TCbH's Top 10 Greatest Expansions of All Time

0:00 All right, everyone. It is April, 2026, which means that it is expansion month here on the Cardboard Herald, and you better believe we weren't going to get through expansion month without refreshing our top 10 expansions of all time. And I guess in this case, my top 10 expansions of all time, which keep in mind that may differ from your top 10 expansions, but we are all friends here, so you can feel free to disagree with any of this and put in the comments below what your own favorites are, or where the beef that you have with any of my top 10. And here, I'm trying to reflect on both my favorite expansions, but also what is the way in which the expansions impact the games. And I had to make some hard choices when coming up with this list, both because I wanted to talk about the expansions that truly are transformative for the game in one way, shape, or form, but also leaving off a couple. I do have some honorable mentions that we'll get to before number one, and I'll kind of talk about why they are honorable mentions as opposed to being on the top 10 list itself. But with all of that out of the way, let's go ahead and kick it off with number 10.

1:23 Concordia: Salsa. And Concordia is just a great game on its own, but Salsa adds salt to this game of Roman trading in the Mediterranean, which is one of the best action selection games really of all time. It is what I think as the quintessential German game. Just everything flows together so nicely, but the expansion elevates it not only by providing a wild resource and incentivizing the use of that, which is smart, but it also encourages you to refresh your turn earlier because you have one-time bonuses that come out of the forum cards. And those are really the more substantial addition to the game.

2:09 Something that makes it so you have additional pressure because each action is a card that goes out of your hand until you end up playing the action that brings them all back. Usually, for efficiency purposes, you're trying to burn through all of your hand in sequence, but now you have a strong incentive to grab a particular forum card that's going to work particularly well for you. Because your instinct as a gamer is probably that it's always best to maximize the use out of every single card, but even without Salsa, that might not be true. Sometimes, you're putting the focus too much on what you could be doing instead of thinking about what you should be doing, and this expansion just nudges you back in the direction of oh, yeah. Just because I can take more actions before refreshing doesn't mean that I have to.

3:01 Next up, Agricola: Farmers of the Moor. It's an all-time banger. I mean, Agricola is another German-designed game. Uwe Rosenberg is an absolute legend, but Farmers of the Moor is just the the expansion that elevates everything, and I think in some ways takes some of the pressure off of this game. Yes, it does add the fact that you need to heat your home instead of just having to feed your starving family, but the ability to scoop up additional ways to mitigate some of the harshest penalties in the game is really smart. I love some of the new mechanics that are added in, especially the cards that can be claimed in place of taking an action on your turn. And that really pressures you to think about the traditional strategies in unconventional ways. It's also got horses in it, which, you know, like that's never going to be a bad thing. And it gives you a little bit of a personalized loadout from the get-go that causes you to maybe diverge in ways that you wouldn't necessarily be encouraged to do with the trees and the peat bogs that you are going to have to go through churning through your board.

4:20 I'm a little less sold on the cute little beds. I mean, they're cool uh functionally. I get the mechanic of having someone laid up because you didn't heat your home, but the the the the actual components themselves are probably a little too rinky-dink uh for what they set out to achieve, but they're cute nonetheless.

4:45 All right, we got a couple older games out of the way, but let's talk about one that is kind of a modern classic at this point, which is Wingspan. And for me, what is the best expansion asterisk, we'll talk about it more later, Oceania, which is the expansion that introduced updated boards, nectar, and of course, all the birds of the Australia, New Zealand, Oceania area, which let's talk about how these things interact with the game. So, we have a new wild resource, which is great. You know, that gives you more flexibility. It lets you get to the meat of the game a little bit quicker. It emphasizes trying to fill out and see more birds. Love that. So, it gives you more options in the game. Then it gives you some contention over the areas that you spend nectar on. So, now there's a little bit more of an inherent competitive nature. Not a lot, because this Wingspan after all, but it is giving just a subtle increase in the competitiveness towards end-game scoring.

5:53 And then, beyond that, it's adding a ton of new birds, which is just more content. Everybody loves more content, and there's the yellow end-game powers that were introduced. So, a slightly new feature and just completely new refresher of birds. And it has the new boards, which rebalances some of the accusations of certain lanes in the game being too strong, or at least too obviously strong. And this encourages you, particularly in the grasslands board where you lay eggs, to have to work a little bit harder. We always play with this board in this house. And I love the addition of all the birds. Unlike the European expansion, which was more content, but not necessarily anything really new. And unlike the Asia expansion, where I felt like I just didn't really care that much about duet in general. Like Wingspan's great as a two-player game anyway. So, if you're only ever going to play two-player, it's stand-alone, so you could get that, but I I really view that as just getting more birds. Whereas, Oceania really elevates, addresses some issues, and smooths out some things in the game while still giving you that extra content. It's a complete knock out of the park, and I can't imagine playing Wingspan without it.

7:23 Next, King of Tokyo: Power Up. This is one of the OGs of great expansion design. King of Tokyo was already a great game, though a little basic. I mean, on paper, you got the Yahtzee dice system, and then you got King of the Hill as portrayed by giant Kaiju monsters. What's not to love? But at the same time, there's a couple things in there. The monsters themselves don't have a lot of personality. You don't really have a lot to do with hearts, especially if you're already at full health. And by doing the game as it is as a base game does make it feel a little bit more rudimentary, more childlike, which isn't a bad thing.

8:09 Power Up was such a brilliant way to address some of those little points of design in here. So, you have individual cards that each character now has as part of a loadout that they get to draw into if you roll three hearts on a turn. Something that normally you only are trying to do if you're desperately low on health, but now those cards, one, because they give you more thematic flavor, and two, they give you strategic advantage, particularly the ones that are ongoing, you are incentivized to consider hearts even if you don't particularly need them. If you roll two hearts, that's not an automatic re-roll anymore. And that now just subtle change completely changes the decision matrix of how you're operating with the game in a way that elevates the fun, feels natural within the existing power, the mutations, the card system that you can purchase into with energy. Like the cards that you play are just like personal versions of those cards, but you earn them in a different way.

9:20 It's so slight, but it's so smart, and it's something that elevates King of Tokyo immensely. It's an immediate and pretty much mandatory inclusion. If you got King of Tokyo, then you should have Power Up. Next up, Five Tribes: The Artisans of Naqala. Five Tribes is a game that I feel like doesn't get talked about as much as it should because it's such a great game. The Mancala meeple cereal just business going on there is so beautiful. Uh the the presentation is so wonderful, but there's a very little obstruction and the Artisans introduces the big pit, a giant hole in the middle of the desert, as well as these wonderful little meeple mountain tiles.

10:15 They now obstruct certain corners of the board. Again, forces you to think about strategies in a different way and not have such free-form access. Now, uh larger scale, that impacts things because it obstructs you, right? But it also subtly makes it so you have fewer things to constantly consider. It it takes what is this giant brain burner of a game and then limits some of your options. And that's actually a really good thing. There's still a ton of stuff that you can do and the board is inherently bigger than it was in the base game, but now you focus on these paths, these tunnels that are created by the pit and the six mountain ranges that are across the board. And that's not to say anything of the the the the purple tokens that you get, the purple tribe that Now, it's no longer five tribes, it's six tribes, but anyway, point being that this new tribe, the Artisans, is another great addition to the game that kind of work like the Elders, but not quite like the Elders in that you're getting these purple tokens, which may have really impressive abilities, but you may also get just straight points out of them. I really like how they change the ecosystem of the game.

11:43 Completely elevates the game for me and is still to date one of my favorite expansions.

11:50 All right. I know I'm in the minority here, but Terraforming Mars Ares Expedition was a game that, in the review on this channel when it came out, I was like, I think of Terraforming Mars as one of my favorite games of all time and I might like this one a little bit better. It's just not quite exactly there. But if it had milestones and awards, then I don't know. I'd probably be willing to get rid of Terraforming Mars. And then they did that. They came out with an expansion that has uh the the the milestones and awards in it and that's Terraforming Mars Ares Expedition Discovery, which then gave me just enough of the juice that was missing from the original game to a game that plays tighter and faster and just gets to the meat of what I love most about Terraforming Mars all that much quicker. And I was like, you know what?

12:46 Even though TM is one of my favorite games of all time, I'm prepared to let it go. Here's another asterisk point that will put into the honorable mentions. I'll get to some more having to do with Terraforming Mars in a bit, but Discovery, beyond just adding the awards and milestones, also adds the ability to upgrade your actions, which is such a cool thing. And you're having to make tough choices about which upgrade path you take for each of your five cards that you potentially can end up upgrading. It's interesting, it's dynamic, it makes up for a deficiency, it adds pressure to the game and it adds more strategic capability and situational import. I really love what Ares Expedition Discovery does for the game.

13:40 The other two expansions that came out at the same time, giving cooperative mode or adding extra players, I could care less about.

13:49 All right. Another one of the all-time greats that many many lists would include is Viticulture Tuscany. I love Viticulture Essential Edition. I think it is one of the most perfect worker placement packages that you could purchase and Tuscany Essential Edition makes it even better. And I know that there is some argument against the Tuscany expansion in particular making it so that the visitors can make you play the game subverting the core loop of just making wine and selling wine, but I found that it just gives you more paths to victory. And if you really want to lean into wine making, you have all the opportunity to do so. But Tuscany giving you new custom buildings is great. Giving you four different seasons, so you have to make really challenging decisions about how you want to do this segmented worker placement throughout the entire year.

14:51 That was already present in the early and late parts of the round of the initial game and now just it's four seasons instead of two. It also has the special workers in it, which is totally great and it has the little area control star system, which is I'll admit, the area control element I don't really care all that much about, but the ability to get more resources as a reliable outlet, I'm all about it. And so, Viticulture Essential Edition plus Tuscany Essential Edition is like an all-timer game set for me. Asterisk here and we'll revisit that again in honorable mentions, but yeah, Tuscany, so great.

15:42 Undaunted Reinforcements is an incredible expansion and it's one that I was unsure how I wanted to include it on this list because some of these other ones I probably play more often or are things that I, you know, like personally am more tied to because of my specific love of the game, but I really wanted to recognize that Reinforcements is just such a brilliant concept where with the help of BGG forums, other veteran designers and a whole lot of feedback, custom solo modes were implemented in the game and then taken to Osprey Games to be able to make it codified into a brilliant expansion that not only adds more content if you're looking for more content for either Undaunted Normandy or Undaunted North Africa, you got a ton more of multiplayer content in there with some really cool new units and stuff, but also fully fledged automa for every scenario that already existed for both of those standalone games in a system that is way better than it really has any right to be. This is not how Undaunted was designed with this solo mode in mind and having it work this well and this

17:12 interesting and making it so that you could play Undaunted feasibly entirely solo. This is just beautiful. Undaunted Reinforcements is one of the most impressive expansions that has a cool meta story behind it that is worth diving into and definitely deserves to be on this list. Now, getting to number two,

17:37 you know your boy had to include Spirit Island on here and you might even thought that it belonged at number one, but I'm going with Jagged Earth, not Branch and Claw, even though Branch and Claw is a big part of why I love Jagged Earth. So, here's the scoop. Spirit Island is great. I think Spirit Island with the additional tokens, the pestilence, the strife, the beasts, the events, the brambly brambles, all of that is what true Spirit Island is. And by the designers' own admission, yes, that's how it was designed with all the content from Branch and Claw in the original Spirit Island, but they decided to break it out and have that as a simultaneously released expansion, which is great. And if Jagged Earth didn't exist, I would say that with certain caveats that maybe it should have been included from the very beginning. Again, asterisk, we'll get back to that little thing here in a little bit.

18:37 I might say that Branch and Claw deserves to be on this list, but Jagged Earth pretty much doubles all the content of everything that you love about Spirit Island, but also adds in the events and those tokens. If you didn't already have Branch and Claw. So, Jagged Earth is just one of those things where it's like, if you like Spirit Island, which the people who like Spirit Island tend to love Spirit Island, and you were only ever going to get one expansion, then this is something that just vastly increases the amount of spirit combinations that you can play with, which is really one of the biggest delights of the game is seeing how the spirits work in concert together. So, greatly diverging the possible combinations is just incredible, but also adding what I feel like is that element that takes it to the necessary point that Spirit Island really deserves to be, which is having those events and all of the extra tokens that really take the clockwork system that's really reliable and incredibly strategic about the original Spirit Island if you just play right out of the base game and then adds just a little bit of wild, a little bit of unpredictability, but something that you can anticipate, that you can work around, that you can a little bit count on. So, that way you kind of know the the vague sense of good

20:07 things that can happen, but you don't have complete utter control, which I think when games get a little too deterministic, then they get a little too dry and boring for me. Spirit Island: Jagged Earth, amazing. All right, honorable mentions. Let's get this out of the way right now. This really belongs on the list. Terraforming Mars: Prelude is one of the best expansions that's ever come out. It takes what is great about Terraforming Mars, gives you a little bit of a boost, which reduces the time of the game, and then gives you a little bit more of a customization right off the bat, and I think it just belongs on the honorable mentions because I don't own Terraforming Mars anymore. So, honorable mention, and I wish that there were a prelude in Aries. Maybe we'll get that someday.

20:59 Also, I have to mention the Wingspan: Americas as well as Viticulture: Bordeaux, both Stonemaier releases that just came out, and we are reviewing as part of expansion month this month. Both of those are games, Wingspan and Viticulture, where we have entries on this list, where I have entries on this list, that are incredible expansions, but I think with more time, I may say that the best things that are offered by Oceania, or the best things that are offered by the Tuscany Essential Edition, are done just as well, except maybe even better, in the Bordeaux expansion for Viticulture and the Americas for Wingspan, because Americas includes nectar, but it also includes the hummingbirds, which the hummingbirds are fabulous. I love the Oceania board still, and I would want those as something that I have available, so working in conjunction, I think that's the best way to play. I want all of the birds and all the things, and that's great. But, if you're only going to do one expansion, there's a good chance I might say Americas instead of the Oceania. And the same thing with Viticulture, Bordeaux just brilliantly changes up Viticulture, a game that I played so many times, and I love to see

22:29 the changes there, and it still offers the segmented four-season board that you get out of Tuscany. Again, I think the best version of the game has elements of both of these expansions. But, if you're only to get one, it might be Bordeaux and Americas. Next up, I've talked a ton about Lords of Waterdeep: Scoundrels of Skullport over the years. Lords of Waterdeep still one of my all-time faves. Scoundrels of Skullport, mandatory inclusion for me. But, the fact is, I only ever play with half of that expansion. I love Skullport. I couldn't care less about Undermountain. I don't want to play with all of it because I think it loosens the game a little bit too much, and widens it. And Undermountain on its own, without Skullport, doesn't really elevate the base game of Lords of Waterdeep. It's just more powerful versions of what was already there, and isn't really that interesting. So, honorable mention it gets. Final honorable mention is a recent expansion, and that's one of my recent favorites I've talked a lot about on this channel, which is Kenfire Council: Winds of Change. And this is the expansion that introduces solo mode to the game, introduces cooperative mode. I love both of those, which is kind of crazy because I typically don't like games that are designed with competitive in mind and then have a solo variant, but it works

24:02 extremely well in this game. But, honestly, I think it should have just been included in the base game itself, and it came out at the same time as the base game, and I think from like a consumer perspective, not speaking as a manufacturer, not speaking as a publisher or the designer or anything else, from the consumer perspective, as someone who loves both of these things, I think it would've been better had all of this just been integrated from the beginning. I know there's an argument for some people who never want to touch the solo or cooperative mode that they don't want to have to pay for those materials, but I think the cost of those materials would've been kind of negligible to include into the base game itself, if it were designed with that in mind.

24:50 And so, having it as a separate retail product that now has the additional barrier to entry of the cost of buying the separate expansion with the shipping in the box and the storage and everything that has to go into having an expansion exist, is kind of disappointing. So, without further ado, let's get to number one, which is Ra: Traders. Yes, Ra is a game that came out well over 20 years ago. It is one of Reiner Knizia's all-time greatest games. A lot has been said about how great Ra is over the years, the decades since it's been released, and only recently did an expansion come out for it with the beautiful new edition that 25th Century came out with.

25:38 And Ra: Traders is so good.

25:43 It's such a small, subtle expansion that adds the shipping boards and the shipping tiles, which now, when you purchase them, you put them at the top of the board. They only last for the current epoch that you're in, so the current round. But, whenever another player buys one of those tiles, then you add a shipping token to it. Not only does it look beautiful, not only does it increase the thematic element of the trading in the ancient history, but it also adds a huge incentive to not just postpone bidding on something. A lot of Ra is traditionally about just waiting till the last minute to get as much as you can to sweeten the pot. But, having something that really encourages you to invest early is such a smart, subtle design, and a perfect example of how an expansion can elevate an already great game. It doesn't solve a problem, but it does expand the strategies, it expands the theme, it expands everything about it. And plus, those little brown and golden shipping goods tokens just look so freaking good. Ra in general is one of the greatest games of all time, and Ra: Traders just makes it even better. I'm super impressed with it, and I I think it's kind of the pinnacle of what an expansion could and should be.

27:14 And that's our list, but let me know, what is your favorite expansion? Or do your favorite expansions? Or do you have any beef with any of the list that I gave for you today? Put it in the comments below. And as always, thanks for watching, thanks for supporting. New money changes hands between publishers and us. So, we rely on you for those likes, subscribes, comments, the shares, and of course, checking out our Patreon, where we give away free games on a quarterly basis to anyone who supports the Cardboard Herald. So, I encourage you check that out. But, above all all else, just thanks for being such a great community. You know that I've been Jack for the Cardboard Herald.