There’s a specific feeling I’ve come to actively resent in this hobby, and it took me a while to be able to name it properly. It’s not the price of expansions themselves, I don’t mind paying for more content when a game’s earned it. It’s the feeling that a base game was designed, on purpose, to feel like it’s missing something, so that the only way to get the complete experience is a second, third, sometimes fourth purchase down the line.
Cyclades is the clearest example on my own shelf. I’ve said in my review that the monster expansion is close to essential, and I stand by that, the base game plays noticeably drier without it. But sitting with that admission longer, I’ve started to wonder whether “close to essential” is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence, work that amounts to the base box not really being the finished product, just the opening ask.
I get the business logic completely, I’m not naive about it. A publisher’s got to fund the next thing somehow, and a base game that’s genuinely complete and doesn’t need anything else is a harder sell for a follow-up expansion than one that leaves a gap players can feel. I don’t think every designer doing this is being cynical about it either, sometimes an expansion really is just a good idea somebody had after the fact, not a deliberate omission. But I’ve played enough games now to start noticing the difference between those two things, an expansion that adds and an expansion that completes, and the second kind bothers me every time I run into it.
Godtear’s the game I hold up as the opposite example, worth mentioning since I gave it a full five stars. The starter set is genuinely, completely a full game the moment you open the box, no asterisk, no sense that Renata and I are playing a demo version of something better sold separately. Everything else in that line is additive, more champions, more options, but never a fix for something that felt broken or thin in the base set. That’s the version of expansion design I want more of, and it’s a real part of why that game earned the rating it did from me.
I don’t have a clean rule for spotting the difference before you buy, unfortunately, mostly you find out after a few sessions whether the base game feels whole or feels like it’s holding something back on purpose. But I’ve started factoring it explicitly into how I review things now, because I think it’s a real, measurable difference in design honesty, not just a vague vibe, and it’s worth naming out loud instead of just quietly grumbling about it to Renata every time I notice it happening again.