Sometimes you love a game, but you want more. What if there are no official expansions, or you’ve already got them all, but it’s still not enough?
Welcome to the world of fan expansions!
I’m using the term to mean a few different things:
· Play modifications – house rules, if you will, suggestions to make a game simpler or harder, or just more interesting, perhaps providing solo rules for games that don’t have a single-player mode.
· Additional cards to play with – this will be the main topic for discussion here.
· Other play components – replacement boards/maps, for example. Sometimes the changes are so comprehensive, it’s almost a new game. Another thing people like doing is replacing boring old card tokens with snazzy 3d-printed ones.
Where Do You Find Them?
BoardGameGeek (BGG) files and forums are an excellent source of such material, and here are a few from the first page of the Terraforming Mars files list (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/167791/terraforming-mars/files):
· 3D printable (STL) terrain pieces – replacement tokens to place on the board.
· 22 unoficial [sic] corporations to print – extra cards to add to the deck.
· Solo variant – rules variant.
· Terraforming Mars: Junior – simplified boards and rules for young kids to enjoy the game.
And that’s just a few of the 200+ files there.
On the topic of Terraforming Mars, you can find the awesome GIGA Expansion at https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2293920/terraforming-mars-giga-expansion-ares-pathfinder-b—a humungous board (below) and vast numbers of cards, combining many official and unofficial expansions.
You can spend absolutely ages perusing BGG’s fan expansions for your favourite games.
Moar Birb!
Stonemaier Games is particularly supportive of Wingspan fan creators, with a page dedicated to them on their site: https://stonemaiergames.com/games/wingspan/wingspan-fan-creations/.
The page also includes some ‘creation guidelines,’ which serve as a reminder that being able to create and use such material is a privilege not to be abused:
We love it when fans engage with our games and make fan expansions! But please keep in mind that card frame templates are provide for your personal use only. Printed versions of these cards can not be distributed nor sold. Likewise, digital versions also cannot be sold.
You may post digital versions of your creations online for people to download, print, cut, and sleeve at home. If you do so, please make it clear both on the card itself (no official art, icons, or trademarked terms; add “Fan Made” to every card) and in the description of your files (“This is not an official Stonemaier product”) that this is a fan-made card. This is so there is no confusion about what is or is not official.
[…]
These rules protect the designers, artists, graphic designers, and countless other people who work hard to create games for your enjoyment.
The game’s intellectual property belongs to the producer, and others should not seek to profit from it or tarnish the brand’s reputation.
Incidentally, Stonemaier Games has packaged and distributed professional versions of some fan created cards in the past, and I believe another block is coming soon. That’s the best way to get high quality extra cards, but it doesn’t happen very often.
Below are examples of cards from https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3013127/custom-cards-designed-by-my-kids, a charming set of cards created by a fan and his young daughters; https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3542448/potoo-fan-pack, the very pretty Potoo fan pack; and https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/253583/extinct-birds-fan-expansion—who wouldn’t want a dodo in their game?
What Next?
Okay, so you have a collection of image files for boards and cards; now what?
The cheapest approach is to print them yourself—quick and convenient. The downside is quality. It’s also not as easy as it might sound as it’s tricky to align fronts and backs of cards. (Printing front and back on separate sheets and gluing them together can be better than double-sided printing.) And while a guillotine can give you nice sharp edges, tidily rounding corners is a chore, though craft cutting machines like the ones produced by Cricut (https://cricut.com) can help.
Even so, your cards aren’t going to look much like those of the actual game—maybe that doesn’t matter, but I’d prefer not to be able to tell if the next card I’m going to draw is a custom one. Sleeving all the cards could reduce the difference in appearance, or… An alternative is getting them printed by an external company. Yes, yes, I know that’s bending, if not breaking, Jamey Stegmaier’s rules, but I’m sure publishers will turn a blind eye at you printing one set of cards for your own use.
I’ve had success with PersonalisedPlayingCards (https://personalisedplayingcards.com); there are other companies such as MakePlayingCards, though PPC is the only one I’ve come across so far which prints in the UK, making delivery fast and cheap. But postage is the only thing that’s cheap: at time of writing, a pack of 54 cards costs about £14 all in. Still, for only a few decks, that probably works out at less than a high-quality printer and craft cutter, and the cards do look good, and fairly close to those of the ‘real’ game.
The overall process is:
· Collect all your image files (not forgetting card backs). You’ll need to ensure there’s adequate border padding (3-4mm) as some of the image will get cut off when printed, so you want to make sure all the important content is well away from the edges.
· Determine the correct card size. Fortunately, many games these days do seem to have standardised on bridge or poker card sizes (56×87mm and 63×88mm, respectively—different companies quote other sizes for these, differing by half or a whole millimetre, but you’ll just have to settle for what you get—your custom printed cards are never going to be identical to the actual game’s); if your game uses different sizes, you’ll have to search farther for a print company.
· PPC seems to be set up to produce conventional playing cards, hence the default of 54 cards (the 52 suit cards and 2 jokers), with the usual hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs on the front, but you can select ‘double-sided personalised’ to let you override that.
· Next, you’ll be dropped into an editor where you first upload all your image files, then add them to the cards. The image below shows one of the Potoo cards mid-edit. (Note the small grey boxes at the corners of the card—these allow manipulation to get the image properly centred and scaled, but there’s not a lot of leeway.)
· When you’re done (and do double check the cards, as the UI is a bit clunky), it’s time to finalise things and pay.
Here are a few of the cards I ended up with. As I said earlier, not identical to actual Wingspan cards (colours a little muted, cards not as thick), but they’re good enough for my games. (Other printers offer a choice of different card stock and finishes, which might get closer to the real thing, but these ones were expensive enough that I’m not going to double the cost to take that chance.)
Getting boards printed is more of a challenge, though there are poster printing companies that could help out. I’m afraid you’re on your own here, since I’ve not investigated this yet; and 3d printing is a whole other adventure.
What If You’re Bitten By The Bug?
So, you see a game and think you’ve got an idea for an expansion… Well, what’s stopping you? Get your pen and paper out and start sketching.
Depending on the game, you might find tools and templates. For example, the Stonemaier page mentioned earlier includes a link to template files. Even better, if Wingspan’s the game you’re interested in, there’s a quick and easy card designing tool at https://wingspan-card-site.vercel.app/creator to get you started.
Finally, in my life outside board games, I’m a writer, and several of my stories include dragons. Shortly after discovering Wyrmspan and the concept of fan expansions, I created this card, starring one of my dragons:
(The image is from the front cover of my novel.)
The card’s not particularly playable, but I’m contemplating using it as a business card to hand out at conventions rather than for game, though I’m not sure how much of an intersection there is between Wyrmspan fans and speculative fiction readers.
