What was the first gaming expansion? I’m sure that if you looked back to the 1930s and 1940s you could find some amateur Monopoly supplements. Likewise, I wouldn’t be surprised if amateur Diplomacy supplements appeared in the 1960s. For professional publications, it’s obvious that things got going even later. You can find some linked games as early as 1973, when GDW began their “Europa” series. SPI’s North Africa Quad of four games similarly appeared in 1976. However, the surge of true gaming expansions appeared in 1977, when SPI put out its two supplements for War of the Ring and Avalon Hill supplemented their Win, Lose & Show game.
I’m sure there’s a few scattered earlier expansions that one could dredge up, and I welcome your comments on them, but I think that 1977 is a pretty good starting point for when gaming expansions became a professional business.
And, as part of an overall look at expansions in gaming, I’m going to tell you why.
Dungeons, Dragons, Americans, and Germans: 1974-1977
I’m pretty confident in saying that you can trace the emergence of gaming expansions as a business model to Dungeons & Dragons, which was released to the public in 1974. The publisher, TSR, started out following in the footsteps of hobbyist game publishers that had come before them — like Avalon Hill and SPI. They thus didn’t see a business in gaming expansions and instead figured that they’d keep pumping out new roleplaying games of all sorts, starting with Boot Hill and Empire of the Petal Throne the next year.
However, Dungeons & Dragons — and really the whole new roleplaying medium — was quite different than those board games that came before. These new games were infinitely expandable, and thus publisher Gary Gygax couldn’t help but tread on some new ground as well. In 1975, while the company was producing its second and third roleplaying games, it also put out two expansions for Dungeons & Dragons — books of character classes, monsters, and treasures called Greyhawk and Blackmoor.
Though TSR did publish these two gaming expansions before any other hobbyist gamers were really considering the possibility, what happened next made it obvious that the whole idea of expansions was still very alien to them. In 1976 TSR was approached by a man named Bob Bledsaw who wanted to license Dungeons & Dragons so that he could produce adventures and other expansions for the game. He was literally laughed out of the meeting. TSR didn’t understand why anyone would want to buy expansions instead of new games. Bledsaw, meanwhile, got the last laugh; he started up Judges Guild, which became the top producer of roleplaying supplements for the next five years.
And thus we move from 1976 into 1977, by which time we find Judges Guild, Wee Warriors, Games Workshop, and Metro Detroit Gamers all producing expansions for Dungeons & Dragons. I find this evolutionary tale interesting because it explains why gaming expansions are such a uniquely American phenomenon. In the 1970s, the same companies who were producing hobbyist board games in America (and England) were also taking the first stabs at roleplaying games, and thus it’s very natural that the idea of expansions leaped the species gap, as it were. As a result we saw those aforementioned expansions from Avalon Hill and SPI in 1977. Other American games like Eon’s Cosmic Encounter (1977) and Metagaming’s Melee (1977) were centered on the idea of expansions from the start.
Expansions & The World: 1977-Present
The American idea of expansions stayed American (or at least Anglo-American, including Britain) as time passed. Companies like Steve Jackson Games carried the banner of expansions through the 1980s with games like Car Wars and Illuminati. Games Workshop similarly built games like Talisman and HeroQuest upon an expansion model. Today most American producers of hobbyist games — such as Atlas Games, Fantasy Flight Games, and Steve Jackson Games — produce as many expansions for their games as new games, if not more.
Understanding the American origin of expansions also explains why they took so long to to gain traction in Germany. We think of SdJ winners as being heavily supplemented, but in truth that’s a pretty modern phenomenon. As far as I can tell, from Hare & Tortoise (1979) to Manhattan (1994), not a single SdJ game received a supplement. Then a little game called The Settlers of Catan (1995) came along. It apparently received expansions not due to any financial motive, but rather because Klaus Teuber hadn’t gotten to publish the whole game he envisioned; The Seafarers of Catan (1997) was intended mainly as the balancing final piece of the game, but its success showed future winners the way to milk an SdJ victory.
Since 1995, most SdJ winners have enjoyed expansions (though sadly not 1999’s Tikal or 2000’s Torres), while since 2001, when Carcassonne won, they’ve gone crazy. In the 21st century most SdJ winners receive yearly expansions until the franchise is entirely dead. Besides 2001’s Carcassonne, 2003’s Alhambra and 2006’s Thurn and Taxis are both members of the one-a-year club.
It took a while for the idea of expansions to catch on for Germany, and they still haven’t been used much beyond the SdJ winners (which I find somewhat remarkable), but for those games, the publishers are clearly gung ho.
However, in the last couple of years, an alternative to the expansions has appeared in Germany. Ticket to Ride (2004) has joined the one-a-year-club, but it’s been mainly supplemented with alternative games like Ticket to Ride: Europe, Ticket to Ride: Märklin, and Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries. They’ve only fallen back to true expansions in the last couple of years with releases like Switzerland. Unlike the standalone games, these newer releases depend on you having an original game. This all might be the German answer to the American expansion model: more expensive standalone games for a few years while the SdJ market is hot, and cheaper expansions afterward. Certainly, 2007’s Zooloretto seems to be taking the same path with the recent announcement of their standalone Aquaretto.
Though Germany found its own, apparently accidental, path to gaming expansions, elsewhere in the world gaming expansions seem to correlate pretty well with penetration of the roleplaying industry. The hobbyist industry in England has largely been controlled by Games Workshop, which started out as a Dungeons & Dragons licensee, and that’s why the country has been so very expansion friendly. France is another country that had some notable roleplaying influence in the 1980s and 1990s, thanks to companies like Oriflam and Jeux descartes. Thus it shouldn’t be surprising that we now see French expansions though releases like Eurogames’ Formula Dé and Asmodée’s Dungeon Twister series. Even more notable is the expansion model shown off by Days of Wonder’s two military combat games, BattleLore … and Memoir ‘44.
And the expansions for Memoir ‘44 are going to be the topic of my discussion when I return to the question of expansions in four weeks. I’ll see you then!
Around the Corner
My next column falls on Valentine’s Day, and thus my wife has agreed to write a guest column on what non-gamers like. Then I’ll be back here two weeks later to talk about expansions some more, and some of the unique new models that I think really work.
Meanwhile, you can as always find my other writing on board games scattered around the net. Last week I wrote a column on game design and The Tragedy of the Commons for Skotos. Meanwhile my reviews of the last couple of weeks have been of a couple of brand new games (to the American market): Freya’s Folly and Lascaux.
Author’s Note: Most readers of the original version of this article flagged Stock Exchange (1936) as the first expansion. It was an amateur third-party expansion for Monopoly and another Parker Brothers game called Finance, except Parker Brothers bought it, removed the Finance references, and released it as an official supplement on their own (1937). However, it was clearly an exceptional case at the time.
Down the road, a few readers flagged expansions from Avalon Hill and GameScience in the ’60s, and suggested that the American miniatures and board wargaming field of the ’60s was the ultimate source of expansions rather than the American RPG field of the ’70s. I suspect they’re right. So, rollback the Way Back Machine by a decade, but otherwise I suspect the general trends outlined here are correct. —SA, 4/12/15
