I didn’t love Expeditions, Jamey Stegmaier’s follow-up to Scythe. For a game with such an enticing setting, it was sterile and undifferentiated, more zoned out than Zone. But when Gears of Corruption showed up at my doorstep, I was eager to return to this meteor-blasted Siberia with my trusty animal companion and rusty mech. That’s a good sign. Right?

Right-ish. Gears of Corruption does indeed improve on the game it’s expanding. But like a few splashes of paint over the rusted flanks of my crawling longship, there’s only so much it can do.

New mechs brush shoulder-plates with old mechs.

Like many expansions, the additions in Gears of Corruption are modular. There are three broad categories found here. Each adds breadth without doing much to alter the card-gathering and star-boasting that are the hallmarks of the base game.

The first, unsurprisingly, is that there’s more stuff to pack into the box. Two new mechs join the original five, delivering abilities that allow them to toss out those (mostly useless) map tokens you’ve been accruing to either bypass the corruption hogging up a map space or perform an action when refreshing. These are situational abilities, but they offer some significant utility nonetheless. There are a few additional items, which are nice for rounding out that category. Similarly, four new character/companion pairs enter the fray. Most of these are unremarkable, but one in particular, the corrupted traveler Baaliahon, twists the gameplay in new directions. He’s a weird purple guy who doesn’t solve quests or vanquish corruption in the regular fashion, instead opting to gather both quest cards and corruption tokens directly rather than jumping through the usual hoops. This gives him some early flexibility that gradually constricts as the session progresses.

The expansion’s best addition is more surprising: a modest set of starting cards. These provide a few initial resources to each mech, along with a wild worker who ostensibly represents your main character. Expeditions has always suffered from a pokey start, filled with opening rounds that see players getting up to speed by gathering a few initial workers. Adding just one starting worker — and an all-purpose worker at that — goes a long way toward making the early game less sluggish and repetitive. It also helps anyone who goes later in turn order and can’t blitz to one of the two tiles that guarantee an initial worker. With less pressure to staff up one’s entourage, there’s more latitude to pursue other objectives.

Finally, there’s now the option for a corrupted mech to waddle onto the scene. This bad boy doesn’t appear until somebody has added a star to the scoring board, but his arrival usually causes a few ripples. Filled in with any mech not currently in use, and governed by a simple deck of cards, he gets a turn of his own, clanking across the board and potentially dealing hits to unsuspecting players. This is handled via its own odd system; since Expeditions doesn’t actually feature “hit points” in any real sense, the damage dealt by this corrupted baddie are spelled out on his cards, depriving players of points, cards, or resources. The same cards that direct his movements function as his own hit points. Players can attack them much the way they would vanquish corruption, spending their resources to peel cards off his stack and eventually reduce him to a smoking ruin.

The new characters are a welcome addition.

This is the most significant addition rules-wise, and many will likely regard it as the biggest draw for the expansion. Unfortunately, there isn’t much to see. Like everyone else’s bulky bois, the corrupted mech mostly serves to block spaces. His attacks aren’t especially threatening, serving as a deterrent the way a mild itch might deter somebody from accepting large bundles of cash. Similarly, his cards are trivial to vanquish, reducing him to a bloated piñata for anyone chasing the corresponding star. I wouldn’t say he isn’t worth the effort — the cards governing him are dead simple — but he doesn’t offer much of a departure from the core gameplay loop.

That goes for the expansion writ large. Everything added by Gears of Corruption is appreciated, rounding out the base experience with a few new options and some extra variety.

But as expansions go, it’s disappointingly traditional. Every space still feels like every other space. The gameplay is still passive, everybody waddling around in tandem, ne’er to glance in one another’s direction. The portions of the map that are closer to the impact site, those that communicate danger via their deep purple palette and ominous illustrations, are not in fact any more threatening than those to the south. On the surface, the illustrations and text of Expeditions present a story that’s rife with warnings about the potential dangers of attaching liquid meteors to your mech, fiddling with alien technology, or adopting altered humans into your retinue. Scratch that veneer, however, and one finds a game that’s almost cynical in how it treats settings as wallpaper.

Gottem.

In the end, Gears of Corruption leaves Expeditions slightly better than it found it. There are some new toys to play with, there’s less time between setup and the good stuff, and the corrupted mech… well, he’s there to provide a moving target for your attacks. I was happy to return to this world for a few more expeditions; if only they had proved more interesting than a tour through a purple-hued haunted house.

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A complimentary copy was provided.