Disclaimer: A copy of Curses & Covens was provided by Good Games Publishing for review purposes
There aren’t many One vs. Many games that hit my table. I think the only other one that I’ve talked about on this blog before has been Beast, and that wasn’t exactly a glowing review. But let’s not dwell on the past, lets focus on Curses & Covens, designed by Samara Jethwa and David Walsh, with art by Samara Jethwa, and published by Good Games Publishing (in Canada).
Tiny witch hat included
In Curses & Covens, one player takes on the role of the witch hunter while everyone else scrambles to keep the coven safe. It’s a battle of wits, whispers, and wildly unlucky guesses. The witch hunter wants to capture any five witches, while the townsfolk win if one of them reveals three witches of the same suit in their hand, or by tricking the witch hunter into snagging two ritual cards.
The game starts with the census phase. If someone has no cards, they draw one, then everyone reveals their hands. Totally open information for everyone. If someone reveals 3 cards of the same suit, game over, the villagers win. If one player has two witches matching the spell, they may cast the spell, creating an effect for the round. Then, the town players can communicate. This is the only part of the game where the townsfolk can freely conspire and strategize, but remember that the witch hunter listening to every word. Once the census is completed, everyone picks up their cards and keeps them hidden.
Next comes the arrival phase, the witch hunter observes everyone entering the town. The witch hunter draws a card, looks at it, and hands it to the player on their left. The witch hunter repeats this until everyone has received one card. Now the witch hunter has all the information, while the towns people are left a little in the dark, unsure what new card everyone else got. Once everyone has received one extra card, the starting towns person gets to choose 1 card from their hand and give it face down to another player, ask another player to choose and give them a card from their hand, or, choose one card from your hand, and swap it with the forest card, which is just a face down card set aside at the start of the game.
A ritual card, and a decoy witch
Once all players have taken one travel action, the witch hunter strikes. They take two cards from the town players. If they pull a townsfolk card, they give it to a different town player. If they find a witch, they keep it face up in front of themself, and the player they snagged it from has to discard all their remaining cards to the bottom of the deck. If the witch hunter takes a fake witch card, all the witches they’ve captured up to that point run free and are discarded to the bottom of the deck. If the witch hunter stumbles upon a ritual car, it just goes in front of them. If this is their second ritual card, the townspeople have won the game!
After the hunt, the game goes back to the census phase, where everyone reveals their hands and can freely communicate again. Gameplay follows this loop until one side claims victory!
What Curses & Covens absolutely nails is its unique inversion of the social deduction formula. Instead of mere only breadcrumbs of information to make logical leaps off of, the game thrives on open information and collaboration. This dynamic keeps the tension high and creates moments of genuine suspense, as everyone knows what’s at stake. And then when the hunter’s mental map of the cards starts to slip, the moments turn gold.
Speaking of gold, the production quality of the cards is stunning. The tarot-sized cards are a visual delight, the diverse depictions give the game a refreshingly modern touch. The gold foiling all over the cards makes it feels like you’re playing with a deluxe set, which makes it a joy to bring to the table.
Once you get going, the gameplay is quick. At just 20 minutes, it’s an excellent opener or filler game. The mix of strategy and luck means everyone has a chance to shine, and injecting information after the planning phase can make for some really fun moments. If you were handed the lynch pin of victory, how can you adjust the plan without talking? If you hand someone a card before they take their travel action, will they figure out what you’re trying to do? It has all the great moments of tension like those cooperative trick taking games like The Crew. The moments where the witch hunter flukes a capture or the townsfolk correctly double bluff and transfer a ritual card into the right position to barely pull off a win are deliciously dramatic. The game actually reminded me a lot of Now Boarding, which is a fully cooperative game where new information is injected into the game after the planning phase, during a real time segment. It’s exciting to pivot your plans to the new information, but also, chaotic and stressful.
Curses & Covens isn’t without its struggles. For one, learning the game is weirdly difficult. Not because the mechanics are complex, but because the strategy is opaque. Is it better to cluster witches or spread them out? How do you actively work toward your win condition without giving away too much? No clue. The lack of clear strategic paths made some rounds feel more like flailing than planning.
Another issue is the communication restrictions. Discussing strategy as the townsfolk is both vital and stifling. Every word has to be said in the hunter’s full view, which makes it hard to coordinate without just giving the hunter all the information they need. This isn’t a dealbreaker for me, but it can be frustrating for players who thrive on tactical planning and cooperation.
I generally don’t enjoy social deduction games. Coup and The Resistance are not my cup of tea, the genre as a whole often leaves me cold. But Curses & Covens? It’s different. It captures a unique energy that makes it stand out from the crowd.
Curses & Covens shines as a fast, accessible filler game or a convention experience. It’s the kind of game that ends with players, laughing about the wild guesses, then immediately demand a rematch. There’s a delight in its simplicity and tension that makes it perfect for casual yet competitive groups. I hope Curses & Covens finds a wide audience because it scratches a very specific itch for me. If I’m going to play a hidden movement or deduction game, this is the one I want to play. Gorgeous to look at, deceptively tense, and brimming with memorable moments. And who can resist that tiny witch hat!?
I really respect the mission of Restoration Games. They take old games, refresh them for modern gaming sensibilities, a fresh coat of paint, and give the games a second chance. Games like Whosit turning into Dinosaur Tea Party, Star Wars: Epic Duels into Unmatched, and Top Race into Downforce. I love seeing how they manage to retain the core of the game, but breath so much life and character into these dated games.
Thunder Road: Vendetta is designed by Dave Chalker, Brett Myers, Noah Cohen, Rob Daviau, Justin D. Jacobson, Jim Keifer, and Brian Neff, and published by Restoration games in 2023. Ostensibly, this is a racing game, but more realistically, it’s a death run game. Each player has 3 cars, and are tasked with either being the first to cross a finish line, or be the last one standing. Basically at the start of a round, everyone rolls 4 dice, and on a turn you assign a die to one of your three cars, moving it that number of spaces. There are also some special actions that you can do once per round by assigning a specific die to do that special action.
If during your move you land on a spot that another car is in, you bump them, rolling two die to determine which car gets moved, and where. This can cause chain reaction bumps too. Now your three cars come in different sizes, large, medium, and small. Large cars get shot more easily, but they have the option to reroll when a bump occurs.
Now, the board that you’re moving on, has a side scrolling element. When someone reaches the end of the last board, you take off the earliest board and put a new board on the end of the track. I think the game ends after 6 boards, but we’ve never gotten to the end of a race. The board has road segments, dirt, oil slicks, and a bunch of face down hazards that might cause chaos. Also, impassible spaces that, if you’re forced onto those spaces, blam, that car is dead.
When cars take two damage, they’re incapacitated, and when a player has all 3 of their cars destroyed or incapacitated, they’re out of the game. At that point, the current final tile gets the finish line added to it, and the first player to get a car to that finish line is the winner, or, if there’s only one player left with operable cars, they’re the victor.
So, my game group is usually really boring. We like predictability, deterministic outcomes, economic simulations, you know, boring euro game stuff. But for some reason, the chaos that is Thunder Road: Vendetta gets us all cackling with laughter every time. In the game we played last night, one player put his car in between two impassible spots, and three people came and bumped him from behind. All three cars were thrown backwards into the impassible spot and were destroyed, on like, the second round of the game! Other things inject chaos too, like the damage tiles can make you blast off in a specific direction, or have you wobble around randomly, sometimes someone will damage you, then a piece of shrapnel will fly off and incapacitate their car in return. It just good fun to see everything go wrong.
The slams are a really fun and integral aspect to the game, but it’s also really flow breaking. You’re moving your car, then slam, then you have to stop and roll two dice, take a second to orient the direction die so you can see who is going where, decide if you want to reroll or not, and if that triggers a chain, then you do it over, and over, and over again. We’ve had a few slam sessions that chain 4 or 5 cars together, shuffling and reorienting a cluster of cars into something unrecognizable. It’s pretty fun, but it does feel like the game grinds to a halt during these segments.
Sometimes I feel like complaining about the dice rolls. In my last game, one round I rolled three 1’s, and one 4, so two of my cars just crawling along the back of the pack. Meanwhile, the other players all rolled a pair of 6’s, leaving me in the dust. It doesn’t feel very fun to move a single space, but on the other hand, there is a tactical advantage to being in the back. If no one is rushing the last tile and putting your cars in jeopardy of getting shunted off the board, then on the next round, it’s very likely all the obstacle have been cleared and you can just rush up and start shooting your opponents in the bum.
I’ve only played the retail version of Thunder Road: Vendetta, and as that product stands, it’s an excellent game. That said, I’ve found myself more than once looking over the plethora of expansions and salivating at the potential chaos that all these modules would add. From a big rig that is 3 big car pieces linked together to 5 little motorcycles, jumps, player powers and a demolition derby style arena that changes how the game is played altogether. I love the base game, but I’m so excited to explore all these expansions.
Thunder Road: Vendetta is a game about violence and player elimination. Sometimes you’ll roll poorly, and that’s just how it’s going to be. If you crave control, you aren’t going to find it here. Having a good time in this game is about embracing the chaos. Not always picking the safe, smart option, but the one that would make for a great story. Yes, you’ll more often than not crash into a ball of flames, but at least you’ll have a story to tell.
A copy of Bark Avenue was provided by Good Games Publishingfor review purposes
The life of a dog walker seems like an envious one. Picking up playful pooches, giving them a job around the block in the sunshine, throwing a ball or a Frisbee at the park, then depositing them back at their home and collecting a paycheque. That said, I also know the struggle of starting and building a business, which is a ton of effort and stress. So instead of building a business for real, let’s talk about Bark Avenue, designed by Mackenzie Jungck and Jonathan Jungck, with art by April Borchelt and Chris Martinetti.
In Bark Avenue, you are an intrepid dog walker, ready to earn your day’s wage. Each turn, you’ll roll the dice, move the number of steps as your slowest dog, then preform an action. To end your turn, you’ll advance all the timers for your dogs, then the next dog walker takes their turn. After everyone has taken their turn, the game timer advances down the track and triggers an event.
The crux of the game is in the actions. You’ll pick up new pups, engage with their favourite activities, take their pictures, perhaps buy a coffee or a treat, then drop off dogs back at their home, once their walk timer has been satisfied. There’s plenty to do on every turn, but you’re restricted to only doing one action per round. Unless you cheat and drink a coffee, which gives you a boost and lets you take a second action during your turn.
When you drop off dogs, you have the opportunity to earn tips. Each dog has 3 criteria that can be accomplished during their walk, which is pooping, taking their picture, and engaging with their favourite activity. For each one of those criteria you accomplish, you earn an extra $2 tip. There’s also a subset of requirements along the left side of the board that will let you place out review stars, which will unlock more abilities for you during the game, and in the last 3 rounds, if you have no dogs to walk, you can take a review star from the left side of the board and place it on a coffee shop for some extra points.
The game plays over 16 rounds, at which time the scores are tallied and the person with the most cash is the winner!
Watching the how-to play video on Terradice’s website reveals that Bark Avenue was inspired by MacKenzie’s experiences as a dog walker in New York City, The reverence to the theme is obvious and unmistakable. If you like dogs, and Upper Manhattan, then I’m sure the theme will carry a lot of enjoyment for you. For the rest of us, there’s not much to write home about.
Bark Avenue is described as ‘gateway plus’, meaning it’s a hobby board game that’s approachable. It’s meant to be the next step from being relatively inexperienced, into the world of board games. And in that vein, I can appreciate Bark Avenue. One of the easiest ways to get non-boardgamers to sit down at my table, is to find a game with a theme that appeals directly to them. For someone who has an ‘I love doggos’ bumper sticker on their car, all the doggie portraits should be enough to engage their interest for an hour.
As a pickup and deliver game, I felt it was an exercise in tedium. Perhaps it’s unfair of me to say that, but hear me out. Bark Avenue is about as complex as Wingspan, but doesn’t offer any of the exciting combo building from that game. Instead, Bark Avenue is a game about optimization and efficiencies. Yes, it feels good to be walking three dogs at the same time, roll that golden poop to accomplish that task for all dogs, and align all of their favourite activities in one fell swoop. But all the dogs are functionally identical. Nothing really separates Beasley from Pixel aside from their home location and the amount of cash you’ll earn from their job.
Each game of Bark Avenue feels identical, even with the event cards shaking things up every round. The map is massive, with dozens of spaces to go, but nothing really differentiating them from each other. You won’t have a different experience playing east side vs. west side, other than the portraits of the dogs will change. Mechanically, there’s nothing really pulling you back for multiple plays. Once you’ve played a handful of rounds of the game, you’ve functionally experienced everything that Bark Avenue has to offer. There’s a sprinkling of set collection and other goals for you to chase, so your actions aren’t entirely rote, but it doesn’t have any real tension or excitement.
At the end of the day, Bark Avenue is a product for dog lovers. If your main joy is looking at portraits of happy doggies and imagining yourself at the helm of a dog walking venture, then Bark Avenue will provide you with entertainment for an evening. It’s not a game that I feel compelled to play again, nor would I recommend that anyone rush out and buy it. I actually think the cover does a pretty good job of signalling who this game is for. If your first thought at the sight of the cover and title was “Awe, cute!”, you’ll certainly dig this game. If you had any other thoughts or feelings than that, well, nothing I said above was going to change your mind.
How many times have you almost been in a fight? How many times have you talked a big game only to realize, yeah, it’s probably smarter to sit back and let someone else take the hits? Scythe is all about that moment; the tension before the clash, the slow buildup where everyone is flexing just enough power to scare off rivals. Despite the war machines that are front and centre in players hands, Scythe isn’t just about throwing punches. It’s a game about power, efficiency, and a dance of anticipation where actual combat is rare, but impactful.
Scythe is a beautiful game. It was the first time I had ever seen a dual layered player board, something that just seems so obvious and prolific in today’s world. Each faction has four mechs plus a hero and animal companion, represented with unique sculpts. The world building and art by Jakub Rozalski draws on 1920 era industrial revolution motifs, with hulking behemoths in the background. It’s immediately arresting and sets up an atmosphere that makes you feel like you’re on the doorstep of a great conflict.
The gameplay hinges on a unique action-selection system. Each player gets a personal action board with four sections, each section links a pair of actions. On your turn, you choose a quadrant, pay any visible costs, and carry out the top action. Then, if you can, you also pay for the bottom action for an extra benefit. Turns are quick and efficient, hopping from one player to the next until someone manages to place their sixth achievement star, and immediately end the game.
Scythe‘s top row actions are deceptively straightforward. Move, produce, trade, and bolster. Moving lets you expand your influence across the map, dragging along your loyal workers to work the fields. Producing generates resources based on your where and how many workers you have on a location. Bolstering raises your strength or gives you power cards, and trading lets you spawn any two resources for a coin. But it’s the bottom row actions and being able to exploit the timing is where the strategic depth really lies. Each bottom action costs resources, and different player boards mix up which actions and benefits are linked together, making every faction’s strategy feel unique.
These bottom actions are what really get your engine running. Upgrading moves a cube from the top row to the bottom, making a main action better and making a bottom action cheaper. Enlisting gives you benefits when your neighbours take specific bottom row actions, deploying drops those hulking mechs onto the table, plus unlocking asymmetric abilities for all your plastic figures, and building creates structures that produce persistent benefits, not to mention may be worth points at the end of the game.
All of these actions build towards earning coins, which are the measure of victory in Scythe. Though you might not notice it at first, coins are critical. And everything you do in the game, from piles of resources you’ve amassed, to all the territory you control, converts into coins based on your popularity at the end fo the game. Placing six stars ends the game, but it’s not a strict “race.” players who are beloved by the populace will get far more coins from the same accomplishments, turning what may seem like a run away leader game into a narrowly close end result.
Scythe isn’t a typical war game. It’s more a cold war game, a palpable tension where strength is a resource, just as important as oil or food. Combat is rare in this game, and its real benefit is really limited by a star cap, so strong players aren’t encouraged to just beat down on weaker players indefinitely. When combat does finally occur, it’s a high-stakes gamble. Each player commits strength and power cards secretly, then both strengths are revealed simultaneously. The winner takes control of the contested hex, and gets to place a star, if they haven’t hit that cap. Both players lose all the strength and cards they committed to the fight, however. One time, I made the mistake of going all-in against Clare, only for him to one-up me with a power card, leaving his sum a single point above mine. With my strength utterly depleted, the other players descended on my mechs, pummelling me for easy stars, and leaving me destitute and licking my wounds at home base.
Scythe manages to build a sense of threat. As players expand and build themselves up on the power track, they’re hesitant to get into fights. Many games see a couple of players pushing toward the top of the strength track, throwing fights to conserve their power. But once they max it out, suddenly they have all this strength to burn.
As much as I’ve talked about warfare, winning Scythe isn’t about being the strongest. Victory comes from resource management and having efficient productions, being able to optimize every turn. Every action has a milestone to earn at its end, whether it’s enlisting, upgrading, or building structures and mechs. Like many action efficiency games, the more you play, the more you see the nuances. It was only on my third or fourth game that I really started to understand how to link actions into something that resembled efficiency. After every game, I’d find myself mulling over every decision and thinking about how I could have shaved off a few turns here, or accelerated my engine just a bit faster. It’s the kind of system that digs into your brain and stays there, whispering, “next time…”
Scythe is a special package. It offers a unique blend of cold war tension and engine building bliss. It’s not for everyone, as evidenced by half my game group ‘being done with it’ after 15 plays. But my other friend and I are 20 plays deep, and are looking to embark on some of the fan made campaigns soon. There is so much game to plumb here, from the faction’s starting positions to which action board pair best with each faction, to even just learning how to use each faction abilities themselves! Learning when to push forward and when to back off, there is a tonne of nuance here. Scythe is a masterpiece in my opinion, and a game that I would happily play, any time, anywhere.
I have a regular group of fellows that I play board games with every Wednesday night. After work, dinner, and kids are mostly in bed, we gather at one of our houses around 7pm, and play until 9 or 10. This means that our usual games are the ones that we can teach and play within 3 hours. That said, we’ve all been board game fans for over 10 years, we all enjoy games that are more complex in nature. The downside is that some of our biggest games don’t see the light of day because we’re a bit nervous to break out a big game on a weekend game night.
Enter The Gallerist, designed by Vital Lacerda, and published by Eagle-Gryphon Gamesin 2015 following a successful crowdfunding campaign. I don’t think I’ve ever talked about Vital Lacerda games before, but as a board game designer, he’s quite prolific. All of his games are these big, complex boxes of interconnected mechanisms that require a thorough studying in order to understand and comprehend. In the past I’ve played two other games of his, 2014’s Kanban and 2019’s Escape Plan, both were similar in that they required more than a weekend game night to get through.
Players in The Gallerist take on the roles of gallery owners, and must discover artists, commission and display works of art, promote the artists, then sell those works of art to make a profit. The goal of The Gallerist is to make the most money, but the path forward is not always clear.
It shouldn’t be difficult to play The Gallerist. On your turn, you take a single executive action (which can be one of two options), then move your pawn to one of the four locations (if someone is already there, bump them out and they get a kicked-out action after your turn is done), and take one of the two actions at that location. A total of 8 possible location actions in the whole game. It can’t be that difficult to learn just 8 actions, can it? It turns out, Vital Lacerda’s games are like clockwork. Every mechanism, each action turns a gear, which influences everything else in the game. It’s not enough to know how to do each action, what’s important when playing The Gallerist is that you understand why and when you want to do each of the actions for maximum benefit.
The devil is in the details when it comes to these 8 actions, but thankfully the included player reference cards are verbose and cover the major points of every action, making them invaluable to learning players. I’m not going to go into detail about all 8 actions, this review is not intended to teach you how to play The Gallerist, after all.
In preparation for game night, I watched Rodney Smith’s excellent Watch it Played video, and then read the rule book, which made me feel fairly well-prepared, although during the process I felt like I was crunching for an exam. My wife came out as I was pouring over the rule book and asked, “Is this fun for you?”. And the truth is, yeah, I really do enjoy learning how to play Lacerda games. As you process each mechanism, each action space, as you peel back one more layer of the onion, slowly the shape of the whole comes into focus. Thematically, things mostly make sense, and the thematic integration assists with learning how to play. When you sell an artwork, one of the people in your gallery leaves with the painting. Little details like that make sense and help me retain the rules to this complex game, and made the gameplay feel a lot smoother than many games of a similar complexity.
I remember reading once that some designers design mechanics first. Their early prototypes are plain cards with numbers, and the game is just manipulating numbers. Theme comes afterwards. I doubt this is the case for Vital Lacerda, as the theme and the mechanisms are often so well tied together. I feel like he gets inspiration from the theme that informs the mechanics of the game he wants to create. It’s something I really appreciate about his work, and it’s something worth highlighting here.
Talking about The Gallerist specifically, gosh, I’m bad at this game. I don’t know how or where I go wrong, but golly do I ever flounder. I fall behind at buying artworks, which means I don’t have the money to buy more artworks, and I fail during the end game scoring. I never seem to have the right guests in my lobby so I’m shut out of the influence actions that inform another large aspect of the end game scoring. But I do have fun. It’s fascinating seeing all these mechanics work together, and the main board is tightly packed with action spaces that you’re going to constantly rub elbows with your opponents, which is to your benefit, as getting kicked out of a space awards you a benefit.
I’ve talked about positive player interaction before, and I quite enjoyed it here as well. Getting bumped out of an action spot awards you with an extra action. No one owns the artists, so buying their works of art and promoting them benefits everyone. A rising tide lifts all ships, after all. The point of The Gallerist isn’t to step on each other’s necks, but to be the player that excels. The most ‘feel-bad’ part of the game is when you drag a visitor kicking and screaming out of an opponent’s lobby and into your own, but that’s it. The kick-out mechanism has an added bonus of making the time between your main turns feel a lot shorter, as you may be gifted a bonus action during someone else’s turn. I quite appreciated that aspect.
I find myself wanting to replay The Gallerist again and again, mostly to see if I can figure out where I’m going wrong. So many of the mechanics have players looking at the thing they want to do, and work backwards through all the steps they need to do in order to make their plan happen. It’s a satisfying puzzle, and one that has me interested and intrigued, even if I’m awful at it.
The Gallerist is a big, well produced game. It looks gorgeous on the table, and the components are high quality, even judging by today’s standards. The puzzle is solid and engaging, and I can’t really find any place to truly fault it. I’m not a Lacerda fan-boy by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have reverence for his craft. A Lacerda game has a certain, specific quality to it. When you play one of his games, you know what kind of experience you’re going to have. Part of me really appreciates when a designer has a specific flavour, that I know what I’m getting into when their game hits my table, but at the same time, I wonder how many Lacerda games I need in my life. It’s been too long since I played with Kanban or Escape Plan, and I’d gladly play them again at any request. But if someone asked me what Lacerda game I wanted to play, The Gallerist is sitting right at the top of my chart.
Expeditions by Jamey Stegmaier, released in 2023 debuted as the sequel to 2016’s Scythe, which is fairly high on my favourite games of all time list at number 16. While visually very similar to Scythe, the gameplay in Expeditions is quite different, and I think it’s worth being explicit in saying right from the get-go in saying that Expeditions is a fully separate game. Jakub Rozalski returned to provide the distinct art and world building, which helps players familiar with Scythe to feel right at home from the moment they get their hands on the box, but nothing in the Expeditions box can be ported to Scythe, nor the other way around.
The box for Expeditions feels oversized for what’s inside. It is just a bit smaller than the original Scythe box, but it feels like it contains so much less. 5 large mechs, 20 location tiles, a huge stack of cards, 50 worker meeples, a bag of thick acrylic markers, 5 square player mats, and a home bast tile is what that box contains. The included plastic insert holds everything quite well, and should facilitate fast set-ups, when you’re not playing a public copy at the board game café and whoever played it last was not so careful in putting everything back in the right spots.
I’ve never been able to complain about Stonemaier Games component quality. Everything here feels about as deluxe as you want it, and they showcase thoughtfulness in small ways, like including little riser stickers for the player boards to make it much easier to tuck cards under your player board. The home board that holds the glory track has the end game scoring listed right next to it, making it really easy to remember what is worth points come the end of the game.
The play area itself is expansive, which I think is quite good for a game named Expeditions. After all, what kind of adventure would it be if you only travelled 6 metres from where you started? The main play area is
Playing Expeditions is pretty straightforward. There are 3 actions available to you. Move, Play, and Gather. Moving is simple, move your mech from hex to hex, up to your movement value. If you enter an unexplored tile in the centre or north side of the map, your movement ends, but you get to reveal the tile. Play just has you play a card from your hand. Each card gives you guile or strength, and if you place a worker on the card at the time of playing it, you get to activate its special ability. Gathering just lets you take the action of the tile your mech is currently sitting on.
The tiles are laid out in such a way that there’s space for 5 cards between the hexagons. Those cards can be quests, items, or meteorites, all of which can be claimed to be used for a unique ability, and then upgraded, melded, or solved to offer some more permanent effects. The stack of cards in the game is impressively large, offering a wide variety of effects that could show up.
Each turn on the game has you move a cube on your map, covering one of the three actions, enabling you to preform the other two. This was a great mechanic, and figuring out your own tempo on how you want to move and play or play and gather was a good puzzle to try and squeeze some efficiencies out of. The cards you play and the workers you spend on them sit on the table in front of you until you take a rest action. This takes the cube off your board, pulls all your workers back to your mat, and lets you play all your cards again. And, on your next turn, you get to take all 3 actions, which can be very powerful and is a nice consolation prize, making that lost rest turn a little less painful.
The general flow and card play of Expeditions can be quite satisfying. If you happen to pick up cards that compliment each other well, you can find yourself specializing in specific ways that lead you to claiming an achievement long before anyone else can. In one game we played, I just happened to pick up 4 items, and uncover the upgrade action. I very quickly was able to boast to claim the 8 cards achievement, then immediately turned around and started upgrading those item cards to claim my second achievement before anyone else claimed a single one. The downside is that once you hit the achievement threshold for something, continuing to pursue that objective is meaningless. You’ll need to pivot and figure out a different way to get the rest of your stars onto the board.
For a game to be called Expeditions, I expect a fairly heavy focus to be on the discoverability inside the game. I found it surprisingly disappointing that all the tiles are in use in every game. The discovery isn’t about finding new tiles and which abilities are available to you during this game, it’s just a matter of figuring out where the tile you want is hiding. In addition to this, if you happen to find the tile you needed, great luck! Another player is probably crawling across the north part of the map, frustrated that they’ve just collected their 8th map token that have no value beyond collecting 5 for an achievement. Exploring isn’t rewarded, which is awful in an action efficiency game.
The art on the tiles and cards all tell a story. Much like the encounter cards in Scythe, the art is a wonderful vignette featuring a grim 1920’s aesthetic, with the shadows of hulking mechanical behemoths in the background. A tale can easily be told by these cards, but at the same time, the theme can very quickly melt away. Guile and power turn into brain and strength, which are just values you accrue, vanquishing is merely a transaction, solving is just being on the right spot at the right time. Nothing you do in the game feels thematic, it’s purely mechanical.
The interaction between players is merely being in each other’s way. Someone can camp on a tile that you need for a few turns, and someone might sweep the card you were pining for, but that’s really the extent of it. You can’t take anything from your opponent, you can’t bump them off their tile, they exist to just be in your way. A score to compare yours against at the end of the game.
The gripes I have with Expeditions mostly stems from mis-matched expectations. I went in with all the thoughts and feelings of Scythe, but found a game that feels more like Century Spice Road wearing Scythe’s clothing. I really wonder if calling it the sequel to Scythe was the right thing to do, considering just how different the games really are. The Scythe world was so unique and gripping that it does make sense to set more games in that universe, but I really feel that Expeditions suffers from sitting in the overbearing shadow of its predecessor.
