The Confines of Infinite Design Space

It has now become the norm for board and card games to have expansions. Now the question is how do you leave space for an expansion in the original game design, and can you run out of design space? Living and collectable card games are the easiest to see the expansion mindset in as they are designed from the beginning to have many expansions, and often it is quite easy to see the direction such expansions might take. Board games on the other hand are not always so obvious as the base set is confined and balanced and the additional sets need to fit in with this, which is why they often introduce extra board sections as these enable new rules to exist in a relative vacuum away from the original game. However, I believe that the biggest constraint on any expansion is not having to fit in with the rules of the original, but rather is maintaining the flavour of the game.

To illustrate this I'm going to use Magic the Gathering as even after almost twenty years new rules, expansions, and card are still being produced. Most Magic players have a rough idea of what mana cost a card should have and what standard abilities belong in each colour, meaning that they have a pretty good idea of the basic magic design space. This is useful because as long as the new expansion is based on these ideas, with a few new rules thrown in, it will feel familiar to most players. What makes design interesting is having to fit a story to each expansion. If I were to make a green common card that cost 2 mana for a 2/2 with a basic ability as far as power level goes there would be no problem. However, if I called that card Unstoppable Swamp Monster it wouldn't make sense, because something like that should be bigger.

The above two cards in my opinion are fine as far as mana cost to card power, but wrong in terms of card flavour. The Segovian Leviathan has been 'fixed' by making Segovia a very small plane, and explaining that those whales are actually the size of goldfish, as for the cat I guess that it is the green glowing eyes that make it tougher than a normal human.

Another consideration is that your new abilities mustn't end up being silly. If we consider First Strike (This creature deals combat damage before creatures without first strike) we can immediately see space for a new rule called Last Strike (This creature deals combat damage after creatures without last strike). It could even fit as far as game flavour goes, with last strike being on a wall or a slow moving creature like a golem or corpse.

Once this ability is introduced another one immediately becomes obvious, Triple Strike (This creature deals first strike, regular and last strike combat damage). The ability to deal regular and last strike damage can also be introduced as can the ability to deal first and last strike combat damage. From this we see that with very little effort we have created up to four new abilities and without much more we can create another, Super Strike (This creature deals combat damage before creatures with First Strike) but why stop there why not have Super Duper Strike or Uber Strike? The answer is that all of these abilities are very similar and while Last Strike could fit flavour wise all the extra first to deal combat damage abilities are much more difficult to justify. However, a similar effect can be achieved without the need to design new abilities.

The above cards provide mechanics which are close to First and Last Strike without the need to introduce new keywords or rules.

What I hope I have illustrated is that the challenge with making a good expansion is not finding new rules and ways for people to play but rather in keeping the themes and flavour of the game intact. Designers also need to be wary that the story and source material don't cause the rules to bloat and become over complicated. The first edition of the Star Trek CCG suffered from this problem and by the end it was so complicated that only people who had been playing since the start could have any hope of understanding it.