Favorite Game for December 13th

#12 Expeditions

In Expeditions players are Mech pilots in an alternative history 1920's Siberia exploring a landscape tainted by a corrupting dark miasma that has fallen as part of a meteor shower. Every player has an individual player board that represents their Mech. Players also choose their character. All characters come with  a unique animal companion.

Mechs along with character/companion provide unique starting abilities for the players. On your turn you can perform one of three abilities, but one of the three is always hidden and this changes from turn to turn. The abilities are: move, play, and gather.

Move is moving your Mech on the board. Play is activating the cards in your tableau. Gather is activating the ability printed on the board where your Mech is located. You start play with two cards in your tableau, your character and your animal companion, and these are designed to work together. You can acquire more cards by activating card draw locations around the board using the gather action.

The board is made up of giant hex tiles and we have the awesome deluxe playmat for our version of the game, but this is optional. The tiles closest to the starting area of the map are face up, but further away the tiles are face down and must be explored in order to take the actions on them. This is where corruption comes in.

Unexplored tiles have a certain amount of corruption on them. Players all have strength and guile and must use this resource to remove corruption to clear the new tiles. Gathered cards, explored tiles, removed corruption, all of these things trigger different landmarks during the game. Each triggered landmark sees a player place one of four stars (wooden star tokens) onto that landmark spot on the starting/score board.

The first player to place their fourth star triggers the end of the game and all of the different stars placed are worth differing amounts of victory points and the player with the most victory points is the winner.

Julie and I love Expeditions. It's probably the adventure game that we collectively like the most. Travelling around driving a Mech and adventuring with your animal companion is fun to imagine. All of the art is stunning, and this is one of the few games that we have invested in more deluxe components like the playmat. It wasn't strictly necessary, but we wanted to do it, because we just really love the game.