You’ve done it – read the rules, slapped the cardboard on the table, taught your group, and played night in and night out for weeks. The game remains great, but the strategies are settling in, the motions are feeling a little stale, and Bobby’s winning every time. You need to shake things up – you could get a new game and start the journey all over again, but then you notice a familiar logo, a smaller box, and an appealing price tag.
The hallowed expansion – often arriving a year or so out from a game’s release (and, these days, usually accompanying a reprint crowdfunding campaign to ensure plenty of stock) is the antidote to favorite game malaise. Below, we’ll take a look at several hit game expansions that’ve released in recent months, all of which bring new life to their parent titles, promising to keep a fond favorite fresh for years to come.
Distilled: Cask Strength and Cocktails
Distilled, the distillery-management euro, poured its way onto our tables in 2023 with an enticing combination of resource management and push-your-luck. Putting a slew of ingredients into your personal supply and hoping to draw the right combination is a neat exercise in odds control and strategy. You could play fast-and-loose, brewing whatever you wound up with, spending your turns and money upgrading your facilities instead, or try to grab ingredients and slant the odds in favor of a particularly brilliant brew. It’s a solid mid-weight euro with a cracking theme, with enough random elements to the setup and play that you won’t find yourself repeating the same steps.
The game’s first expansion, Distilled: Cask Strength, a mini one containing 55 extra cards, is a perfect example of what a mini-expansion should do. It buffs
premium ingredients with unique abilities, adds some extra upgrades, and throws in a dynamic market to add some, er, dynamism to the economic side of the game (certain ingredients will be cheaper/more expensive every round). It’s cheap, rules-light, and injects variety without diluting the game’s focus – you’re still making drinks, folks.
An Africa and Middle-East expansion came next, striking the middle-ground between Distilled’s next and Cask Strength. Small box, a card surfeit to add a fresh thematic dimension to the game. This hits the zone we talked about in prior expansion articles – even more than Cask Strength, Africa is dedicated to bolstering options rather than adding on new mechanics. An easy add, even from the first play.
This year, Distilled: Cocktails will mark a big-box expansion for Distilled, bringing a far larger suite of enhancements to the core game. A 2nd washback lets you brew more concoctions, while collectors add end-game scoring bonuses if you can craft enticing-enough cocktails. There’s plenty more here too, but it’s all modular, letting your group tack on new elements as desired, keeping rules overhead minimal and fun, well, maximal?
If Cocktails strikes your fancy, you can pre-order it now and ensure you’ll have a copy when it arrives this year.
Shackleton Base: Below. Within. Above
Coming out in 2024, Shackleton Base threw players into a mid-weight competition to make the best moon base, all while being sponsored by various Earth corporations and space agencies. By drafting shuttles and their accompanying astronauts, deploying those same space-walkers to gather resources and build structures, and scoring the points earned by your stellar exploits, Shackleton Base hits a compelling mix of theme and efficiency, where well-planned play comes out ahead.
Shackleton’s expansion, Below. Within. Above. sticks to the script, adding more variety and clever mechanics, like the ability for players to risk digging underground for more building space at the cost of instability. India enters the space agency fray. It’s not changing your game much, but there’s no need to: Shackleton Base is a premium experience for euro players that dislike negative interaction, and its expansion is an easy recommend if you have this one in your collection.
SETI: Space Agencies
SETI, at the upper edge of the mid-weight euro spectrum, is all about finding those aliens. A beautiful game, you’ll essentially operate in two theaters: the outer space hunt for extraterrestrials, and the more earthly pursuit of better technology. You’ll perform actions over five rounds, eventually passing when your resources are exhausted. If your probes or insightful analysis of interstellar signals prompts a discovery of an alien species (1 of 5 in the base game), they’ll appear on the board, altering play and offering bonuses. It’s a neat mid-game shift that shakes up plans and keeps play from feeling rote.
SETI’s expansion, Space Agencies, does everything it can to make things spicier. First and foremost, asymmetric corporations are thrown in the mix, meaning players no longer start with the same setups. You’ll have unique abilities and new potential paths to victory. You’ll get on those paths faster too, as optional quick-start cards effectively skip the slower opening round, sending organizations on more distinct paths while speeding up the game. Which means you’ll encounter one of the three new alien species faster, and thus hit the game’s sweet spot while shortening the several hour play time. It’s an ideal expansion for SETI vets – remixing the start and adding just enough unpredictability to the late game to keep everyone coming back for more.
Galactic Cruise: Accommodations / Advancements
In a list I’m realizing is very space-heavy, last year’s Galactic Cruise is taking a different approach with its expansions, somewhere in between Distilled’s mini expansions and the other big-box versions. Accommodations and Advancements (and the forthcoming Achievements – it’s all A’s here) are all modular updates designed to be mixed and matched to create your ideal version of the Lacerda-like action-chaining euro. Some of the modules are bigger – Accommodations’ cabin-matching module replaces all the base-game blueprints with ones putting the cabin in one of three sections, which must match with the next level of the ship, making construction a more interesting mini-game.
Because Galactic Cruise, with a cohort of experienced players, is a fast and fun game, all these modules are a great way to tweak the parts of play that are least interesting (or that become the most predictable). That said, the small size of these expansions coincides with slimmer print runs – I’d recommend keeping them on your want list, picking the right time when your group’s ready to play Galactic Cruise enough to justify the expense.
Nucleum and Barrage
Nucleum and Barrage, two heavy euros with an interactive, cutthroat emphasis, are a fascinating expansion case study. Despite coming from different publishers,
both have a bevy of expansions, crowd-funded editions, and more over their years in the wild. These include numerous promo packs that find their way to conventions, big-box content with new maps and the like, and mini-expansions that toss in bonus modules or extra asymmetry. What they really represent, though, is a living board game, where your favorite title is constantly getting new content, almost like a video game.
From a certain point of view (#obiwan), war gaming has long adopted this, with rule sets forming the base for an ever-expanding library of titles. CATAN and rail games like Railways of the World and Age of Steam come pretty close, but Nucleum and Barrage are excellent hobbyist titles pursuing the same end – a game you can learn, introduce to your group, and come back to time and time again with new ways to play. If your group prefers sticking with a title for a long time to really master it, then I’d recommend both Nucleum and Barrage as great options that’ll never grow stale.
Inis: Nemed
Now this is a prickly one – 2016’s Inis is a classic area-control and card-drafting medley raised above the sum of its compelling parts by gorgeous artwork and 
production design. Its first expansion, Seasons, came in 2019 and added a fifth player option. Adding in an extra player is a frequent expansion target, and worthwhile once your group knows the game and plays with enough speed that an extra player won’t ruin the pace. All good, then.
It’s the second expansion, Nemed, coming this year that sparks a curious expansion dilemma. See, Inis had a change in publisher, and in the crowdfunding campaign that brought forth Nemed, the production changed. The new art style is still gorgeous, but the new Nemed doesn’t fit with the original Inis. Card backs, physical sizes, it’s all different.
Unless you look for the specific Legacy Edition of the Nemed expansion. That’s designed to support Inis’s first and second editions, so if you’re a grizzled Inis vet, that’s the one you want. Otherwise, if you’re new to this fantastic game, keep the Legendary Edition or the forthcoming new Inis version on your Want List.
Why highlight this?
Because Nemed has some great things for Inis players – more epic tales, new sacred sites, and plenty more. But our hobby is often mercurial. Publishers change, designs are updated. When expansions arrive, especially for games more than a few years old, it’s worth doing a little research to make sure everything lines up.
If not, and as a coda to this piece, consider solid color sleeves to nullify different card backs. Check B oard Game Geek and other forums for info, as some publishers will put out print-and-play files with legacy-friendly components. And, lastly, consider either selling or gifting your older copy to make room for the new one, or seeing if a friend might be interested in acquiring the new edition. None of these are perfect solutions, but they are solutions, and they will get a great game to the table.
Which is, after all, why we’re here.
