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Welcome to Part two of this article on expansions. I decided it was getting a bit unwieldy for one article. Here I will cover another Wingspan expansion and a second Everdell one, as well as another module from The Isle of Cats Kittens and Beasts Expansion.
As well as the European expansion for Wingspan, I own the Oceania Expansion. Hmmmn, why did I buy this one? I think because my friend had just bought the standalone Wingspan Asia and I felt left out. Not much of an excuse but sometimes you just don’t need one. Again, the cards are beautiful and interesting. Again, the extra eggs are perhaps unnecessary. The new bonus cards and goal tiles are welcome. There are also new boards and new dice for this expansion, plus nectar tokens, all of which are essential for the new elements of game play.
This expansion is very different to the European one, in that it does change the mechanics of the base game, with the collection and spending of nectar as a food type offering up more scoring opportunities. So, there are new rules to learn, but nothing too arduous. I think it addresses one weakness of the base game, in that players are likely to spend the last few turns of the games laying eggs, which is often the best option in terms of points but not very satisfying. The Oceania Expansion tends to make other actions at the end of the game more profitable, which is certainly a plus. I have only played this expansion twice so far, but as expansions go, it’s getting a thumbs up from me.
Everdell Newleaf is really more than one expansion. You can (and we often do) simply shuffle most of the new cards into their respective decks and enjoy the new combinations and abilities they provide. There are also ‘tickets’, allowing you to move deployed workers twice during the game, reservation tokens for when you really want that card but haven’t saved up for it yet, and two more basic events to aspire to achieving. The main addition provided by Newleaf is another add-on board comprising the train station. Here there are new worker placement spaces, with a chance to choose a visitor with a point scoring objective to achieve, and an option to refresh some of the meadow/station cards. This last is a particularly welcome addition if you find that sometimes in the base game you get stuck with meadow cards no one wants for several turns. Together with three extra spaces for available construction and critter cards, the station provides more variety in the cards you can choose from.
We have found the new cards provided by Newleaf an exciting addition, and almost always incorporate them into the game. The station itself we use less, perhaps because we find we only take the option to collect a visitor towards the end of the game, when we can be fairly confident about achieving the goal it offers. There is so much going on if you use all the Newleaf components that it can be difficult to work out or stick to a strategy. One thing we have tried is removing the special events cards from the game so that the visitors are more likely to appeal as an extra way of scoring points. We have also tried Spirecrest and Newleaf in the same game, just for fun. This requires a huge amount of table and isn’t recommended by the designers (or me) as it makes things way too complicated! So for this expansion, the module I actually like most is the new cards!
The Isle of Cats Kittens and Beasts is one of those more-than-one-expansion expansions. (I could have worded that better but I like saying expansion expansions.) When I wrote part one of this article it reminded me that I still hadn’t tried the events module and I have now put that right! The rats were so happy to venture out of the box. I’ve only played it once but this is what we learned. The events add a different condition to each round of the game. For rounds 1 and 5 this is a one-off bonus or penalty like gaining (or losing) two fish each. Or it can be an extra rule changing the usual game play. For example, being able to select a rare treasure when you cover a treasure map rather than a common one.
The events for the middle three rounds give you goals to work towards and are scored at the end of that round. An example would be ‘choose a row on your boat and score a point for every cat that has at least one square in that row’. These new objectives certainly changed how we played the game. I tried to be clever in one round by keeping cats of the same colour separate to gain points for lonely cats in the hope that I could join them up later to make families. Only partially successful. At the end of the game, we were surprised to find that we’d both scored much lower totals than usual, despite feeling as if we’d aimed at and achieved more objectives than usual. Whether we can improve on that remains to be seen! Next time I play with the events module I intend to be more selective about which events I try to score points with, rather than trying to score from them all.
We enjoyed Events but one game is not enough to know whether we will continue to use this part of the expansion on a regular basis in the future. Especially because Kittens and Beasts are already established favourites!
In conclusion, I shall reiterate what I said in part one: Many expansions are good fun but do your research first. Decide what you are looking for – more of the same, or a whole new dimension to the game? As always, have fun!
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