Fixing Games you Didn't Know were Broken | Meta Game Minute

Sometimes you really like a game but sneakily there are some things that could be better. And you cruise along then one day an expansion arrives for this game and it "completes" or fixes a bunch of things you didn't notice in the first place but now are grateful to have! For me, A Feast for Odin and Wingspan fit this category and they have both been taken from great to greaterest with the aid of expansions! What are some games that got "fixed" for you?

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[Mentat]

Terraforming Mars without Prelude comes to mind.

[dankelly]

Champions of Midgard with Valhalla and Terraforming Mars with Prelude.

[pandaparadise]

Quacks of Quedlinburg is a family favorite in this house. We already loved it, but the upgraded chips from the BGG store and The Herb Witches expansion take the game to a whole other level.

[Ronindennis]

What comes to mind... Architects of the West Kingdom with Artisans, Anachrony with Fractures of Time (awesome upgrade for the solo bot, 5th faction, new modules), and Raiders of the North with both expansions.

[cashliam]

Trade expansion for Orléans. New event tiles, new trade board and contract cards...chef’s kiss

[petergross]

I am surprised you didn't bring up Tuscany expansion as a essential expansion for Viticulture.

I think the Upstairs Downstairs expansion for Obsession takes a good game and makes it great. It mitigated the random feeling from the original game, added a lot more strategy to the game with new worker servants, I would never play just the base game again.

[islausvakangas]

These expansions don't really fix the game in any way for say, but they bring the hours of interesting gameplay up to another order of magnitude: Root and Escape the Dark Castle, both deserve any and all of the expansions. The variation of combinations just brings out so much more out of even the base game, especially with Root. In Root the expansions don't make the game more complicated or longer, they just add new factions as options, and the dynamic between those and the base game factions makes everything work in a whole new way. One of my favourite games ever, couldn't imagine going back to the base game.

[FuzzyLogic]

Teotihuacan did this for me, the grids for construction and decoration really kicked an already great game up a notch. Never played AFfO before the expansion but can imagine a similar feeling.

[RenzoSG]

Concordia with Salsa expansion, Raiders of the North Sea with both expansions, Flashpoint with Tragic Events expansion, Castle Panic with the Wizard's Tower expansion, and Viticulture with Tuscany Essential Edition

[johnathanrhoades]

Food chain magnate with the Ketchup expansion milestones. I will never go back to the original milestones.

[hendrikrasmus]

Stonemaier is known for having post release balance fixing, where the pattern is that people who play a lot of the game notice a problem or in tapestry they just collected a huge amount of player data. However I don't play the same game enough to see the problems so I am happy until the fix.

[namelessfire]

I had some gripes with Wingspan when it came out, basically all of it had to do with excessive randomness and lack of interaction. Oceania fixed all of it:

- Eggs are no longer OP
- Bird feeder screw (the addition of nectar on dice and the ability to re-roll the feeder)
- Card display screw (the ability to re-roll the display and more birds are valuable because eggs are no longer OP)
- Opening hand screw and slow starts (the extra starting nectar makes more birds viable in your opening hand and kick-starts your engine)
- Lack of player interaction/complete disinterest in the other players boards (nectar combined with the already established end-of-round goals makes me look over at other players’s boards more often)

I cannot tell you how much hate I got by pointing out these imperfections. I was told the game would become too loose, too samey, too fiddly, and too long with my proposed fixes. I was told that the fun of Wingspan is getting stuck with non-synergistic birds, goals, and objectives and figuring out how to deal with them even while your opponents blaze past you simply through virtue of their opening hand. I was told I needed to play the game more and that I wasn’t good enough, despite 50+ plays and an average score of 112. I was told the game was perfect as is and as the infallible designer intended.

Then, the Oceania expansion came out and literally fixed all of it; and Wingspan is a much better game for it. It jumped from a 5 to a 9 for me and I’m thrilled it’s finally stepped it up. I can’t wait to see what it has in store for the future.

[MauricioHoffman]

“Stockpile” without the “continuing corruption” expansion was good, but I wont ever play without it again. The dice mechanism is soooo good.

[valerieglee]

Roll Player expansions!!!! And Everdell with Spirecrest!! Loved the games before but dont think I would play them on their own again! Great topic!

[Amuny]

Two of my very favorite games of all time;
Star Wars: Rebellion. Rise of the Empire completely fix the only weakness of the og game; combat.
Spirit Island. Both expansions made the game just exponentially better.

[juddpth]

it's interesting that these examples are generally really popular games. I wonder if these games are just being played A LOT and these slight imperfections are being discovered because tons of people are playing them

[NathanWells]

Xia with Embers of a Forsaken Star takes a really good sandbox game with several dominant strategies (run around and get exploration tokens, which are always a good thing, ship cargo between two nearby planets, etc), and mitigates those dominant strategies while still keeping them viable (exploration tokens have a chance of damaging you, the addition of an economy board makes frequently-traded goods less valuable).

[evannadeau]

Damn I was on the fence about Oceana expansion and now I want it. Norwegians too cuz I’m def like “Sheds whatever animals whatever..pillage pillage pillage”

[marktibbs]

7 Wonders, I wouldn't play now without the Leaders expansion. So much so, that I forget that it is an expansion and not part of the base game!

[Kiristo]

Getting Iceland and plundering all game were a 100% win rate for us (at 2p) in AFFO. So, it quickly came down to whoever went first would win every time, and thus it stopped getting played. Getting the Norwegians expansion opened the game back up for us. Definitely recommend it.