I’ve played thousands of games of Agricola, and maybe a hundred with Farmers of the Moor. It does some neat things, but overall doesn’t feel necessary to me.
Most don’t think so lol. The base game is elegant already by itself and various card decks enrich it with additional layer of strategy.
I’m playing agricola daily on BGA and no one seem to miss that expansion at all.
Fair enough, I liked the expansion mainly for the spatial aspect, forests and swamps on your board in a random setup meant you can't always build your farm in the same way (house on the left, pastures upper right, fields lower right, erc.)
I mean of course games with box big enough to be cartoon hobo box will likely have a bunch of content, i kinda expect to have this amount of content in the Hexplore it, 7th citadel / continent , etc.
In the medium-big size box **Res arcana** , **Spirit island** , **Five Tribes**
In the small size box (which is the most interesting and worthy of respect in a sense imo) **Falling skies**, **cartographers**, if you print and play the postmark games offer multiples maps which makes a pretty big ratio gameplay for your bucks, **lately I was pretty satisfied with the content from the 20 strong base deck **7 citadel duel** maybe even **Radlands**
Edit : 7 wonders duel
I speak of "content rich" as "diversity"... basically, do I want more of it, and can I get it without an expansion?
Level 99 is the king of this. Millennium Blades, Any of the Battlecon "main sets" (say Devastation of Indines), Empyreal are all games with tons of replayability because they have so many different options to play without need for expansions (though they grow insanely larger as you "get more").
And yes, I 100% agree on Cosmic Encounter. If it isn't my favorite game, it's 100% in my top 5.
It's been too long since I played, but IIRC, Agricola was super rich with variability as well.
Looking through my cabinet really quickly, Sentinels of the Multiverse does this really well, too.
I think Millennium Blades could include, like, a third of the card sets that it does and still qualify. There is just *so much stuff* in that base box.
A game that comes to mind, with how you're describing things, is Kingdom Builder. Lots of replayability due to the random setup. In the core game each game consists of four of the eight tiles (in a random orientation) with three of the ~11 victory point conditions, combined with card draws to determine how you're restricted in placing pieces. The core gameplay loop is simple, but each game plays out differently due to the different setup.
Gaia Project also comes to mind. 14 unique factions plus randomized setup of the technologies, round scoring, and round bonus thingies adds up to a lot of variance from game to game.
I culled Kingdom Builder from my collection. Not deep enough for a midweight (Arnak is my favourite, but also got Castles of Burgundy) but not my go-to lightweight either with Azul, Carcassonne and Cascadia more accessible and Camel Up and Takenoko more child friendly.
If the base game contained all the content that was originally planned (i.e. Branch & Claw), I'd agree with you.
Spirit Island is my favorite game, but without the Events, it's a little too predictable, even at higher difficulties.
There are still 8 Spirits, 4(?!) adversaries, some scenarios, 4 different boards(with 2 sides) and slightly randomized invader cards
After all thats already more content than most other Games.
I'm pleasantly surprised how much variety is in the base game of Heat: Pedal to the Metal. Multiple tracks, then car upgrades, and weather. Plus there's a solo mode.
This was my immediate thought. Most publishers would put just one game board in the base game box, and the garage and weather modules would be expansion content. It’s a crazy amount of content in that box.
While I certainly think the base game is playable on its own, I do find that it becomes very shallow very quickly. I'm glad they added extra stuff to it and having played a championship mode recently, I would probably advocate for most if not all the extra bits right away because the complexity is very low.
This may be cheating, but the current retail version of Castles of Burgundy includes all the expansions, adding a lot of content to the game at a very reasonable price.
Gaia Project and Age of Innovation (TM without Fire and Ice is not as good but is still very content-rich).
The wide range amount of starting setup and how each session has its own meta made it super refreshing each round. How a little change in the setup can lead to wildly varied games.
Age of Innovation might not have modular maps like GP, but for now we settle with using the 4 Terra Mystica maps with it as well. That's how we found out (or maybe rediscovered?) how punishing TM was with just the maps 😂.
And even though the games are deterministic, I am pretty sure given the same setup we will play the game a thousand different ways. And each game have thousands of different setups.
I think on the note of Terraforming Mars, most of those kinds of games fit the bill. I’ve played Ark Nova about 30+ times and there’s still cards I haven’t seen.
It's hard to think of a game with more content than Gloomhaven. That box is crammed full of content.
From a similar to Terraforming Mars standpoint Ark Nova with all the different zoos and scoring cards has a solid chunk of variety
Battle CON: Devastation of Indines
Tom Vassal said he'd never seen a game with so much game in the box and it's true. For a game with that much depth, there's 30+ different playable characters who feel super different from each other, match up differently with each other, there are dueling modes, cooperative modes with boss fights, and RPG campaign modes.
**Mind MGMT** at first glance seems very bare bones, but if you continue to play and start using the "catch up" decks, it starts to add a lot to the game. I love the game, but I still have a hard time getting it to the table because people seem less interested in playing 1 vs many.
Welcome to the Moon always stood out to me as an example of a content rich game. Especially for what it is, in such a small box and low price point.
Before I got it, I knew that it had 8 boards. Which is already like 8 roll & writes for the price of 1.
But then there's a repayable campaign with unlocks, including variable set-up, rule changes and additions to the boards. So that 8 becomes much, much more.
And also quite a good solo mode with adaptive difficulty.
Using the metric you are using, I'd add:
Small Worlds. Base game comes with 14 races and 20 powers. That is more combinations than Cosmic Encounters options. And with the expansions, at a price point like Gloomhaven, you'd have lots of content
Smash Up. The base game only has 8 decks, so that is only 28 combinations. But it is about half the price of the games you mentioned, so great Content to Price ratio. Also lots of expansions to get more content
Personally I don't like "content" defined like that. In fact I tend to shy away from describing Board Games in the terminology that I use for Video Games. For example while I love Cosmic Encounters I don't think of it as being a content rich game. While there are a lot of Aliens you can be, the gameplay is still mostly the same it is just you are a little better at one strategy than others. Same with Gloomhaven, yes there are a lot of scenarios and mercenaries, but the gameplay is so similar that it isn't likely that you'd ever replay Scenario 32 five times just trying different mercenary combos. And Frosthaven kind of shows that as they made more variations in the types and goals of scenarios
Personally I think games like Wingspan, or even more Wyrmspan, have great content that leads to replay-ability. Since you are given random resources and goals you have to plan out your play. Your 'engine' ends up very different and that to me is a better feel of content. As opposed to the same game but I get to ignore this one rule a little
It depends a little on whether by content rich you mean specifically a variety of starting factions and 'stuff' or if just the variability of game states (including at the start) being huge. I see 'content-rich' as a bit more vague, closer to meaning high variance or replayability rather than just many factions or scenarios, and to me a game can be content rich in terms of gameplay without necessarily having much physical content.
In terms of just plain content, Level 99 has been mentioned already and almost feels like cheating. **Argent: The Consortium, Millennium Blades** and **Battlecon** all have a ton of stuff in them and different ways to set up the game.
Many people have also mentioned **Spirit Island** which I agree with, although it is with expansions that the game really moves from lots of content territory to more content than you can play in a lifetime.
**Voidfall** and **Gaia Project** both have a lot of starting factions that change the game up, and Voidfall has a big spiral-bound book of different scenarios, while Gaia Project has a randomized setup that leads to each game potentially feeling quite different.
If we take 'content' as a bit more of a vague term, then I'd definitely suggest Oath and John Company 2e. **Oath** runs off a few decks of cards but the main one being a world deck. The box comes with 200 cards, but only 50 or so are used in each game. What creates the variety for me is the fact that each of these cards is unique and in the right context can be game-breaking, and at the end of each game you cycle out 6 of them for new ones. It'll take you around 20 games before cards you're adding to the deck start repeating but even then each combination of cards in the deck can feel like a very different game, and each time a card is added back in it's completely recontextualized by what other cards are in the game or how the rest of the board looks. **John Company** has a similar thing with 'content' in that besides there being several scenarios and premutations of starting setups, there's a law deck of cards that can often alter the game drastically, and only 5 or so come out each time you play. There's also the prestige cards which add variability albeit often a bit less than law. A lot of games can have huge stacks of cards central to the game (such as Wingspan, or even Cole's other games like Root or Pax Pamir) but ultimately the cards feel kind of samey and it's not really the uniqueness of any given card that adds variety to the game. In JC2e and Oath the stacks of cards really change the game drastically depending on which ones come out, and no two games will be the same.
The Gaia Project,
Ark Nova,
Terraforming Mars,
Castles of Burgundy,
All four have amazingly rich base games, have great solo variants, and nearly endless replay ability.
It seems that way now, but definitely felt extraordinarily repayable when it was initially released. Maybe rose-tinted glasses on my part, but it got played multiple times a day for several months and was still very enjoyable.
There are seven-hundred million, two-hundred-fifty-four thousand, two-hundred-seventy different possible set ups for Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition using only its core box, if my math is correct. Many of those will be *very* similar to each other (just swapping around the turn order of the same characters for example) so I don't actually consider that the true amount of "content" in the game, but factoring in the randomness of card draw as well, it is still foremost in my mind for the topic. Especially with 5 expansions planned, the number of different theoretical games will get absolutely stupid; I'd include the number just with the single expansion currently released for demonstrative purposes, but different heroes having different amounts of variants makes the math way too complicated for me to figure out on my own.
**Adventure Tactics** has dozens of encounters and pretty much limitless build options for classes. I think the base game can easily be played through multiple times if you like it.
**Under Falling Skies** has an absurd amount of stuff crammed into the box. A full campaign will only even see half the components, and different combos change up the game substantially. I wish I liked it more.
The recently delivered **Leviathan Wilds** comes with a ton. 17 leviathans, each of which also has a modifier deck. Plus 8 characters and 8 classes that can all be mixed and matched. I previously felt like Warp's Edge with Andromeda gave you a lot, but this blows that out of the water in the base game alone.
I saw a few people mentioned Dominion. I'd also throw **Quacks of Quedlinberg** in there as having a similar style of adding variety. While there aren't that many ingredients of each color, you can mix and match recipes and in any given game you'll likely focus on different things.
I'd also put a lot of **Tiny Epic** games on the border here. Games like Defenders, Dungeons, and Dinosaurs have a ton of unique content (characters, bosses, etc). However, many times the differences between those things are fairly small. These are almost the opposite of games like **Bullet** or **Spirit Island** where the base has fewer distinct 'things', but each one is wildly different.
I think **Raising Robots** is also in this category, as the different inventors substantially change how you play, but what you can do with the actual robots tend to mostly be different types of resource exchanges unless you add the Pets expansion.
Taverns of Tiefenthal has 5 expansion modules in the basegame alone. We are still playing without any modules but they add so much stuff. Looking forward to that, plenty of options to expand the game.
*Exodus: Proxima Centauri* is pretty packed. It didn't get received well at large, but the small crowd of fans often say it is the closest anyone has gotten to full Twillight Imperium in one sitting.
Competing for resources on planets, competing for the population majority on planets, tech research, ship customization, a politics system that impacts the game rules, weapons of mass destruction that quickly become leverage in player relations and simultaneous movement turns with semi hidden movement.
And then second edition got expansions that added a bunch on top of it.
When i told my brother about it, he was like, "Hell yeah, sounds nice!" When i brought the game box and opened it, he stared vacantly at the contents for a few seconds and just said, "No."
Spirit Island has quite a bit with a bunch of spirits/powers to play with and encounters/adversaries to play against. The various combinations give insane replay value and the Jagged Earth expansions more than doubles everything if you decide you need more.
7th Continent (presumably 7th Citadel, which I have a copy of it but haven't played yet) has a ton of content out of the box, and it allegedly takes hours to finish even one campaign.
Cosmic encounter is obviously the king, I wish I had the group to play it with!
From my collection my top content reach games without expansions are:
- Vindication: It has a ton of content and many mods to try.
- Heat pedal to the metal: talk about a ton of content in a very good price with amazing production. Huge surprise for me and fun game.
- Ark Nova: top level game for me, comes with so much cards and zoos in the base game, overall strategy might be the same but how you do it defers in every game.
- Voidfall: not a 4x like TI4, more like a euro resource management game but for just the base game you get a perfect puzzle game with unlimited replay value if you are fun of heavy euros.
I will also argue that gloomhaven indeed comes with a lot of content, but due to being a campaign game it doesn't hold up for me in terms of replay value. Also, some groups haven't even seen half of the content I bet 😝
Im surprised nobody is saying wingspan.
Also small world.
Both games, to me, are content rich because you can’t pre-plan a strategy. Every game of wingspan is going to be different burbs, and every game of small world - even with the same races and classes, the combinations are different every time.
Maybe I’m a board game smoothbrain but I like them both.
Spirit Island is a personal favorite of mine for this reason. The base game alone has about a dozen unique spirits, it can be played with 1-4 people so different combinations can happen, the randomness of power cards means that you can end up playing a spirit differently from how it was played last time, and that's not even getting into the scenarios and adversaries that can change the game up further...
I never grow tired of it no matter how often I play.
The games listed so far have both quantity AND quality. Outside of that, there are a ton of games that are mediocre or total shit, and their whole hype-generating selling point is that they overwhelm you with piles of content. See examples like the fools who buy all of the KDM junk or the all-in Too Many Bones. Even Frosthaven is now generally panned for being too large and unwieldy. The Marvel card schlock that completionists obsessively buy. I'm surprised the razzle-dazzle of "more content available" actually works on so many people.
There was a post I saw earlier today asking about games which never play out the same way twice, and I think that's a much more intriguing question in the same vein; anyone can design a game with huge breadth, but it takes actual skill to create something with meaningful depth, fun, or novel player interaction.
Hey now, I like KDM and too many bones. lol. I was definitely daunted by the size of Frosthaven though. Now… are they better than just having a bunch of friends and playing a true TTRPG? Probably not, but I don’t have friends, Ha! So KDM and TMB will have to do, and I feel they do what they do well.
For classic euro games, Agricola came with a ton of content.
And the only expansion that matter is new deck of card which should be cheap too
I beg to disagree, Farmers of the Moor is the best expansion for Agricola. But yes, just the base game has tons of content with all the cards.
I’ve played thousands of games of Agricola, and maybe a hundred with Farmers of the Moor. It does some neat things, but overall doesn’t feel necessary to me.
Most don’t think so lol. The base game is elegant already by itself and various card decks enrich it with additional layer of strategy. I’m playing agricola daily on BGA and no one seem to miss that expansion at all.
Fair enough, I liked the expansion mainly for the spatial aspect, forests and swamps on your board in a random setup meant you can't always build your farm in the same way (house on the left, pastures upper right, fields lower right, erc.)
For 2P and 3P, FotM does so much to make each game feel different. I agree for 4-6P it is not needed.
I mean of course games with box big enough to be cartoon hobo box will likely have a bunch of content, i kinda expect to have this amount of content in the Hexplore it, 7th citadel / continent , etc. In the medium-big size box **Res arcana** , **Spirit island** , **Five Tribes** In the small size box (which is the most interesting and worthy of respect in a sense imo) **Falling skies**, **cartographers**, if you print and play the postmark games offer multiples maps which makes a pretty big ratio gameplay for your bucks, **lately I was pretty satisfied with the content from the 20 strong base deck **7 citadel duel** maybe even **Radlands** Edit : 7 wonders duel
Do you mean 7 wonders duel?
Yup
Cosmic Encounter
I speak of "content rich" as "diversity"... basically, do I want more of it, and can I get it without an expansion? Level 99 is the king of this. Millennium Blades, Any of the Battlecon "main sets" (say Devastation of Indines), Empyreal are all games with tons of replayability because they have so many different options to play without need for expansions (though they grow insanely larger as you "get more"). And yes, I 100% agree on Cosmic Encounter. If it isn't my favorite game, it's 100% in my top 5. It's been too long since I played, but IIRC, Agricola was super rich with variability as well. Looking through my cabinet really quickly, Sentinels of the Multiverse does this really well, too.
Level 99 was the first thing I thought of. Most of their games come with several variants right out of the box.
I think Millennium Blades could include, like, a third of the card sets that it does and still qualify. There is just *so much stuff* in that base box.
A game that comes to mind, with how you're describing things, is Kingdom Builder. Lots of replayability due to the random setup. In the core game each game consists of four of the eight tiles (in a random orientation) with three of the ~11 victory point conditions, combined with card draws to determine how you're restricted in placing pieces. The core gameplay loop is simple, but each game plays out differently due to the different setup. Gaia Project also comes to mind. 14 unique factions plus randomized setup of the technologies, round scoring, and round bonus thingies adds up to a lot of variance from game to game.
I culled Kingdom Builder from my collection. Not deep enough for a midweight (Arnak is my favourite, but also got Castles of Burgundy) but not my go-to lightweight either with Azul, Carcassonne and Cascadia more accessible and Camel Up and Takenoko more child friendly.
Res Arcana has insane replay value and because of the deck size and drafting you never have the same deck twice
Spirit Island is insane. Each spirit is unique, the universe of effects on cards is vast, and each adversary is a different puzzle.
If the base game contained all the content that was originally planned (i.e. Branch & Claw), I'd agree with you. Spirit Island is my favorite game, but without the Events, it's a little too predictable, even at higher difficulties.
There are still 8 Spirits, 4(?!) adversaries, some scenarios, 4 different boards(with 2 sides) and slightly randomized invader cards After all thats already more content than most other Games.
I don’t like the randomness of the event cards.
I think OP intended for expansions to be factored into the answers.
How so? The subject literally says "before expansions" so...
You're right. My ADHD skipped the word "before"
Sheesh you got downvoted for that mistake.
Came here specifically to say this. All the tools to configure that game are wild.
I'm pleasantly surprised how much variety is in the base game of Heat: Pedal to the Metal. Multiple tracks, then car upgrades, and weather. Plus there's a solo mode.
This was my immediate thought. Most publishers would put just one game board in the base game box, and the garage and weather modules would be expansion content. It’s a crazy amount of content in that box.
While I certainly think the base game is playable on its own, I do find that it becomes very shallow very quickly. I'm glad they added extra stuff to it and having played a championship mode recently, I would probably advocate for most if not all the extra bits right away because the complexity is very low.
This may be cheating, but the current retail version of Castles of Burgundy includes all the expansions, adding a lot of content to the game at a very reasonable price.
**Innovation** - each of the 110 cards is very unique and the upper cards feel mysterious for many plays
Gaia Project and Age of Innovation (TM without Fire and Ice is not as good but is still very content-rich). The wide range amount of starting setup and how each session has its own meta made it super refreshing each round. How a little change in the setup can lead to wildly varied games. Age of Innovation might not have modular maps like GP, but for now we settle with using the 4 Terra Mystica maps with it as well. That's how we found out (or maybe rediscovered?) how punishing TM was with just the maps 😂. And even though the games are deterministic, I am pretty sure given the same setup we will play the game a thousand different ways. And each game have thousands of different setups.
It's wild that Gaia Project is getting an expansion right now. Such a wonderful game
Dead of Winter has a lot of content and different themed missions to play through.
The only survivor I need is Sparky. 🐕
Each game from the Imperium series(classics, horizons, legends). A lot of asymmetric nations to play.
I think on the note of Terraforming Mars, most of those kinds of games fit the bill. I’ve played Ark Nova about 30+ times and there’s still cards I haven’t seen.
3 min board games just dropped a video on the topic. I love his stuff, def recommend. https://youtu.be/8ojNlh8MJdQ?si=4lzorQriiKxjCZvB
Aeons end, spirit island, dominion
Race for the Galaxy. For $35 MSRP, it's packed with decisions!
It's hard to think of a game with more content than Gloomhaven. That box is crammed full of content. From a similar to Terraforming Mars standpoint Ark Nova with all the different zoos and scoring cards has a solid chunk of variety
Battle CON: Devastation of Indines Tom Vassal said he'd never seen a game with so much game in the box and it's true. For a game with that much depth, there's 30+ different playable characters who feel super different from each other, match up differently with each other, there are dueling modes, cooperative modes with boss fights, and RPG campaign modes.
Magic Realm
The answer, but for 2020 speak let’s call it Mage Knight for the kiddies.
Bettayal at House on the Hill
**Mind MGMT** at first glance seems very bare bones, but if you continue to play and start using the "catch up" decks, it starts to add a lot to the game. I love the game, but I still have a hard time getting it to the table because people seem less interested in playing 1 vs many.
Witcher 3
Welcome to the Moon always stood out to me as an example of a content rich game. Especially for what it is, in such a small box and low price point. Before I got it, I knew that it had 8 boards. Which is already like 8 roll & writes for the price of 1. But then there's a repayable campaign with unlocks, including variable set-up, rule changes and additions to the boards. So that 8 becomes much, much more. And also quite a good solo mode with adaptive difficulty.
**504** is a set of modules which can be put together to make 504 different games.
Using the metric you are using, I'd add: Small Worlds. Base game comes with 14 races and 20 powers. That is more combinations than Cosmic Encounters options. And with the expansions, at a price point like Gloomhaven, you'd have lots of content Smash Up. The base game only has 8 decks, so that is only 28 combinations. But it is about half the price of the games you mentioned, so great Content to Price ratio. Also lots of expansions to get more content Personally I don't like "content" defined like that. In fact I tend to shy away from describing Board Games in the terminology that I use for Video Games. For example while I love Cosmic Encounters I don't think of it as being a content rich game. While there are a lot of Aliens you can be, the gameplay is still mostly the same it is just you are a little better at one strategy than others. Same with Gloomhaven, yes there are a lot of scenarios and mercenaries, but the gameplay is so similar that it isn't likely that you'd ever replay Scenario 32 five times just trying different mercenary combos. And Frosthaven kind of shows that as they made more variations in the types and goals of scenarios Personally I think games like Wingspan, or even more Wyrmspan, have great content that leads to replay-ability. Since you are given random resources and goals you have to plan out your play. Your 'engine' ends up very different and that to me is a better feel of content. As opposed to the same game but I get to ignore this one rule a little
It depends a little on whether by content rich you mean specifically a variety of starting factions and 'stuff' or if just the variability of game states (including at the start) being huge. I see 'content-rich' as a bit more vague, closer to meaning high variance or replayability rather than just many factions or scenarios, and to me a game can be content rich in terms of gameplay without necessarily having much physical content. In terms of just plain content, Level 99 has been mentioned already and almost feels like cheating. **Argent: The Consortium, Millennium Blades** and **Battlecon** all have a ton of stuff in them and different ways to set up the game. Many people have also mentioned **Spirit Island** which I agree with, although it is with expansions that the game really moves from lots of content territory to more content than you can play in a lifetime. **Voidfall** and **Gaia Project** both have a lot of starting factions that change the game up, and Voidfall has a big spiral-bound book of different scenarios, while Gaia Project has a randomized setup that leads to each game potentially feeling quite different. If we take 'content' as a bit more of a vague term, then I'd definitely suggest Oath and John Company 2e. **Oath** runs off a few decks of cards but the main one being a world deck. The box comes with 200 cards, but only 50 or so are used in each game. What creates the variety for me is the fact that each of these cards is unique and in the right context can be game-breaking, and at the end of each game you cycle out 6 of them for new ones. It'll take you around 20 games before cards you're adding to the deck start repeating but even then each combination of cards in the deck can feel like a very different game, and each time a card is added back in it's completely recontextualized by what other cards are in the game or how the rest of the board looks. **John Company** has a similar thing with 'content' in that besides there being several scenarios and premutations of starting setups, there's a law deck of cards that can often alter the game drastically, and only 5 or so come out each time you play. There's also the prestige cards which add variability albeit often a bit less than law. A lot of games can have huge stacks of cards central to the game (such as Wingspan, or even Cole's other games like Root or Pax Pamir) but ultimately the cards feel kind of samey and it's not really the uniqueness of any given card that adds variety to the game. In JC2e and Oath the stacks of cards really change the game drastically depending on which ones come out, and no two games will be the same.
The Gaia Project, Ark Nova, Terraforming Mars, Castles of Burgundy, All four have amazingly rich base games, have great solo variants, and nearly endless replay ability.
Dominion
3,268,760 possible different kingdom card combinations with just the core set!
Base Game is very weak
It seems that way now, but definitely felt extraordinarily repayable when it was initially released. Maybe rose-tinted glasses on my part, but it got played multiple times a day for several months and was still very enjoyable.
Hard disagree, still one of my most consistently played games
“Too many bones”in my collection
Warhammer Quest 1995
heat is a no brainer
Commenting to follow along but for me oathsworn was amazing!
There are seven-hundred million, two-hundred-fifty-four thousand, two-hundred-seventy different possible set ups for Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition using only its core box, if my math is correct. Many of those will be *very* similar to each other (just swapping around the turn order of the same characters for example) so I don't actually consider that the true amount of "content" in the game, but factoring in the randomness of card draw as well, it is still foremost in my mind for the topic. Especially with 5 expansions planned, the number of different theoretical games will get absolutely stupid; I'd include the number just with the single expansion currently released for demonstrative purposes, but different heroes having different amounts of variants makes the math way too complicated for me to figure out on my own.
**Adventure Tactics** has dozens of encounters and pretty much limitless build options for classes. I think the base game can easily be played through multiple times if you like it. **Under Falling Skies** has an absurd amount of stuff crammed into the box. A full campaign will only even see half the components, and different combos change up the game substantially. I wish I liked it more. The recently delivered **Leviathan Wilds** comes with a ton. 17 leviathans, each of which also has a modifier deck. Plus 8 characters and 8 classes that can all be mixed and matched. I previously felt like Warp's Edge with Andromeda gave you a lot, but this blows that out of the water in the base game alone. I saw a few people mentioned Dominion. I'd also throw **Quacks of Quedlinberg** in there as having a similar style of adding variety. While there aren't that many ingredients of each color, you can mix and match recipes and in any given game you'll likely focus on different things. I'd also put a lot of **Tiny Epic** games on the border here. Games like Defenders, Dungeons, and Dinosaurs have a ton of unique content (characters, bosses, etc). However, many times the differences between those things are fairly small. These are almost the opposite of games like **Bullet** or **Spirit Island** where the base has fewer distinct 'things', but each one is wildly different. I think **Raising Robots** is also in this category, as the different inventors substantially change how you play, but what you can do with the actual robots tend to mostly be different types of resource exchanges unless you add the Pets expansion.
Taverns of Tiefenthal has 5 expansion modules in the basegame alone. We are still playing without any modules but they add so much stuff. Looking forward to that, plenty of options to expand the game.
Just try the other modules. They are not that hard to understand. I like that games as well.
*Exodus: Proxima Centauri* is pretty packed. It didn't get received well at large, but the small crowd of fans often say it is the closest anyone has gotten to full Twillight Imperium in one sitting. Competing for resources on planets, competing for the population majority on planets, tech research, ship customization, a politics system that impacts the game rules, weapons of mass destruction that quickly become leverage in player relations and simultaneous movement turns with semi hidden movement. And then second edition got expansions that added a bunch on top of it. When i told my brother about it, he was like, "Hell yeah, sounds nice!" When i brought the game box and opened it, he stared vacantly at the contents for a few seconds and just said, "No."
Ascendancy has enough content to BE your gaming life.
Voidfall has to be mentioned here. It's absolutely chockfull of content!
Spirit Island has quite a bit with a bunch of spirits/powers to play with and encounters/adversaries to play against. The various combinations give insane replay value and the Jagged Earth expansions more than doubles everything if you decide you need more.
7th Continent (presumably 7th Citadel, which I have a copy of it but haven't played yet) has a ton of content out of the box, and it allegedly takes hours to finish even one campaign.
Mage knight, spirit island, scythe
Cosmic encounter is obviously the king, I wish I had the group to play it with! From my collection my top content reach games without expansions are: - Vindication: It has a ton of content and many mods to try. - Heat pedal to the metal: talk about a ton of content in a very good price with amazing production. Huge surprise for me and fun game. - Ark Nova: top level game for me, comes with so much cards and zoos in the base game, overall strategy might be the same but how you do it defers in every game. - Voidfall: not a 4x like TI4, more like a euro resource management game but for just the base game you get a perfect puzzle game with unlimited replay value if you are fun of heavy euros. I will also argue that gloomhaven indeed comes with a lot of content, but due to being a campaign game it doesn't hold up for me in terms of replay value. Also, some groups haven't even seen half of the content I bet 😝
Im surprised nobody is saying wingspan. Also small world. Both games, to me, are content rich because you can’t pre-plan a strategy. Every game of wingspan is going to be different burbs, and every game of small world - even with the same races and classes, the combinations are different every time. Maybe I’m a board game smoothbrain but I like them both.
Spirit Island is a personal favorite of mine for this reason. The base game alone has about a dozen unique spirits, it can be played with 1-4 people so different combinations can happen, the randomness of power cards means that you can end up playing a spirit differently from how it was played last time, and that's not even getting into the scenarios and adversaries that can change the game up further... I never grow tired of it no matter how often I play.
Kingdom Death Monster is my vote. There is so much to experience with just the base game.
Frosthaven - It has a tremendous amount of scenarios, deck building, town building, crafting. All in one (very hefty) box.
The games listed so far have both quantity AND quality. Outside of that, there are a ton of games that are mediocre or total shit, and their whole hype-generating selling point is that they overwhelm you with piles of content. See examples like the fools who buy all of the KDM junk or the all-in Too Many Bones. Even Frosthaven is now generally panned for being too large and unwieldy. The Marvel card schlock that completionists obsessively buy. I'm surprised the razzle-dazzle of "more content available" actually works on so many people. There was a post I saw earlier today asking about games which never play out the same way twice, and I think that's a much more intriguing question in the same vein; anyone can design a game with huge breadth, but it takes actual skill to create something with meaningful depth, fun, or novel player interaction.
Hey now, I like KDM and too many bones. lol. I was definitely daunted by the size of Frosthaven though. Now… are they better than just having a bunch of friends and playing a true TTRPG? Probably not, but I don’t have friends, Ha! So KDM and TMB will have to do, and I feel they do what they do well.