Let's Talk: Sunk Cost Fallacy

Shellhead wrote: Maybe you should watch Midnight Chronicles to get in the mood:

www.imdb.com/title/tt1079372/

BTW, do NOT do this. I've watched some REALLY low budget schlocky fantasy films in my day but this one just took the cake. I'm not sure I even have that DVD anymore or where I got it but that film is TERRIBLE. Like FMV video game Night Trap bad. Worse than a porn parody and without the porn to fast forward to.

The only instances in which I bought expansions for games that I hadn't played or hadn't played "enough" were Ankh, because it was a KS that came with them, and Root. The expansions were instantly of use with Ankh because they were mostly more of the same (i.e. more gods and more guardians) so they went right into the our games and we've never looked back. The Pharaoh expansion was one that we waited on because it adds another layer of complexity to the game, but now that we've played it, we'll probably never go back (Eric Lang says that he'd never play Ankh without it unless teaching to newbies.)

In the case of Root, I picked up the Riverfolk expansion because it added two factions that, IIRC, were part of the original design but left out for cost reasons and because I knew by that time that I'd played enough of the game that I would get a lot of use out of them, which I have.

As Darthjojo mentioned, I don't really look at game system additions as "expansions", per se. Funkoverse is the most obvious of these, since there is no "base game" for it. They're just new sets using the same rules. I kind of extend that to other "systems" like Neuroshima Hex. Yes, there is a base game with the four original factions, but the game was obviously intended to be built upon. In a way, it's like Root, in that I suspect that some of the "expansion" armies, like SMART, were already present in the original design but held back for economic reasons.

The most expanded games I have are Runebound, 2nd Ed. with 28 and Cthulhu Wars with 27. I don't regret either of them, since I've played all of the expansions for Runebound repeatedly and will likely do the same once I obtain the remaining expansions for Cthulhu Wars. In fact, I won't even have all of the expansions for the latter, since some of them are mildly ridiculous so I guess I'm not subject to the main topic (sunk cost fallacy; getting more just because they exist) in that particular case.

Shellhead wrote:

Rliyen wrote:

Shellhead wrote: It might be a collector's mentality, which I have sometimes fallen prey to in the past. FFG used to patch their games with expansions, so if you were a big FFG player in the past, you might have internalized that concept.

Agreed. When it came to Runebound 2e, I was afflicted with Gottahavitis. Hell, I sold some stock and bought the Midnight expansion off of Noble Knight over a year ago, and I've STILL yet to play it.

Maybe you should watch Midnight Chronicles to get in the mood:

www.imdb.com/title/tt1079372/

Already watched it. So, I'm immune. It had a low budget. Despite that, I thought it was okay (in the sense of the earlier episodes of Doctor Who).

Meanwhile, I just received a large box from Petersen Games.
Inside?
A dinner-plate-sized diorama of the King in Yellow.
For Cthulhu Wars and four other PG titles.

I don't know what the hell I'm doing now, or what I was thinking then. I bought (KS) this thing before the pandemic.

What function could a miniature that size possibly serve in Cthulhu Wars? I'd be interested in the rules for it. If I had to guess, it doesn't sit directly on the map...

I thought the same thing. But we're BOTH wrong. It DOES sit on the map. If it covers more than one area, it's considered to occupy it as well.

I'll transcribe the card at some point. The rules are pretty modest, but I can't imagine the amount of headache it will induce when trying to set it up on the board.

It definitely falls into the "neat, but not necessary" category.

The nice thing about expansions is that a big cost in gaming is learning new game rules. With an expansion, if done well, you can get a ‘new’ game with relatively little new rules overhead.

As someone pointed out upthread, the print run of expansions is less, sometimes substantially less, than the base game. If you like the base game enough, FOMO is an issue . Otherwise you end up with something like Chaos in the Old World, where before it went permanently OOP, the Horned Rat expansion was going for as much as the base game, sometimes more. War of the Rings expansions go thru much longer droughts of being available vs the base game.

The one type of expansion that I tend to dislike is one that offers a grab bag of variant items that generate a discussion of What are we going to use in this particular play of the game? There was this one time that we were getting ready to set up a game of Battlestar Galactica, with just the base set. One of my friends said that we should take a break so he could call a local friend who is a huge fan of the game so he could bring over all the expansions. Why the hell would we want to do that? Every expansion for BSG was a messy mixture of good, bad, and ugly additions and options for the game, and the bigger ones tend to slow the game down or otherwise make it longer. And it would force us to have a lengthy discussion of which ones to use and which ones to leave out. Or, instead we could, you know, just play the goddamn base set which was a reasonably solid game.

The BSG expansions are such an odd bird. They comprise the best and worst traits in one box.

Half of each expansion is total shit, the other half amazing. All the new gameplay modes can be 100% skipped. On the other hand, the charactes and skill cards and treachery cards go right in with almost no overhead.

Then the three winners, Cylon leaders, Pegasus and The Cylon fleet board. All of them add real value.

This is a thing for me, with this game.

I’d like to see a “designer’s edition,” where the best parts of the expansions are folded into the core set for an amazing experience.

Unfortunately the ship has probably sailed on the license. Even if they got it for free, it’s unlikely that it has the cultural cachet to bring in any sales. So instead we get Yet Another Lovecraftian Theme.

The show came out so long ago that the place I was living didn’t yet have an option for high-speed internet, and we were too cheap to pay for cable/dish for the one show we liked, so we’d go to a local brewery and drink beer while I torrented the latest BSG episode over their Wi-Fi on my Asus netbook. I had a custom lightweight Linux install running on it and felt l33t for the first time since moving my mouse driver into HIGHMEM. I have not felt this l33t since.

Mechanically, Unfathomable folds in some of the best expansion elements, including treachery, a streamlined Cylon Fleet board, and a Cylon-leader like role to replace the sympathizer.

charlest wrote: Mechanically, Unfathomable folds in some of the best expansion elements, including treachery, a streamlined Cylon Fleet board, and a Cylon-leader like role to replace the sympathizer.

Hmm. I might need to pick up Unfathomable after all. I thought that substituting Deep Ones for Cylons was a good idea, because Deep One hybrids look like humans for a long time before they finally succumb to the change to Deep One as an adult.