A $30 Game In A $50 Box

It's always especially disappointing to me when a great (or even a merely adequate) game is let down by sub-standard production values. You could argue that it shouldn't matter that much, as long as the playing pieces work your imagination can do the rest, and that may have been true in the '70s and '80s with games like Dune or Aliens that have some great game play but fall short on component quality.

In the current board game renaissance, however, the bar has been significantly raised, so much so that a game that doesn't look good is at best embarrassing, and at worst difficult to find players for. The Expanse Board Game, published by Wizkids and based on the television and book series, is such a game.

The game itself is fairly good. Players control the planetary governments that hover in the background of the TV series, manipulating events in order to control the solar system. The core of the game is a row of action cards which are purchased by players using their victory points, and then used either for their printed game effect, or spent for more general actions such as moving fleets around the board. There are several scoring cards shuffled into various points of the deck, and when one of these comes up, players score points based on the number of planets and moons they control, with ties broken by the strength of a player's fleet.

It's a fairly basic area control game, with two important elements that make it feel like the TV show it's based on. One is that each player has a series of tech cards that are earned at various points throughout the game, which serve to escalate the conflict between the planets; early in the game there is an uneasy truce in which players are not allowed to openly attack each other, but this quickly escalates into open warfare, much as it does over the course of the show.

The other interesting game element is the Rocinante, the misfit ship whose crew are the main characters of the show. In the game, James Holden and his crew change their alliance from turn to turn, with control of them going to whichever player is in last place. I particularly like this touch, as it reflects their shifting alliances and also their tendency throughout the series to support the underdog.

The aforementioned poor components -- mainly muddy images on the cards, a bland board that is sometimes difficult to read, and too-small cardboard counters to represent each player's mighty warships -- stop just short of actually being distracting, and might be acceptable if the game's asking price were a little lower.

On the other hand, maybe that's appropriate for a game that takes place in the Belt, where resources are scarce and everything is more expensive than it should be.

Rating: 3 (out of 5) A decent game that would probably rate higher if either the production quality were better, or the price point were lower.

• The Expanse Board Game official website
• The Expanse Board Game on BoardGameGeek