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General / Re: Why endless expansions? Playing the Original - An opinion
« on: January 04, 2021, 03:29:08 PM »Agree all around. For several years I kept buying Catan expansions and even those could not quite defeat the grind and predictability of the game. Nothing really ever stopped runaway winners.
We only have base game Catan and I am not sure if we will ever play it again. The game is fairly easy to predict the winner based on the starting positions of every player.
Expansions that are just more of the same get old really fast. I guess there is a sweet spot where an expansion has to change enough to justify its existence, but not change too much so that the game isn't recognizable anymore.
My favourite types of expansions are ones that build off the core mechanics but in interesting ways.
Highlighting these excerpts with my dual-response-- I feel the same way as you both.
Sometimes games are designed with "win more" cards, situations, abilities, tokens, etc-- where if a player is winning, they just win more. And continue winning. In those games, it's very frustrating from a competitive standpoint to not have catch-up or resetting mechanics. From a casual gaming standpoint (and from a game design philosophy standpoint, I'd argue) it is simply un-fun if in an average, typical given game, there is a player that is able to run up the score after pulling ahead by a sufficient margin. Of course, I'm not advocating against the possibility for a game to experience an incredible player turn that results from random incredible draw (luck) or by leveraging risk/odds and hitting the payout (also luck)-- that can be exciting if it is both rare and feels organic. In games that aren't like Connect-Four or Go, there ought to be room for some version of that.
While players can sometimes develop strategies that weren't foreseen by the game's designers (particularly given a high enough complexity level), the baseline progression of a game should not have runaway winners be the regular occurrence. I feel that happens too regularly with some of games, whether it be Catan or even Monopoly (although for the latter, that was sort of intended by the original creator!)
One of the reasons I enjoy Carcassonne as much as I do is that early runaway winners are not the typical experience.
To the second point you both make: I couldn't agree more. For me, good expansions preserve both the spirit and core mechanics to a large degree, but contain additions are both compelling and interesting, adding their new smaller mechanics in meaningful ways.
If I were to be argumentative about it, I'd say that if an expansion fails to do that, changes the base game not just significantly but unrecognizably so in gameplay, or adds a mechanic that is drastically out of touch, then it is either a bad expansion or should be considered a different game.
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