Expeditions has players exploring a map with a big mech.

I didn’t like Scythe, is this better?

Siberia, where a massive meteorite crashed near the Tunguska River, awakening ancient corruption. An expedition led by Dr. Tarkovsky ventures into the taiga to learn about the meteorite and its impact on the land. Itching for adventure, heroes from the war privately fund their own expeditions to Siberia, hoping to find artifacts, overcome challenges, and ultimately achieve glory.

Expeditions Game Overview

Quick Rules Summary

This is a fairly in-depth game, I’ll just give a brief top-level overview here.

Players have 3 actions on their player board: Move, Play and Gather. Players cover one of these with a cube and take the two visible actions. On their next turn, they must move the cube to a different space.

Move: Move the mech around the board. Moving onto an unexplored tile ends movement and reveals it. They keep the map token on it.

Gather: Activate the space you’re on. Common actions are to gain the two resources, draw cards or gain different coloured meeples.

Play: Play a card from hand. These have different abilities as you can imagine. Some of them need you to place a certain coloured meeple on them.

There are 7 gals to complete to be able to take a Gather action on a few particular tiles to place a Glory star.

These are to:

• Solve 4 quests, these are cards with goals to achieve
• Meld 4 meteorites on specific locations on the board
• Upgrade 4 item cards
• Vanquish the corruption from location 20
• Gain at least 7 corruption tokens by removing it from tiles
• Have at least 8 cards in your control
• Have at least 7 workers or 5 map tokens

How do you win?

When someone has played their 4th Glory token the game end is triggered and then players score.

Players get points for each coin they collected.

You get points for the number of glory tokens placed times by the number of quests you solved.

Each upgraded item scores it’s printed amount.

Each corruption token scores 2 points.

Most points wins.

Main Mechanisms

Technically action selection, even though you only really have 2 choices on a turn.

Hand management is important too. You have to take a refresh action and basically skip a turn to then get your discard pile back into hand. On your next turn you take Move, Gather AND Play to make up.

USP

There is no USP here, even the world the game is set in has been done before.

Theme

The theme is an interesting one, far from generic. The backstory is built out and the items, characters and locations you encounter are far from generic.

Setup

They were halfway through playing this at a local game store when I went in. So when I joined in for a new game after they had played something else with me, the game was already setup.

Looks as simple as laying out the tiles in a particular pattern, placing some tokens and shuffling some cards.

Components & Artwork

The wooden components and minis are cool.

The art is fine but I’m a bit down on it from this art being, shall we say “borrowed” from other sources. Might as well use AI.

Ease of Teaching

It’s a fairly complex game. There are a lot of interconnecting parts so even if you get things right on the map, you might not time this correctly with your actions.

Similar Games

Scythe has to be there right? It’s set in the same world and has a not-too-dissimilar action selection mechanism.

Expeditions Review

Positives

The setting is an interesting world.

It looks good on the table and the iconography is plentiful, but clear.

Negatives

It’s frustratingly restrictive. You have limits on actions, on cards available, on resources, on meeples to use on cards… It’s not that you can’t do everything, it’s that you can barely do anything.

Summary

Not sure why I’d play this again.

Jesta ThaRogue