by skipsizemore
out4blood wrote:
Leaders and Cities are expansions. By definition, they are both superfluous. His personal preference for one over the other is just personal preference. I fail to see any "reasoning".
... Says the guy who's sworn off expansions. :) Something can be not strictly necessary without being superfluous, as the word is used here. A house without a garage is still a perfectly serviceable house; this doesn't mean that a garage is superfluous.
I think the idea is that game design is subject to cost-benefit analysis. If the cost (complexity, game length, downtime, chaos, price, etc.) is not justified by a corresponding benefit (balance, depth, thematic immersion, etc.) then it is superfluous. Adding a good expansion to a game makes it a better game (arguably), while adding a superfluous expansion lessens it by adding costs without sufficient benefit.
I can't say that I agree about Leaders, based on my plays with it, but it seems to me a valid argument.
Applying the same logic back to Terra Mystica, there may be parts of the game that could be removed, lessening the game's cost without losing a correspondingly great benefit. I don't know, based on one play, but the design did seem rather busy.