About VPG Expansion Kits

The Player’s Option for More

You may notice that Victory Point Games offers myriad expansion kits for its game products. Allow us to explain our philosophy about expanding our existing game products.

A Tight Story

Expansion kit materials are never needed to play the base game, period. They are always bonus material to enhance or expand the base game’s experience with additional rules, pieces, and scenarios that were not required to tell the story. Have you even watched the deleted scenes on a DVD and listened to the audio commentary? Almost every time the director tells you, “We really loved this bit, but it was cut to tighten and focus the story.” Well, that’s what happens with games, too. They have a story to tell, and sometimes bits get removed to help focus it.

We teach our developers here at VPG that a game is not finished when the last feature is added; a game is finished when the last feature is removed. Cutting, squeezing, trimming, and focusing are a crucial part of completing a game project – and the best of what gets cut for focus is often archived for that game’s possible future expansion kit.

Bonus Features

On other occasions, the material for an expansion kit is simply bonus material that was thought of later. One thing you learn here at VPG is that, in the words of game design Yoda, Jim Dunnigan, “Games are never finished, only published.” That is, even after a game is shipped and goes on sale to the public, the designer keeps thinking about it, reading player comments as they appear in online forums, and continues to come up with more ideas. At VPG, the best of these after-publication ideas often find their way into that game’s expansion kit.

Keeping it Affordable

It’s a marketing truth that there are certain “price points” where products need to land for consumer acceptance. Occasionally, we have to make our games conform to this marketing reality (and our ‘small format’ publishing model) and cannot always fit in the extra odds and ends that we would like to into the base game product. When that happens, instead of discarding those elements that don’t fit, we set them aside as the seeds of a possible future expansion kit.

The Player has the Option

Expansion kits give flexibility to the players. Rather than raising the price point of a game by including its expansion kit contents in the base product, players can purchase the lower-priced, complete base game and see if they really enjoy it enough to invest further in any supplemental materials. By keeping the buy-in threshold low, players can experiment with more new games at affordable prices, and then revisit their old favorites with the fresh gaming materials found in its expansion kit.

Alan Emrich Posts on

the Victory Point Games Forum on ConsimWorld:

Why VPG Makes Expansion Kits

Here's the publisher's take on why we make expansion kits: Make the designer's happy. It's not like we're paying them a fortune, so we should darn well try to make them happy!

For a solitaire game, we're learning that price point and playing time really matter to our customers, and the States of Siege^TM games have really hit a sweet spot. Somewhere between ISRAELI INDEPENDENCE and THE LOST CAUSE is size, scope, complexity and cost has proven to be a very popular location for new game releases. Our latest offering, LEVEE EN MASSE, has hit a total Home Run and, honestly, we can't keep it in stock! We literally can't build that game fast enough!

So, it is wise for us to create the release version of a game that really hits that sweet spot in terms of subject matter, price, complexity and playing time. That's what designers usually aim for (because they, too, like games in that zone), and we try to help them hit that bulls eye.

Expansion Kits are made for many reasons. Some are created to bring in parts of the story that are removed from its core focus -- like a DVD's directors cut or deleted scenes can tell of subplots or character scenes that needed to be trimmed to keep the product "tight" (such as with the LEVEE EN MASSE and SOVIET DAWN Expansion Kits).

Other Expansion Kit emphasize a new (sometimes complex or esoteric) mechanic, play up some alternate features that can take the narrative off its central line, or simply provides MOTS (more of the same) that was left on the cutting room floor because it just didn't "make it" as part of a tightly focused game release (THE LOST CAUSE Expansion Kit is a good example with its 1865 cards and lots of wild new Broadsheet cards and some of the more esoteric/what-if Confederate Leaders and Resources).

For the game you've been discussing off-line, WE MUST TELL THE EMPEROR, with its designer, Steve Carey, we have what we call internally, "The China Syndrome." The basic game will have China represented in its proper proportions to the other theaters included in the standard game, absolutely. There is no LOSS of narrative or focus there. But the expansion kit will add some "chrome-y" stuff to pad its narrative (and give a more-emphasized telling of the Chinese Theater's side of the story from the Japanese perspective), and drop in some late-game stuff that were more rules-then-reward to include in the standard game: these add a Russian army popping up for one turn and set of Operation Olympic rules (that may never happen in the game, of course).

It is very like the film side of the entertainment industry. People go to the movies to see a carefully crafted film. This means that scenes were cut to tighten it for a polished release and to fit in the price point and time format that people expect. But that means that there is something for the Deleted Scenes or a Director's Cut on the DVD version. At least with our games, you don't have to buy the DVD twice to get the deleted scenes.

We don't have to release expansion kits. Players have been coming up with their own variants in magazines and on web sites for years. But why not share the designer's odds and ends? You certainly don't need them to enjoy the game -- it was designed and published to stand on its own and, as you've attested for THE LOST CAUSE at least, we do a pretty good job accomplishing that goal. Look how many people have attested here to buying expansion kits for our games that they've yet to play because they're still enjoying the standard game that they bought it for!

It's all a matter of focus and telling the story the best (not the longest and most-complicated) way possible in a game's release. For the stuff that was cut or an alternate subplot or narrative line, an expansion kit can be made available.

This is entertainment, Charles. That's how we see it.

Alan Emrich