Either a measure of how out of the loop I am or the constant torrent

Zee Garcia just put up one of his top 10 lists; this one about which games most need expansions.



I had heard of exactly two of these: the Cthulhu version of Pandemic (which kinda made me ill at the thought of it) and Horrified. I have no idea what the rest of them are. One of his parameters was that the release date of the games on his list had to have a release date of 2019 at the latest, so it's not like it was stuff released yesterday. I guess this is why I mostly write about games released decades ago...

I have only heard of HORRIFIED.

While I've heard of most of them, I only have played two of them (which I still own).

Libertalia is a fantastic game of double-think and simultaneous action selection with a bunch of unique characters/powers. My only gripe is that order is pseudo-randomly determined based on your player color, and certain cards have order that's way more important then others. When I play it again, I'm gonna randomize it, instead. Regardless, if you have a chance to play it, especially at the higher player counts, I recommend it (even though I always lose).

Samurai Spirit is an OK coop game based on the Seven Samurai, though it can be a bit fragile on your first couple of plays. One character can take himself out of the game early if he exercises his special powers, and then be forced to sit around watching others play. To be fair, that's usually not the best way to play, as you can instead share your power with others.

But yeah, there are a ton of games out there it's hard to keep up even with the titles.

I suppose that's the great thing about Youtube, you can create a video called '10 games no one has heard of that I think need an expansion' ... OK, I have heard of (actually played once) Pandemic Cthulu.

It’s not you it’s the market. There are so many more games released each year you just can’t know all of them.

I confess to not actually watching the video and just skipping ahead to the moment where he mentioned the games, mostly because I wanted to see if I knew of any of them. And I kinda knew it was mostly the market, since there's almost no way to keep up with everything getting spewed out. But cdennett had heard of most of them, which is impressive enough to me. Basically the place I hear about new stuff is this place and it's been that way for years. I remember when people started talking about The Others when the KS campaign had started and I made a joke about Greed and Gluttony being the stretch goals. Two years later, I had forgotten all about it and read something somewhere about Eric Lang (who had remained a favorite from CitOW) which mentioned The Others, so I came here and asked about it because I honestly didn't remember what it was. I eventually picked up the whole game by trade or sale because I really liked it, but I went searching back through the forum a while later and found myself talking about a game that I basically forgot even existed a couple years later.

That's why I've pretty much restricted myself to particular designers and/or studios (Eric Lang, Jim Felli, Leder and Wehrle, Portal, Gamelyn, Prospero Hall) and nothing else unless I read about it here from one of the reviewers. I just can't keep up with the rest of it and really don't have the $ to be haunting Kickstarter, anyway.

Jackwraith wrote: I had heard of exactly two of these: the Cthulhu version of Pandemic (which kinda made me ill at the thought of it) and Horrified. I have no idea what the rest of them are.

Same here. Horrified has gotten some positive comments here. I played the Cthulhu Pandemic one in 2019 and found it just as meh as vanilla Pandemic. It's like a simplified Arkham Horror with most of the semblance of a narrative stripped out.

Libertalia is a great game for families. We have played it not very often but regularly since it came out.
Yes, if you learn the order you can break it and it is too mean and thinky for a typical family game, but I totally agree one should try it given the chance.

Libertalia was fun but it also felt much more complex than Citadels for being so close to Citadels.

Gotta admit Citadels never grabbed me. It's been almost 20 years but I remember thinking 'why is this so long?' every time.

I’ll tell you what though — there is much more focus on a much smaller set of games than there has been in years, because they’re the only ones available on one of the online play sites. These days that’s the venue for perhaps 90% of all playtime, and I’d wager 100 titles are soaking up the majority of that.

I’d imagine the Dice Tower team are still playing half a dozen new games a week in cardboard, just as standard operating procedure.

Sagrilarus wrote: I’ll tell you what though — there is much more focus on a much smaller set of games than there has been in years, because they’re the only ones available on one of the online play sites. These days that’s the venue for perhaps 90% of all playtime, and I’d wager 100 titles are soaking up the majority of that.

I’d imagine the Dice Tower team are still playing half a dozen new games a week in cardboard, just as standard operating procedure.

By all accounts board game sales overall are very healthy, yet obviously FtF playing opportunities are severely down from the usual . I gotta imagine some companies may be sitting on releases a bit til things open back up again, akin to Hollywood studios delaying the release of blockbuster movies til theaters reopen fully.

Witch of Salem?!?!? LOL nobody gives a shit about that game anymore! It was hailed at the time as a “Euro Arkham Horror”. It was not.

I feel out of the loop all the time...I see this stuff come through on the TL and I’m like WTF is this...I’m seeing some buzz for Cryo and I have no idea what it is. I didn’t realize there were so many of those Garphill games, I though they were al just Raiders of the North Sea expansions.

I realized the other day that I’ve really been out of the loop for a long time. I’ve never played Great Western Legends of the Trail (?), Gaia Project, any Vital Lacerda designs...I haven’t even played Wingspan. There’s an entire generation of CMON games I’ve never played...but then again, neither has anyone else. Then there’s Splendor Marvel, Love Letter Batman, Game of Thrones Ticket to Ride and all of the Munchkined stuff out there I’ve never touched. Or even seen in person.

There’s so, so much cruft out there...so many also-rans and runners-up. The games listed here aren’t getting expansions because a) they are left behind cruft and b) not every game needs a fucking expansion.

There's also good stuff you haven't played, but that's OK too.