Do You Need a Board Game Expansion?

This is the question people ask just before they make the most frustrating board game gift there is. The logic feels sound - they already have the game, so give them more of it - and the result is a box that gets opened, understood in three seconds and put in a cupboard, because it is not a thing you can play.

What an expansion actually is

An expansion is a set of extra components for one specific game: more cards, another map, a new rule or an additional player color. It is sold in a box that looks like a board game, is shelved beside board games, and is frequently the same price as one. Open it on its own and there is no game inside - no rules for playing without the base box, and often no board at all.

The three ways it goes wrong

1. They do not own the base game. Easily the most common. Somebody mentions a game once, you find a box with its name on it, and it turns out to be the expansion. There is no warning on the front of most of them loud enough to catch a buyer who is not looking for it.

2. They own it, but a different edition. Long-running games get reprinted, and components change between printings - card backs, board sizes, the colors of the pieces. An expansion printed for one edition can be a poor match for another, and working out which one somebody has means looking at their actual box.

3. They already have it. A person who plays a game enough to want more of it has usually already bought the obvious expansion for it. The ones who would most enjoy the gift are the ones most likely to own it.

The confusing case: boxes that are not expansions but sound like one

Several of the best gifts on this site are second boxes in a family that are complete games. They are worth knowing about precisely because they are the safe version of the thing you were trying to do.

• Ticket to Ride: Europe is a standalone game, not an expansion - Days of Wonder states 2-5 players and 30-60 minutes for it, the same as the original, and it comes with its own board. Our comparison of the two covers which to buy.
• Sushi Go Party! is a bigger standalone that contains the original game’s cards - Gamewright states 2-8 players and 30 minutes against 2-5 and 15 for the tin. Buying it for somebody who owns Sushi Go! is not wrong, but it does make the tin redundant; the comparison is here.
• Splendor Duel is a separate two-player game rather than a two-player mode for Splendor - Space Cowboys states 2 players for it and 2-4 for the original. Which one to buy depends only on how many people play.

The pattern to take from those three: a standalone in a family is a perfectly good present for somebody who likes the original, because it works whether or not they still own the first box. An expansion is only a present if you are sure.

What about the CATAN expansion specifically?

It comes up more than any other, because CATAN is the game most people can name. Catan Studio publishes a 5-6 Player Expansion for the base game, with its own rulebook, and it does exactly what it says: it lets five or six people play the game somebody already owns. It does not go the other way, and there is no published way to take the base game below its stated floor of three - which is the subject of our answer on playing CATAN with two.

So the 5-6 expansion is a good gift in exactly one situation: the recipient owns CATAN, you know which edition, and their table is regularly bigger than four. That is three conditions, and if any of them is a guess, buy a complete game.

How we chose the complete boxes below

One rule, applied hard: everything needed to play is in the one box. No separate purchase, no edition to match, nothing to check before wrapping it. Beyond that we picked for breadth rather than for a single taste - a family game, a party game, a two-player game, a game for somebody who already plays, a cheap one, and one from a line that is famous for its expansions, to make the point that the base box still stands on its own.

Every player count, playing time and age band below is the publisher’s own stated figure, read from the publisher’s page and attributed to them. We have not play-tested these and do not claim to have; how we pick sets out the method.

If they have specifically asked for an expansion

Then buy it, and get the details from them rather than from the shelf. Ask which game, which expansion and - if the game is more than a few years old - what the box looks like. A person who has asked for a specific expansion knows exactly what they want, and this page is not about them. It is about the far more common case of guessing.

If you want to give something to a person who already owns a shelf of games without guessing at all, our page for board game lovers is built around that exact problem, and the five ways a board game gift goes wrong covers the rest of the field.

What a complete game costs against an expansion

Usually about the same, which is the quiet argument running under this whole page. An expansion is frequently priced like a game because the box is the same size, so the choice is not “cheap add-on or expensive present” - it is “a thing they might not be able to use, or a whole game” for similar money. We never print a remembered price anywhere on this site: each pick’s button shows a live figure when we hold one and says so plainly when we do not. What board games cost sets out the bands.