Happy Sunday!
Sometimes 1 expansion is too many and in other cases every expansion is barely enough! Using Zombicide for an example, the expansions are all different and yet very similar. In a lot of case the difference is the miniatures.
By contrast when GW released Warhammer Quest Blackstone Fortress, the best expansion looked like the worst. 3 standard plastic plague marines (definitely not new or unique sculpts) had the best rules and scenarios. At a glance it was horrible value, ($90 Oz) but ended up my favourite.
KS expansions are the worst. I’ve bought so many games with all the extras that I’ve never used. It’s almost criminal.

It’s the XLBS Show……….Happy Sunday Fellow CoGs!

So……@warzan if you’re cutting out gluten in bread, (124,000 parts per million (ppm) then you must be cutting out Beer as well, (20 parts per million), it adds up! I’ve seen folks at the Coffee Shop freak out over less. I on the other hand have recently started baking fresh bread from scratch. This week I’m making Irish Soda Bread for the 17th!

I stopped keeping things in boxes unopened a decade ago. If I’m buying it I’m playing with it or using it, whatever it is.

I stopped playing Dreadball when things expanded soooooo much.

I stopped playing MTG at the end of the Beta days. I saw the writing on the wall, it’s just cardboard crack. Keep buying or you’ll never be even close to competitive.

Back in the day, Star Fleet Battles went crazy with more and more rules. I think I remember stacking up the books in three-ring binders and it was at least two feet tall.

What we are really talking about here is the cause and effect of a monetarily successful business model versus a business model based on building a great game, (but probably going broke or never making enough to join the country club).

I think @brennon is right in pointing out McCullough’s approach and success. We need more McCulloughs. But if we want our hobby to grow we’ll have to put up with the ‘Money Chasers’ creating expansion after expansion, and cheer on the McCulloughs that sneak in and stir the waters.

YMMV

Happy Sunday all, except for @ben. Fuck @ben, he knows what he did.
oh and lets all watch the greatest movie ever made.

Happy Sunday everyone. Yeah, I agree with the sentiment w.r.t. expansions. Excellent points made. The Oathmark problem with expansions is why I have not jumped into it.

The problem of impenetrability, is also why I stop playing Warmahordes. I began with 1st ed., but when I tried to get in with 3rd it seemed like a 10m polished wall to climb.

Richmond’s are my favourite sausages.

On less important matters… The other challenge with expansions is that players can often come to the table effectively playing different versions of a game. Unless you have the Ben-happy-commune approach, you kind of feel compelled to keep up with every development in any game you play, as the only consistent version of it (when you play with others) is the most up to date, comprehensive version. So if you play any of the big-company high release velocity games, you push out room for too many other games in your life. We should call them cuckoo games!

I’m finding enthusiasm to be a finite commodity. Too much is definitely draining on the enthusiasm, regardless of its source. Films, tv, board games, books, video games, toys in general and definitely wargames.

I have restricted myself to 2 games, dungeon saga and warhammer(using lord of the rings miniatures). Even that is proving too much for me, I have yet to play 3 of the expansions to dungeon saga. And my warhammer project is monstrous. Both these projects are now in their 3rd year and I’m nowhere near having fully explored it.

Personal temperament must have a lot to do with it, do you need new to not be bored? I don’t, I like depth and variation in one place and to muck around with it in lots of different ways. It’s also cheaper that way!

I’d be interested to know how many of our community has completed a system. Say done alllll the heroquest. Or done all the dungeon saga etc.

@warzan nice hat, you need a newer looking OTT hat as well

I can’t believe all this sausage talk. Its genuinely the worse thing I’ve heard you guys say. My wife is Irish and she agrees with me that Irish sausages are the worse. Your just not getting the right English sausage. Never get the shite ones. What’s wrong with a good Cumberland. Get some one proper English meat in you

Good afternoon all. With Prof @avernos and his merry tutees for company, I’m continuing to paint up some Tommies from Anvil Industries for World War Weird, inspired by Gloom Trench 1926 from @fickledicegames. Results to be posted in my “other” non-fantasy workbench blog later this week. 🤔🤗As I try to resist FOMO so I also try to resist expansions, knowing full well that if they are GW limited release, the scalpers will always get there first and over inflate the value on eBay, etc. 😞

Happy Sunday OTTer COGz

Fizz drinks may be worth cutting out as well @warzan

Gerry’s loft as see at the end of Indiana Jones?

Think like general Hage during WWI about the game figures die, die, an die, again.

Happy Sunday.
There are some good English meaty textured sausages out there, Tesco’s finest is my go to (Cumberland).

Something I realised a few years ago is how refreshing only getting the one book for a games system can be. As long as that book covers all of the main stuff it can feel pretty liberating not having to hunt through umpteen different books for something. That’s why I really like the Osprey blue book games. One book, one game.
Also you can fit more games on your shelves rather than having just one game taking up all of the space, just like my Frostgrave collection.

Also a big problem with 40k that really started with 8th was not just paid for add-ons, the all of the errata and faqs that were released, and sometimes you needed more that just the one. It’s a nightmare keeping track of it all.

@Ben is the new Adrian Mole?

Game creep is real the problem its not only with the industry but with us. We want a universe that’s expansive and simple. We want Cheap yet detailed. We love a spectacle that can be accomplished in a day. We want things to last forever yet are mass produced.

For me I want individual sculpts in rank and file…

The more companies try and please everyone the more they will get it wrong. It’s think it would be best for them to grow some balls and chose a hill to die on (not saying they cant pivot at a point). This would give us a real choice within genres But that’s not how businesses work. They want the largest consumer base to reduce the risk. And a risk averse business is one that will last.

This is why we get so many movies with sequels and prequels. The hard part is getting the consumer into the universe, theme, style or narrative. To equate this to eating. You start with a nice steak popes eye in this example, well cooked to your liking. When your mouth is open it’s easier to shovel some shit in as you now trust it like a chip steak. You trust the initial experience and base your purchasing decisions around it. How do you make that shit steak better, well you withheld a feature like batter and chip shop chips to make it more palatable.

That’s what happens with these games. They with hold something you want to make the shit you are about to consume more palatable.

Sales and marketing (and so many other things) play on human nature. In essence we are all sheeple and fall into these traps over and over again as it’s our nature to do so. Sadly by doing so we are doomed to have this cycle until the market is more disrupted than it has ever been since it’s conception, then we will have a few good years and get back to the above yet again.

Happy Sunday

00:00 A bit more enthusiasm Ben!
00:30 Happy Holidays!
01:00 Huzza!
02:35 Painkiller… cue Judas Priest!
04:20 Whoa John…. what a burn XD
05:30 Sausages in the hot tub… thank the maker this is only available to subscribers XD
09:30 Threw away? Didn’t she gift it to your cousins?
11:00 The James May story gives me cringy goosebumps… I know he’s right… but still…
14:00 GW will stock stuff again? Weird concept.
14:45 You git!
15:00 Golden Buttons! HAH!
16:00 Soapy infinity.
20:15 40k simple? That goes waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back
23:00 @Warbossd does paint them on his live stream over at YouTube… it’s a good laugh on Thursdays.
26:00 Dackel… the Wurst-Hund
28:00 See, told you. YouTube
30:00 Crabs…. now I crave seafood…
31:00 Holy shitballs! That is colossal! 😉
37:30 Dino Wars?
39:30 “Stop buying expansions”? What dark witchery is this? Have you tried discussion this with MTG players?
46:00 Make AAAALLLL the money…
47:00 “Mantic got too greedy… they dug too deep… they’ve awakened the feature creep”
51:45 Deluxe editions are only for collectors…
52:15 I feel there should be a rule in place: every time someone gets Grognardy they need to drink a Grog (Grog is an alcoholic hot drink made from rum, sugar and hot water. In numerous variations, arrack, brandy, whiskey, red wine or tequila are also used instead of rum. )
56:00 MtG is I think a complete hobby in it self and is completely disconnected from everything else.
1:05:00 VAR…. did I miss something? what’s VAR?
1:10:00 I’m not sending you any sausages you lot… German Wurst is best Wurst!
1:11:00 absolutely with you on that @warzan

Now my coffee is empty.

Great show guy’s the world is run by lunatic idiots for lunatic idiots.

Expansions in Tabletop wargaming seem to have gone the way of DLC in computer gaming at times.
There are occasionally blatantly rules left out that players would want in the core rules to play the game. (e.g. Necromunda leaving out rules for playing with terrain of different heights was kept back for a supliment when this was a key element of the first edition it was emulating.)
And there are sometimes rules or factions that are left out cynically where most players would assume would be in the core game. (e.g. Saga First Edition had only Anglo-Danish, Vikings, Welsh and Normans in the core book, where almost every player I spoke to felt they need to get the supliment that with Anglo-Saxons in, as they were one of the biggest factions in the conflicts of the era.)
There have been controversy over “pay to win” elements in computer games that have effected ongoing sales for some developers. But there are elements of tabletop gaming where to play a game competitively on a tournament level you need to buy certain expansions. (e.g. Star Wars X-Wing selling you certain models that would not be good enough to make a competitive tourney list, but the generic card in the accompanying playing cards can be assigned to any vehicle and it offers a must-have bonus that all the top players were taking in their lists.)
This is a hobby, the developers need our money to keep afloat and keep making content that we like. Occasionally we forgive a company for leaving key parts to be shared in expansions, but sometimes we don’t. I guess it’s the way a company communicates and treats their fan base that makes the difference. E.g. If anyone had an gripes about living exclusively on Kickstarter and fears that certain KS exclusives would make a two tier experience… Mantic gave away solo play rules for some systems during lockdown and have free rules downloads (without the fluff) to encourage more players to play their games.
Frequency of expansions has ruined my time with Warhammer Underworlds. I couldn’t keep up with releases and each step of the game, Shadespire, Nightvault Direchasm, Beastgrave etc. improved the winning potential of the new warbands over the old even though they were nominally compatible with the last step officially.
But then I look at Frostgrave and Shadow Deep where there are several books I don’t have but I am never left feeling that I have fallen behind, because the basic game remained the same and I was only perhaps missing out on a playing experience rather and missing out on vital rules to progress the story and level of my wizard. Even when there was a 2nd edition the old expansion books were considered and still “backward compatible” with some tweaks to meet the list building and spell changes of the new edition.

@brennon BEN FU*KING GETS GIFTMAS!!! *slumps in elation as the world seems right in all its manifestations*

HAPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPY SUNDAY…..LOTR THE CARD GAME, like you say as loads of expansions, but me being a donut jut bought the ones i likes it didn’t even cross my mind about the cards to boost my deck, just shows i aint that hot at deck building but just enjoy the game.

I think I saw that James May episode … and yes. He was perfectly on point.
These things are toys.
They are meant to be played with.

In the season 5 episode “The Transporter Malfunction” of the Big Bang Theory, Penny gets Sheldon and Leonard mint in box Star Trek toys, but Sheldon breaks his after being advised to play with it by a talking Spock action figure (voiced by Leonard Nimoy himself).

I’d say that the one reason I don’t always unbox the stuff I get from Kickstarters is more “how do I get it back into the box” and less “I may sell it later”. IT’s why I dislike Kickstarter exclusives. These things are meant to be seen and played by everyone, not stuck inside a box.

I stopped playing 40k after an Apocalypse game with a friend…the game dragged on forever and most of our time was spent looking through books to clarify rules. After that I decided that was the nail in the coffin. It wasn’t a fun game and my friend was of the same opinion.

The one area you didn’t touch on was RPGs…expansions for some systems are absolute garbage. You only have to look back at TSR when they ran D&D. There were many expansions that were bad.

Thanks a million for the Golden Button.

Gerry has the eyes of a hawk for spotting that Velociraptor I put in with my tray of Plebeians.
I think I have have to spruce up the sun shade a little as its a bit saggy in some areas.

I went all in for all the expansions for the first 3 seasons of Zombicide and it was probably one of my worst decisions.
With Zombicide as a base game with no expansions there comes a time when Zombies get extra activations due to the fact that there are no available zombies to put on the board. Adding hundreds of extra zombies to those that are available completely destroyed that part of the game for me. in essence I think all the expansions actually made the game too easy to win at.
Then of course with all those expansions storage became an issue. I ended up with my game split over several boxes but essentially all the expansions had been mixed with the base game. eventually the whole thing just got too big and was really off putting to even consider setting up so was left un-played for years.

Recently I got the game out to see if our kids would enjoy it. I toom one look in the box and decided it was just in the too hard basket. Way to labour intensive to even consider setting up. Figures upon figures and more characters than you can wave a stick at.
I ended up just selling the whole lot for next to nothing, and don’t regret doing so in the slightest.

I like my expansions to add extra scenarios with minimal extra physical content. Ideally I like to keep my games with their expansions in one box. Games like 7th Continent where you can add all the expansions to the base game and you would never know they were there unless you specifically chose to do one of those scenarios.

Other then that, I don’t mind expansions that turn a 4 player game into a 5 player game. beyond that I would rather a game was able to stand on its own two feet than rely on extra content to draw you in. Something that CMON seems to do in spades with its kickstarters.

Damn you Free! You’ve leaked my genius twist. To give you a clue you don’t get familiars very often in Frostgrave but warbands can easily take warhounds…hmmm.
Alternative monsters is also total genius but you’ll still get no credit when I steal that idea. ;~]