Which games are getting bigger in 2023? Lots of them! Here are three of the expansions designers and publishers are working on to bring more of what you love to the table:
• Beyond the Sun: Leaders of the New Dawn from Dennis K. Chan, Joseph Summa, and Rio Grande Games adds a solo mode for 2020’s Beyond the Sun, along with asymmetric factions and leaders and “new viable strategies around the planetary area control board”.
Rio Grande Games expects this expansion to arrive at its warehouse in March 2023, with the release to follow immediately thereafter.
• While Ravensburger is re-launching The Quest for El Dorado with Vincent Dutrait artwork to match Reiner Knizia‘s personal vision for the game, Knizia has continued to release new expansions for the game through publishing partners 999 Games and Lautapelit.fi.
The Quest for El Dorado: Dragons, Treasures & Mysteries introduces three new modules to the game: dragons that block spaces and that can be moved by playing cards; smaller terrain tiles that are revealed and placed only by the first explorer to reach it; and treasures that provide bonuses when playing certain cards next to them — and that also carry an alternate win condition if you collect enough of them!
• Mac Gerdts‘ Concordia from PD-Verlag will have a new expansion at SPIEL ’23 in the form of Concordia: Roma/Sicilia, which features a double-sided game board and these challenges:
—On the island of Sicilia, coincidental eruptions of the volcano Etna may hit you. It’s a new element of luck, but Sicilia can be played without that option as well.
• In case you need more two-mile-tall frogs in your life, designer Jim Felli of Devious Weasel Games will satisfy that need with the Gen Con 2023 release of Cosmic Frog: Find Muck, an expansion for 2020’s Cosmic Frog that is guaranteed to win the award for Spest Boonerism of 2023 no matter what else might be released.
Here’s what awaits you:
This expansion also introduces muck lands, special terrain tiles that offer interesting choices for you in the Outer Dimensions and that function as wildcards for vault scoring.
Finally, this expansion introduces a new chip system for combat, raiding, and returning from the Outer Dimensions that allows for some serious metagaming.
This expansion can be used with the original Cosmic Frog dice-based system as well as the new chip-based system. Just be consistent. If you want to use dice, then use dice for everything, i.e., combat, raiding, and returning from the Outer Dimensions.
