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

Another symptom of the deluge is that I’ll see pictures of huge piles of games for sale on Facebook, and most and in some cases all of them are stuff I’ve never even heard of.

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

Absolutely true! I never played Nusfjord and I love it. Always a delight to find something good you missed.

The weirdest thing is that there's one game in there that you don't know about that everyone else thinks is average that is going to personally blow your mind. But finding that one is really difficult; requires reviewers or influencers you really trust, who see a lot of games.

This is the point where i hug my power grid box and the box of all the expansion maps, whisper "my precious, my precious" and hiss at anyone approaching with a newer game

That's sort of become Zee's schtick over the years: championing games no one has heard of. He does hold onto some oddball Euro stuff but more often than not it's titles that were forgotten because they just never... stood out, and usually for good reason.

I remember hearing that there are something like 3000 new games published every year now.

That’s just insane.

How is anyone supposed to keep up? Who is even playing them?

I think you could actually have an amazing game that gets lost in a sea of mediocrity.

For any games to get noticed now you need to promote the heck out of them.

I find the trick to keeping up with the best releases it to see what people are talking about on TWBG. Folks around here have pretty diverse tastes and are willing to deep dive into the hobby to find games that match those tastes. No need for any one person to keep up with the thousands of releases every year. Someone here will suddenly post about a new awesome horror-themed sports game, or a heavy wargame about ducks, or a take-that game set in a courtroom drama, or that the latest FFG release is a gimmick not worth anyones time, or they're p500ing a COIN game about Ireland, and so on. So I believe Jackwraith is in the loop because if any of those games in the video were worthwhile to him then he'd have heard of them. Or maybe what I'm saying is it's okay to be out of the loop on the hobby as it won't stop you from finding games you'll enjoy.

No one's in the loop if the requirement is to be all knowing and play everything. Professional reviewers like Tom Vasel don't even play everything, as the majority of Dice Tower reviews are coming from other people now.

Why are people even worried about keeping up? Find stuff you enjoy and don't sweat it.

One of my favorite things is discovering some obscure game no one is talking about. Like the first time I came across Shadows of Malice and was immediately smitten. Stuff like that is out there more than ever.

Yeah, I'm not particularly worried about keeping up. I just found it kind of remarkable that he could list 10 games that were apparently so established/popular that he felt like they needed expansions and I'd only heard of two of them.

So is a desire for an expansion a hallmark of a great game (which should feel totally complete, hence why it is a great game), a good game (that you had fun with and would like a little more) or a mediocre/poor one that could be 'fixed' with an expansion?

Kinda like movie remakes. I don't want a remake of "Big Trouble in Little China", that movie is perfect as it is, I want a remake of "Last Action Hero" because i feel like there was a really good idea in there that just needs a bit more polish. So should game expansions be used to fix somewhat broken games or can a game be considered great if it can accommodate more stuff?

Those are really great questions. On top of that, what about games that technically had expansions early on, like Root, but which were made up of content that was intended to be part of the game but got split to an expansion because of cost issues?

I think some of it comes down to game genre, to an extent. Most "Euro" games don't need expansions because their design is basically already complete. No one would bother making an expansion to Tigris and Euphrates. Indeed, Knizia instead decided to simply make a new game in Yellow and Yangtze. T&E is a great game and didn't need expansions. OTOH, I think TI3 was either borderline or actually a great game and desperately needed the first expansion to fix an obvious design flaw (e.g. everyone picked Imperial and Initiative in perfect order around the table.) Was it still a great game with that flaw? Probably. I think "Ameritrash"-style games (those that strive to tell a story) benefit from expansions in order to increase the variability of those stories, whereas "Euro" games often don't. But I would've been happy to own Rising Sun without either of the expansions or the KS stuff because I think it's a great game with enough variety already. But would I be as excited about Cthulhu Wars with only the initial four factions...? Probably not.