now the top-ranked family game on BGG, Sky Team (2023) is a modular game that’s perfectly geared for expansions. It’s a game that doesn’t expressly need more content — let alone more chaotic, more difficult content. But as I play through the expansion content on Board Game Arena, I’ve found it just as engaging and exciting as the original. The expansion makes the whole of the game better.

It all makes me wonder: What’s the right size for an expansion? Are smaller, more modular expansions just my preference, or is there something about the scope that just feels right? When is an expansion too small? Are purely cosmetic upgrades ‘expansions,’ ‘upgrades,’ or something else? I’ve left you — and myself — with more questions than answers, I fear.

I think this is something I’ll need to revisit.

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I hope it’s been a good week — we’ve had family visiting, and it’s been a great time. We played some fun games, too, with a special focus on Hot Streak (Perry, 2025) — it’s proving to be a great family game. Any big gaming plans for you this summer?