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WizKids Announces The Expanse Board Game

By Polar_Bear
In Board Games
Feb 17th, 2017
4 Comments
3448 Views

WizKids continues to expand out from their core products of HeroClix and Dice Masters with the announcement of another new board game. This time it’s based on the Syfy television series, The Expanse. Who will you be in control of? The Earth’s UN Forces? The military of Mars? The rebels of the O.P.A.? Or the Protogen Inc. company?

From the announcement:

The upcoming board game The Expanse, based on the Syfy hit television series by the same name, will be released this June as announced by WizKids president Justin Ziran.

Geoff Engelstein, whose credits include the popular board games Space Cadets, Dragon and the Flagon and the upcoming Fog of War, designed the new game. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, the authors of the best selling original book series published under the pen name James S. A. Corey, collaborated on the project.

The Expanse board game can be played with two to four players and focuses on politics, conquest and intrigue similar to the board game Twilight Struggle, although with a shorter play time. The card-driven game uses key images from the show along with action points and events that allow players to move and place “Fleets” and “Influence”.

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  • hvedhrungr

    I’m a big fan of the Expanse, having read a bunch of the books and keenly following the TV adaptation.
    However, I wonder if a base game like Twilight Struggle, which has gotten very mixed reviews and is basically a very specialised, very niche and, for all the historic and political nods, a very tedious game, is a good fit for this. Yes, the Expanse is, at its very core, a political power struggle. But there are other, more easily approachable games to use as a canvas to paint the Expanse over.

    That, and it really seems like a painfully obvious, halfheartedly executed money grab. $50? Wow.

    • jhureadrm

      I too am wondering if this is a good fit, and while you may be 100% correct, it is not exactly accurate to say Twilight Struggle has “mixed reviews”. Nor is it a niche game based on 26K reviews and an 8.4 rating on boardgame geek. It is the #1 game in wargames and #3 in strategy games. That doesn’t feel mixed to me. Granted, it is not everyone’s cup of tea- but the consensus is there that people overwhelmingly like it.
      FWIW

      • hvedhrungr

        I hadn’t realised Twilight Struggle scored so highly on BGG. Granted, I don’t frequent BGG very often, and haven’t even registered an account there…
        I was going more from the places I usually get my game reviews from, and from personal experience from the FLGSs I visit every now and then.
        And yeah, I still maintain Twilight Struggle may *thematically* make sense as a base for the Expanse adaption, but where mechanics are concerned, I’m afraid it will be as tedious and hard to get into as the original. I would even go so far as to say that Twilight Imperium may have been a better fit, and that game is also hard to get into and runs overly long…

    • TeganVanDiemen

      Yeah, Twilight Struggle, though it does rate extremely well on BGG, is reasonably niche (I suspect its high rating on BGG stems from the fact that if your even going to attempt to play it, you’re probably the sort of person who’s going to like it). But having said that, the fact that this is only described as ‘similar to’ Twilight Struggle, has a shorter player time, and is designed by Geoff Engelstein, I’m pretty confident it’ll have broader market appeal than Twilight Struggle. Geoff knows the audience he’s catering for.

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