Matthew BaileyA few times this summer, I have covered games that are complex, as my children start to branch out into more intricate games, especially with Jack. Today is going to continue along the theme that we explored with “Nemesis” and “Spirit Island”.
As we hit Number 50!
Game 50 of the “Now & Then Summer Marathon 2024” is “Expeditions” played with Jack(9)
I am not going to cover all of the rules here; I’m just going to give you an overview of how the game functions and how it plays. Otherwise, this is going to turn into a thesis.
“Expeditions” is a card-driven exploration and engine-building game where you play as explorers venturing into Siberia after a massive meteorite has crashed near the Tunguska River.
“Expeditions” is also the sequel to “Scythe”, a very well-renowned board game, which I will get around to reviewing one day. I also need to review “My Little Scythe”, which is the child-friendly version of that game.
The game starts with each player selecting a mech that will essentially be their vehicle, as well as a set of starting cards, which include your character and your companion. These are special characters with various abilities that can be activated using different coloured meeples. You also take a number of tokens to represent your glory, as well as power and guile tokens to track how much of those stats you have.
The game is set up with a hex grid split into three sections, with the bottom third visible from the start and the top two-thirds ready to explore later. Each unexplored tile has a map token on it, which will be used later. There is also a corruption bag that forms a key part of the corruption mechanic that you encounter later in the game.
On your turn, you can do two of three main actions: move your mech one to three spaces, gather whatever benefits are at the location where your mech is, or play a card from your hand to gain the core value in the upper left of the card. You can also play a specific worker that you have gathered through the gather action in order to activate this card’s ability.
What is really interesting is that on your first turn, you can do any two of these three actions, but on subsequent turns, you cannot do both of the actions that you just did. This adds a layer of strategy and ensures that it’s difficult to keep doing the same thing over and over. Equally, you must move; you cannot stay still if you choose the move action.
As you move onto face-down locations, you gain the map token, flip the location over, and then draw corruption tiles from the bag. These represent the corruption of the area around the Tunguska River, which you vow to remove. In doing so, you gain points. What is interesting is that corruption isn’t any kind of negative thing but is actually just used as a means of gaining points.
You can also play abilities on the cards that you gather. These generally involve playing a meeple to activate an ability, gaining another meeple, or something similar. This is where the engine-building aspect of the game comes in and allows you to snowball if you activate cards in a sensible fashion to gain extra points and win the game. There are also cards such as quests, where you can use them at certain locations to solve a matching quest card; these also give you various benefits. Other abilities let you vanquish, which involves taking corruption away from locations. There are also other actions, such as upgrade and meld, which I won’t go into too much detail about, but they are other ways of gaining points.
Finally, the gather ability is what holds everything together by allowing you to gain extra cards, gain extra workers, gain benefits, or do things such as refresh cards and workers.
The main concept of the game is that you’re trying to gain as much glory as possible, and in order to do that, you have to do a number of things such as solving quests, upgrading items, vanquishing corruption from the 20 corruption locations, having at least seven corruption tokens, and having at least eight cards in your control.
At any time, you can also refresh, as well as take those three actions that reset everything in your hand.
The game ends when a player places their fourth glory token on the base camp for completing four different objectives. Each player then scores based on the following: coins they collected throughout the game, glory tokens based on various categories, upgraded items, and corruption tokens, all of which give you a number of dollars. In the end, the wealthiest player wins.
I really like playing “Expeditions”. I have played the game three times—twice with friends and once with Jack, just to get an idea of how this would play with a 9-year-old. Jack, after a bit of a slow start, managed to get a handle on everything that was going on. I expect that he struggled to keep track of everything, but for a 9-year-old, he did a good job.
All of the components of “Expeditions” are of the usual Stonemaier Games quality. Everything from the rulebook, which is printed on a lovely satin material, to the quality of the miniatures and the wooden components, is wonderful, and everything has its place. The game is compelling, with a number of different ways to win. Even after three games, I wasn’t quite sure of the best strategy to try and gain points to achieve victory. The only thing I will say that was a slight negative for me is that there are a lot of tokens that you gain for various things such as corruption, meeples, and victory points, and there is no place for these to go—they just sit on your board somewhere. This meant that by the end of the game, the boards started to get pretty busy, and I think it would have been nice if the boards were maybe a little bit larger and gave you specific places on those boards to stack everything, to make it all a little bit easier to follow and a little bit less messy.
The game works thematically, and I like exploring and finding new areas, as it all fits the theme of going out as an explorer well. Having only played as half the characters, I can’t give a complete overview of every character, but I will say that each of the characters has their own slightly different abilities, which makes it worthwhile to try the different ones out.
While this is definitely not a game for children due to its high complexity, from a thematic point of view, there is nothing offensive in it. Older children could certainly give this a bash, as Jack proved.
Jamey Stegmaier, if you happen to read this review, please can we also have a “My Little Expeditions” as well, as I think that would really complement “My Little Scythe”.
Disclaimer: A copy of “Expeditions” was kindly given to me by Stonemaier Games for the purpose of review. All thoughts and opinions are, however, my own. It’s worth noting that “Stonemaier Games” has a very strong policy where they do not read reviews where they have given out review copies, so there is no influence by us in their decision to give out future review copies.
*Yes for much older children
