Qe Commodities

I've only played QE with the Commodities expansion, and I can't imagine ever playing without it. The competing motivations pushing you to aim for the second highest bid as opposed to the highest are super interesting. Lots of opportunity for hijinks.

I won't play without this. It is such a huge improvement over the base game. The base game very often devolved into one mega-spender winning most bids, and then someone winning with a small score in 2nd. This rebalances the entire game and leads to some fascinating bids as you might not always want to win.

This should be sold with the base game. The base game gets old fast by itself. It's funny at first but then it just loses its novelty and is not a particularly good game system for competition. The expansion makes it a much better and reliable game system.

The short: A must add to the base game. Eliminating the rather menial choice of zero bids for an easy effortless 2 victory points takes the base game to a new level. What makes QE exciting is not having open information on what people are bidding, so winning those Company tiles (for those VP) without spending drastically more than others requires effort on deciding a number. The Zero-Bid feature requires no effort and feels very disconnected from the rest of the game. The ability for 2 people to spend money per turn and for players to earn credit adds another variable of adjusting your total spent.

I would never play without Commodities, but that comes with a price - the expansion is sometimes hard to explain to people. I think it's designed greatly because it gives you the needed leeway when overshooting bids and muddies up the game state even more, and fits right into the core box.