The tabletop gaming market has flourished in recent years, with an abundance of new Kickstarter campaigns and successful board game companies flooding the market with a myriad of exciting releases ready to hit shelves later this year.
With the success of so many in recent years, it’s no wonder tabletop companies are eager to build on their games’ worlds and campaigns with brand new expansions and sequels. So whether you’re looking to broaden your favorite in-game world, play some new campaigns, or head out on an all-new adventure, here are tabletop expansions worth looking out for in 2021.
10 Here To Slay: Warriors And Druids
From the people that brought you the highly successful Unstable Unicorns, comes Here To Slay, a similarly small boxed strategic card game that’s been welcomed with rave reviews. In Here To Slay, you explore a dangerous new world in an RPG-style adventure, playing heroes taking on some dangerous fantasy-inspired beasts.
The expansion Here To Slay: Warriors & Druids introduces new heroes and monsters, with 35 new cards, including the Wolf Warrior and Noble Shaman Stag Druid party leaders.
9 Petrichor: Cows
Petrichor is an action selection and influence game where up to 5 players take actions that directly influence the environment; including moving clouds for rain, tending to fields, and harvesting crops.
The final expansion for the much-loved earth domination game is Petrichor: Cows, which brings players new actions, climate mechanics, and new climate-sensitive trees including the Norway spruce, Baobab, and Sweet Chestnut. Cows bring manure mechanics into the mix as well as grazing for crops and methane gas, affecting the earth’s climate.
8 Spirits Of The Forest: Moonlight
Spirits of the Forest is a game rooted in nature and myth, with 1-4 players representing the four elements and needing to work to acquire the most spirit symbols by moving tiles, collecting favor tokens, and recovering gemstones.
In the brand new expansion Spirits of the Forest: Moonlight, players must instead work together in a cooperative scenario mode, introducing Nocturnal Creatures, Moonlight bits, and Moonlight tiles, changing the tiles and score system. This is a great new way to play, changing the game from a competitive style into one where players must team up, seeking to uncover the secrets of the forest and get a glimpse of the unseen ancient spirits within.
7 Everdell Mistwood And New Leaf
Everdell is the highly successful resource-based strategy game, seeing players go head-to-head in building and satisfying the animal residents of the charming Everdell Valley with worker placement and card drafting mechanics.
Everdell has already had three successful expansions in Pearlbrook, Bellfaire, and Spirecrest, but has decided to further the world with another two; Mistwood and New Leaf. New Leaf brings more visitors, sights, and events to Everdell, expanding the base game and adding new cards to the deck with the help of a train station. Mistwood however changes the game entirely, having players face the dreaded Nightweave, a spider villainess looking to take over Everdell with her spiderlings.
6 Keyforge: Dark Tidings
The highly successful card game no-ones sure to forget in a hurry, Keyforge gives players a unique sealed deck of cards which they use to battle one another in order to be the first to unlock the vaults and claim victory.
The fifth installment in the Keyforge franchise, Dark Tidings, gives players the same game as before, with each deck containing three out of seven houses but replacing Din with the new Unfathomable; a house specializing in controlling their foes by exhausting enemy creatures. Dark Tidings also introduces an all-new Low/High tide mechanic, as well as ‘Evil Twin’ decks, which copy another player’s deck somewhere else in the world but swaps their cards with evil variants; displaying new artwork and abilities.
5 Bloodborne
The Bloodborne tabletop game sees players returning to the town of Yharnam, the location seen in the original video game. Your team plays as hunters working together against the board in a campaign-based action-adventure game as you seek to quell the growing threat and discover the mysteries behind Yharnam’s plague.
The new expansions add new locations to the tabletop game many fans will recognize from the video game; Cainhurst Castle and the Forbidden Woods. Each expansion comes with 12 new tiles, 20 (21 in Forbidden Woods) miniatures (including two new bosses), 2 all-new campaigns, and a side-mission chapter.
4 Railroad Ink Challenge
Railroad Ink Challenge builds on the success of its predecessor, bringing two new colors and environments to the train track laying puzzle game: Lush Green landscapes and Shining Yellow arid biomes.
3 Dinosaur World & Dinosaur Rawr ‘N Write
The game that’s still continuing what we all should have learned by now was the worst idea in history—building your very own dinosaur theme park! Dinosaur World is a brand new take on the old game—with a new hexagonal board. safari jeep tours and a whole new range of attractions, vendors, and Dinosaur DNA splicing materials. What could possibly go wrong?
Dinosaur Rawn ‘N Write is the brand new roll-and-write style version of the game; applying a dice drafting mechanic for worker placement and a victory points-based scoring system rating how well your park fits in attractions, roads, and dinosaurs into the space provided.
2 Root: The Marauder Expansion
Root is the cute but savage strategy wargame that sees up to 6 players playing as woodland critter factions battling for control of the forest. It’s already seen two great expansions in Riverfolk and Underworld; bringing the merchant river otters, lizard cult, mole duchy, and corvid conspiracy factions into play, but has recently expanded with the new Marauders.
Root: The Marauder Expansion invites players to play two new parties: The Lord of the Hundreds and Keepers in Iron. The Lord of the Hundreds is the mice faction, introducing a vast horde of warriors only interested in domination, arson, and plundering. The Keepers in Iron are the badgers, here to seek and recover scattered relics of an ancient civilization who seek to ally with other factions and establish woodland way-stations.
1 Frosthaven
The stunning sequel and expansion to the Gloomhaven universe, Frosthaven see’s the return of Gloomhaven’s Euro-inspired dungeon crawling mechanics but set in the new frigid outpost of Frosthaven, crawling with new monsters and mysteries.
Frosthaven allows 1-4 players to select from a plethora of characters—including some new unlockable classes—and tasks your team with building up the Frosthaven outpost. It’s an epic campaign centered around missions and monster-slaying goals, that will have your party dealing with the unforgiving cold while working to make peace with new races against even more sinister foes.
NEXT: 5 Reasons Gloomhaven Is Better Than Dungeons & Dragons (And 5 Reasons It Isn’t)
