Top 10 Expansions We Own: #10

Greetings all faithful readers and tabletop enthusiasts!  For the next 10 weeks we will be doing our top 10 Expansions that we own!  This list in no way reflects our opinions of the greatest expansions ever released, only the expansions we have purchased.  Since we only review games that we own, we will therefore only review the best expansions that we own as well.  Our number 10 is Machi Koro: Millionaires Row.  While the base game of Machi Koro is a good game, it needed more variety and one specific, vital change in order to fix a broken mechanic.  Read on to see why.

Machi Koro as a whole has a variation of options, but just like all expansions for games, we get more variety with them and Millionaire’s Row provides just that. This expansion provides players with 14 new establishment cards, (20 major establishment cards, and 60 regular establishment cards in all), 28 renovation tokens, along with one other very important change in the setup. Instead of laying out a grid of cards for all players to choose stacks of the individual establishments, all cards are now shuffled together and laid out to make a single row of 10 unique cards which makes up the marketplace. If you draw a copy of a card that is already in the marketplace, you simply stack the new card on top of the old one. This eliminates the old marketplace that allowed anyone to simply purchase however many cards of one type that they wanted. Now you can’t buy all of the bakery’s and win nearly 98% of the time by using that simple strategy. This is excellent considering it wasn’t hard to break the original Machi Koro game.

The cards in Millionaire’s Row seem to add to a slightly more aggressive approach to the game. I wouldn’t say that they add a substantial amount of weight, but they add enough to make the game much better, and in my opinion much better than the harbor expansion. Just like the base game, we have new cards that assist in cooperative ways, but also take away from each player. The renovation tokens are a new addition to the game. Some of the cards refer to being ‘renovated’ and this means a renovation token is placed over the card indicating it is temporarily inactive due to being renovated. In order to get this removed, you wait until your next turn is active, and you roll the dice, earn income, and remove the token. The renovation process does add a new alteration to the players progress during gameplay. To date, Millionaire’s Row is definitely the best expansion released for Machi Koro and changes the game enough that it lands a spot in our top 10 list!

Machi Koro: Millionaires Row Overall Meeple Rating: 7/10


New additions: 
1) Marketplace Row
2) 14 New Establishments
3) Renovation & Renovation Tokens

Have any thoughts or questions?  Leave a comment below.