The Long and Winding Road

My primary motivation for playing games comes down to stories. There are many reasons I play games but at the core of my love for the hobby is the narrative of games, both emergent and explicit. Journeys have been a fundamental element of stories for as long as we have been telling them. Expeditions takes the setting of Scythe, and tells a new story. One of journeys, discovery, and adaptation.

Expeditions is a ‘sequel’ to Scythe, no really it says that on the box. Scythe was the Stonemaier games that took the tabletop world by storm a few years back. Set in an alternate Earth where large mechanical war machines sit alongside subsistence farming. It saw players representing the various nations of that world, struggling over resources, and fighting for supremacy. Scythe looked like a wargame, but was actually closer to a thematic euro-style points salad.

Expeditions still sees you representing a nation, but this time it is just you, your animal companion, and who knows how many tons of steel that represent your mech. The mechs aren’t just your standard big robot suit. They are huge boats that scuttle across the land, giant spider crab like constructions, or robust models that look like cattle. Each one is represented on the table by a player board with great art and a special ability. On the map they take the form of robust plastic miniatures.

Venturing out into the Siberian wilderness, you hunt down an expedition that has gone missing on their way to investigate a large meteorite crash site. Along the way you will encounter strange items, difficult quests, and glowing chunks of meteorite. The game is designed by Jamey Stegmaier with art and worldbuilding from Jakub Rozalski.

Stonemaier Games has the weird trend where a lot of their titles wear the clothes of one genre but are something else entirely. Scythe is a euro dressed up as a 4x war game. Tapestry is a point salad wearing the hat of a civilisation game. Expeditions is a worker placement in the coat of an adventure game.

The first thing you’ll notice about Expeditions is that everything is chunky. From the beautifully illustrated map tiles to the big plastic mechs. The game is begs you to pick up pieces and play with them. Stomping your mech across tiles is satisfying. Turns are quick as you use the simple action selection to decide what to do next.

At the start you can move, play cards, and gather (get stuff from the hex you are on). After that you have to choose two of those to do. You are forced to always change up the one you can’t perform. This lends an interesting core of decision to make on your turn that the rest of the game can build on. You can reset from time to time, getting all the cards you have played back in your hand, and allowing you to perform all 3 on the next turn. This is basically skipping a turn though, so you have to time it well for it to work to your advantage.

The basic locations you can get to give you the fundamentals of what you will need to win. Cards, workers to power those cards, and some little tricky abilities as well. As you explore further you will get new abilities to gather and find yourself with all sorts of choices to make when you choose to move.

Cards in the game come in a variety of flavours but from only one deck. You have a ‘hand’ of cards at the start with just your hero and their animal companion. I say ‘hand’ because those cards are on the left of your board. When you play, or discard, a card it goes to the right into your active row. Why not active and inactive? I don’t know.

Time for a PSA. Dear game designers, please don’t appropriate really common gaming terms and make them mean something completely different to how they are normally used. It makes teaching your game harder. Thanks.

The terminology aside, what you are doing with these cards is engine building. When you play a card you get some guile or power. If you have the correct coloured worker, you can place it on the card to activate its ability. These cards do loads of things from making movement easier to ‘rescuing cards’ so you can play them again without having to reset.

The combo potential here is expansive and it doesn’t stop with playing cards. Combining spaces where you can gather odd abilities can hook into your card play. As you explore you will find ways to bolt items onto your mech, giving them permanent new powers you can use without having to have the card played. You can even strap chunks of the meteorite to your vehicle, giving you money for fulfilling certain conditions. Money is victory points at the end of the game, and the person with the most wins.

Guile and Power that you gain from playing cards, and activating their abilities, can be used to purge corruption. Once you start revealing more hexes you find more powerful gathering spaces. Some of the options in that space are covered by corruption and need to be removed before you can perform them.

Quests are dotted all over the map and when you first pick them up can be used just like any other card to give you an ability and some power or guile. If you get to the right space to complete them though, they boost the value of each of your achievements. Choosing when to convert them from card to bonus is a lovely bit of tension, and sometimes the correct choice is to just keep it as something you can play.

Ah, achievements. Sure to send a shiver through the spine of any computer game players reading this, but actually just a term for the goals you can set out to achieve in Expeditions. Like its older sibling Scythe, the bedrock of the expeditions scoring system pivots around achievements. You can get an achievment for everything you choose to pursue in Expeditions. You’ve bolted 4 rocks to your mech? Congrats! You’ve explored lots of places before anyone else? Great, tell me all about it. Show me how much corruption you have purged. You know you want to!

When you do fulfil one of the achievements, you have to go and find somewhere to boast about it. When a player has boasted about 4 achievements you round out the turn and count up your money to see who is the richest? I don’t get the money to be honest, but that is how the game looks at victory points. Justify it narratively how you will. This boast mechanism I always picture as the mech stomping into town and declaring over its loudspeakers ‘Behold, my Stuff’.

When it comes down to it, Expeditions is an efficiency puzzle. Making sure you can get where you want to be, at the right time is vital. This means you do actually have to plan your journey into this mysterious zone. Mechanisms, theme, and setting combining? Yay! There is a scaling issue. Boo!

Despite the map of Expeditions being modular, it does not scale for different player counts. What this means is that the game feels much harder at 4 & 5 players than it does at 3. I haven’t played it at 2 and I haven’t played the solo mode. Players get in each other’s way more at higher player counts, and it is harder to plan your next move. This leads to more analysis and longer turns, when the game already takes longer at higher player counts just through basic addition of time per player.

I get that a scaling map would be difficult to implement. Quests need to be completed on certain numbered spaces, and sorting out what quests were available in a given game would be a bit of a setup pain. It just seems like an oversight that makes the game feel like a tight struggle at 4 and 5 players and positively breezy at 3. I think 4 players is likely where the game really belongs (though a forthcoming expansions will take the potential player count to 6!).

While I am on the criticism, the card layout could be a lot better. The art on each card is great, but I feel like the graphic design choices prioritised ‘pretty’ over ‘practical’. The abilities at the bottom of the cards are in black on a sort of faded out, see through background and it can make them a bit difficult to parse from across the table. Clarity over fancy is what I want from this sort of design.

Expeditions really didn’t grab me at first. It felt like a fairly pedestrian adventure style game. However after my first play, I found myself thinking about it and wanting to play again. I’ve played it a few times now, past the point where I had a crticle handle on it. I find the game really charmed me.

Yes you represent nations in big mechs, but your hero takes their dog along for the trip. Sure there is a strange meteorite corrupting the local animals and people, but you can go on a quest to ‘Save a lost lumberjack’ or ‘Cure a Whale of Parasites’. While doing so you can strap a jetpack and a pair of goggles to your mech then boast about how cool it looks. The game setting might be a bit po faced, but the play isn’t serious at all.

Expeditions is that rare game that is going in my collection. It plays quickly with little downtime, and really gives the feeling of a perilous adventure in a strange place. I’ll be playing it more I’m sure. I’ll dive into the cold once more to encounter strange artifacts, odd folk, and bring back stories of people saved and monsters vanquished. Also my mech looks real cool with this sword attached don’t you think?

Expeditions was sent to me by Stonemaier Games in return for a fair and honest review.

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