Expansion Packs Update

Close Encounters is now pretty much finished in terms of development. I’m still making occasional tweaks to the phrasing of some of the booklets, but it’s all basically finalised. While I work on marketing for that, I’m also putting some of my attention into expansion packs for it.

At present, I have three ideas for expansion packs. There’s one for equipment and heavy weapons; one for tactics and squad leaders; and one with fire support mechs (robots). All of them come with more tiles, more figures, more enemies, more story, and so on.

There are several reasons why I’m thinking of splitting them up that way. The first reason is that each expansion would be a significant “chunk” of value for the purchaser. I know that if I was paying for an expansion pack I would expect to receive something that made a noticeable difference to how the game played, and I want to offer that to my customers.

Second, although each expansion adds significant value, I don’t want it to be overwhelming for people to learn and integrate the new elements into their games. There can be a feeling that you need to use all the new stuff to play the game how it’s meant to be played. By splitting the packs up, the pressure to learn lots of new stuff at once is reduced.

Third, it lets customers choose what they’re most interested in. If you like the idea of having squad leaders and tactics, get that pack. Rather have big guns and equipment to play with? Get that pack instead. And, if you’re kind of keen but not sure, you can get one pack and see how it plays out as a guide to whether you think the other packs are worth getting.

Fourthly, it splits up the cost. Personally, I think Close Encounters is a fantastic game straight out of the box. Playing with all the expansions at once makes it even more fantastic! Unfortunately, the cost of components is significant. Splitting the expansions up allows the price for each expansion to be reasonable.

So, there are good reasons for splitting the expansion packs up in this way. All that being said, however, there are also other ways they could be split. In my next post, I’ll talk about some of those.