Expansion Fever!

Ah, dear & gentle reader, welcome once again to my sporadic commentary about my obsessive need to collect board game expansion sets. Place a variant way to play a game in front of me & I'm like a demented 10 year old with a Pokemon CCG addiction who has been downing Mt Dew and mainlining Red Vines for the last couple of hours.

With that sordid admission out of the way, proceed forward from here - read on, gentle reader! You can check out an exhaustive list of 2010 expansions on the Geek... or simply continue with this more refined (read: "what Mark is interested in") list right here:

Played

• Be Not Afraid (Small World) - 5 new races, 5 new powers... and a very nifty plastic molded tray for all of the expansion races. There are - as always - some balance issues with particular races & powers combined, but the players can correct those by choosing & declining wisely. My favorite new race is the Leprechauns, although the Barbarians can be a lot of fun as well. There's even room in the tray for the Ghosts from...
• Necromancer Island (Small World) - This free expansion will get a full review in the next day or so - for now, I like how it tweaks the game w/out breaking it. (One rules note: the Necromancer does NOT get any starting gold - clarified by Eric H. at DoW.)
• Winter Wars (Memoir '44) - A Battle of the Bulge specific expansion for Memoir that includes a lot of terrain, some great scenarios & a couple of card decks... of special note is the Breakthrough deck, which coupled w/the Breakthrough map set makes those large scenarios really shine. (A full review will follow on BGN next week.)

Not Played

• Asteros (Tannhauser) - It's a big honkin' minotaur to dovetail nicely with the Labyrinth board in the Daedalus expansion... and, in Tannhauser parlance, he's a Legendary Figure, which means he replaces 2 other characters on a team.
• Bearded Brave (Battlelore) - I'm hoping this is the last box of Fantasy Flight "fixing" the holes left by the odd manner in which Battlelore expansions were released. If I were a betting man, I'd guess that this is the way they're cheapening the cost of a new base set... by dropping out the Goblins & Dwarves into separate expansions. Still, it's nice to have more dwarves for those really massive battles.
• Cavern of Soloth (Catacombs) - this flicking dungeon game is getting 4 new heroes, 4 new bad guys, 40 new pieces & 60 new cards. Excellent. (As I've said before, Catacombs = Descent: Journeys in the Dark + Carabande - 4 hours.)
• Daedalus (Tannhauser) - A new map set (along with new scenarios) for Tannhauser - now we'll have the Labyrinth at Minos and a French village to destroy with our Hellboy-ish combat.

• Expansion Set #2 (Smarty Party) - 200 new categories... all I can say is "it's about time!"
• Moltenclaw's Invasion (Heroscape) - The third set of D&D Heroscape figures... I've been pleasantly surprised at how much I've enjoyed the new figures, their powers, and the nifty scenarios/campaigns that go with them. This set looks really sweet, thanks to the previews over on heroscapers.com.

• Zooloretoo Boss (Zooloretto) - While I'm not a big fan of the XXL expansion for Zooloretto, all the others have been top notch... and Boss seems to fit right in. There will now be ways to earn sponsorships & put people to work to increase the fame of your zoo!