Expeditions Board Game Review

Overview

Strange meteorites have fallen, unleashing alien corruption over the region. With a massive mech as your steed, you compete with the Expeditions of other players to accumulate the most money from this phenomenon.

Expeditions is billed as the sequel to Scythe, but that statement is a little disingenuous. It’s like saying a Pug carries a wolf’s bloodline. Sure, they share a bit of DNA, but unless you happen to be a carelessly dropped Cheese Dorito, I doubt you have much to fear from a pack of adorable flat-faced fur goblins with asthma issues.

You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!

Scythe is an area control game with a focus on Cold War. Expeditions is very much a combo game in the vein of deck and tableau builders. That’s not a bad thing exactly, the world already has Scythe after all. But if you loved Scythe, you won’t necessarily enjoy Expeditions and vice versa. It’s honestly best to look at them as entirely separate games, despite using the same 1920s diesel-punk aesthetic.

Expeditions itself seems like an amalgamation of several game ideas mushed together. This is more or less confirmed by the list of inspirations found in the rulebook. The list includes video games such as Slay the Spire, and deck builders like Clank. For the most part, this melding pot of ideas results in a pretty satisfying game that feels good to play. At the same time, some ingredients smell bitter, and higher player counts leave a foul aftertaste in my mouth.

Gideon’s Bias	Expeditions Information
Review Copy Used: Yes	Publisher: Stonemaier Games
Number of Plays: 10+	Designer: Jamey Stegmaier
Player Counts Played: 1, 2 & 4	Player Count: 1-5
Fan of Genre: Yes	Genre: Hand Management, Tableau Building
Fan of Weight: Yes	Weight: Medium
Gaming Groups Thoughts: Enjoyed It	Price: $85

Presentation

Expeditions features the same diesel-punk aesthetic as Scythe, and it looks exceptionally good on both game tiles and cards. Expeditions specifically invokes a semi-love-craftian atmosphere within the setting as well, and the artwork reflects it nicely.

The large tiles that make up the board are sturdy. The cards are well-made, and the nifty little tokens look great. Headlining the box are the large mech miniatures, which much like Scythe’s, look fantastic with great detail. The matching faction boards that come with them are equally cool but feature a common nitpick of mine.

You’re meant to have multiple tokens on the board and slide them around as needed. Since the board isn’t inset, it’s easy to bump and nudge them around. This is doubly true for Expeditions, as you also have to tuck cards under multiple sides of it, making it all too common to accidentally move tokens around.

Additionally, you also receive a small pack of automa cards for the solo mode and a pretty nice insert to help store the game. The rulebook is crisp, clean, and easy to understand. The game itself is fairly simple to learn, barring the somewhat obtuse iconography. Many of the icons are too vague or similar to one another, and it takes a few playthroughs with rigid application of the player aid cards to come to terms with it.

On the other hand, Expeditions is extremely fast and easy to set up. You simply lay out the tiles designated on the basecamp board, shuffle a deck of cards, hand out a random mech and player cards and you are good to go.

I’ve never played a Stonemaier game that didn’t look good, and Expeditions is no exception. However, at the standard price of 85$. I can’t help but feel most of that cost is sunk into the mech miniatures. You don’t truly get a lot of components for the price, especially for the size of the box they come in. I think my biggest issue with this, is that the mechs and the size of the mechs are largely just for show.

They are the main player pieces that you use to move around the board. But the vast majority of your gameplay functions come from cards. There’s no combat in the game either that isn’t incredibly abstracted. So it’s weird to have these large weapon-bearing mech miniatures purely for the purposes of representing the player when there are more cost-effective alternatives that still look pretty good and would match the game’s thematic intent a bit better.

What I Like About Expeditions

The Planning

Expeditions is all about planning, not just your current turn, but many turns in advance. You can perform three specific actions. Move your mech 1-3 spaces, play a card, or gather from a location. But there’s a nifty trick to the whole thing.

You have a little action cube that you slide around your mech’s mat. On your first turn, you move it from the “refresh” space to the open box below the three actions, and you get to perform all three. On future turns, you use that cube to cover one of those three actions, and you only perform the two actions you left uncovered.

If you cover up the gather action, for example, you can move and play a card. On your next turn, you have to uncover gather, and place the cube on top of the move or play a card action. This makes planning what two actions you need every turn essential to playing well.

Gathering from locations allows you to gain workers, and cards, and even perform actions like meld meteorites. But you only gather from the location your mech is on.

When you move, you can move your mech 1-3 spaces, but can’t occupy the same tile as another mech. Furthermore, landing on an unexplored tile ends your movement, and you flip it over.

Cards have several uses, but always gain you either power or guille when played. To get the most out of a card, however, you must play a matching color worker on it to activate the card’s full effect. You start with just two cards, a random leader, and their pet.

The thing is, once played, a card remains in your active area unless a “rescue” effect allows you to retrieve it, or you choose to refresh. Refreshing brings all your active cards back to your hand, but that’s your entire turn. You move your cube back to the refresh space of your board, and then you can perform all three actions on your next turn. A strong part of the Expeditions strategy is managing to have as few “dead” turns as possible and refreshing only when you absolutely need to.

The more cards you gather, the more options you have when you need to play a card. However, melding meteorites, upgrading items, and completing quests removes that specific card from your control. Doing so provides benefits, but you have to weigh the pros and cons of when and how you can afford to lose those cards.

The way you have to plan your actions while also factoring in what resources and cards you want and figuring out how to utilize those cards can be headache-inducing in a good way. Expeditions always have several gears spinning at once when it comes to your turn. Individually they are simple, in fact, turns flow relatively fast, and Expeditions isn’t that long of a game for its weight. But the way those individual gears interact with the overall machine of the game is a really enjoyable brain burner.

The Race for Glory

The one aspect Expeditions has in common with Scythe is the glory system. The final round begins when any player places their final glory token.

You place glory tokens by fulfilling specific objectives such as completing 4 quests, melding 4 meteorites, having 8 active cards, etc. Glory tokens are also one of the ways you gain extra money at the end of the game, as each one is worth $5. However, that number is modified by the number of quests you have completed. If you have completed 3+ quests, for example, each Glory token is worth $10 instead.

Since there are several objectives and you only need four of them, you have a lot of agency in how you choose to try and get ahead of the other players. Furthermore, I really like that the act of working toward objectives has tangible benefits beyond being an objective. For example, melding meteorites and upgrading items have direct benefits when you perform them, not just for end-game points.

However, the best part of the Glory System is that while Expeditions is a race to some degree, its win conditions are a bit more nuanced. Outpacing your fellow players in the Glory Token race has benefits, but it will rarely win you the game alone. That’s because Expeditions is largely about combos.

The Card Play

Cards have several functions in Expeditions. They all grant you either power or guile when played. But the focal point of cards is the abilities they activate when played with the matching color worker. This is where a lot of combo play can come in, but they also can allow you to perform specific actions.

For example. Every leader card allows you to solve quests, assuming you have a quest card and your mech is on a numbered tile matching the quest. When tiles are flipped, you pull corruption tokens from the bag to place on the tile. Corruption blocks a tile’s powerful ability, and you keep any corruption tiles you clear for end-game points. Having enough of them is also a glory objective. The only way to clear corruption is to play a card with the vanquish ability and then spend the required power or guile for each tile.

However, cards also fall into one of three types. Item, meteorite, and quest, and each one has its own extra benefits that can be used when completed, so to speak. Quests can be completed, meteorites melded and items upgraded. Doing so removes them from your control, but they give additional benefits that can combo later.

For example, you can meld up to four meteorites. When a meteorite is melded, it has a meld effect. For example, Leech Stone grants you $1 per player when melded.

However, when you meld a meteorite, it also activates the meld ability of all your other melded meteorites. So if you already have Leechstone melded then meld Charterstone, you activate the meld effects of both cards. In a four-player game, managing to activate Leechstone four times is an extra $16 by itself.

Items have an effect when played, and an ongoing effect while they are active with a worker on them. If you upgrade an item, not only is it worth points at the end of the game, its ongoing effect is permanently active for the rest of the game.

Gathering the cards you need for your strategy and planning out how to use them to their fullest is exceptionally satisfying. It’s also highly challenging since you have to steer the card play using the action system in unison with where your mech is actually located on the board. It’s a lot to think about all the time but the strategy involved is worth the effort. That makes Expeditions fun to play.

The Variety

The random map and cards give Expeditions a lot of variety between each game. You can’t be sure which tiles are going to be where or what cards you will be able to gather. That means you have to adapt from game to game.

Some games with specific action systems like Expeditions tend to have a solvable queue of actions, which can straight-up ruin a game after a while. The unpredictable nature of Expeditions means that having a codified string of ideal actions is effectively impossible, and that’s great.

The randomness also makes Expeditions pretty replayable, as your combo space could look very different from game to game.

Solo Mode

Expeditions features a super easy-to-run automa you can play against solo. Running the automa is as quick as flipping a card and moving a mech mini most of the time. The automa doesn’t exactly feel like a player, but Expeditions is low on player interaction anyway. It does, however, pressure you to play effectively and has multiple difficulty modes.

The automa is not only an enjoyable solo experience but is also a great way to practice the game for multiplayer, as you will definitely notice when you’re playing the race portion of the game too slowly. The longer the game goes on, the stronger the automa becomes. At the same time, you still have to accumulate enough extra points to be able to beat it beyond your glory tokens.

While the automa doesn’t resemble a player, you aren’t getting a cutdown experience with it either. I think Expeditions functions quite well as an exclusively solo game.

What I Don’t Like About Expeditions

The Worker System

The issue I have with the worker system ties somewhat into an aspect I’m mixed on, the asymmetry, but I’ll touch on that later. Essentially, quite a few of your early turns feel preprogrammed based on your starting leader and companion cards. You’re almost always going to beeline straight for the workers matching your two starting cards because your play-a-card actions are partially wasted if you don’t have them.

There are only two tiles on the map that have red/green and blue/yellow workers, and they are always on the lower part of the map. A few facedown tiles allow you to gain purple workers, but no starting cards use purple workers.

Expeditions is a strategy-heavy game with many paths to victory, but the first few steps of that path feel largely the same in every game.

Higher Player Counts

The aforementioned worker issue is directly connected to my player count complaint. I actually prefer Expeditions solo and at two players and no higher. As I mentioned before, there are only two tiles that have the workers you need for most cards in the game, and all of your starting cards. There is a starting tile that allows you to use the effect of an adjacent tile, but it’s not always placed in the spot you need in order to gain workers. Keep in mind mechs can’t occupy the same tile as another mech.

Here’s how a four-player game goes. Player 1 moves to the first worker tile. Player 2 moves to the remaining worker tile. Players 3 and 4 get screwed with no workers. Both players 1 and 2 get to have full use of their cards on their first couple of turns, Players 3 and 4 don’t. These effects are nothing to sneeze at either. Vesna allows a player to gain a face-up item for example, while Matthew allows a player to gain a yellow worker, further cementing their lead over players 3 and 4.

Furthermore, it’s not uncommon for a player to sit on those tiles for more than one turn, gathering additional workers for future cards they plan to grab. If you go third or beyond in the player order in Expeditions, you start the game on the back foot, and it feels very, very bad.

The Lack of Player Interaction

The lack of player interaction in Expeditions feels especially strange since the game claims to be a sequel to Scythe. A game where the Cold War interaction between players was extremely important.

In Expeditions your only interaction between players is taking cards or tiles they may have wanted, neither of which you are going to do intentionally. A winning strategy isn’t going to have room for you to intentionally get in the way of another player. There is simply too much you need to do to waste an action.

It’s a highly controversial stance, but I firmly believe that the entire concept of multiplayer solitaire is somewhat antithetical to board games as a concept. Despite the fact that I highly enjoy quite a few of them. At the same time, that fact is also one of the reasons the solo mode in Expeditions is so smooth, you hardly notice the other players at the table anyway.

Even so, the fact that there is no conflict at all between players with large weapon-bearing mechs feels strange. That’s not to say that all interaction between players in a game needs to involve conflict, but Expeditions doesn’t feature any interaction at all.

The Abstraction

I once again have to mention the weapon-bearing mechs, because combat does sort of exist in the game If you squint, but it’s highly abstracted. You pay power or guile to “vanquish” corruption and to complete quests. Some quests are concepts such as clearing out monsters, so in an abstract way, you are fighting. It just isn’t particularly interesting in any way. It’s just spending resources on a mat and that’s what it feels like.

In particular, corruption feels underwhelming. It blocks the usage of a tile ability until it’s’ cleared off a tile, but that’s it. There is no sense of dread or urgency to deal with it at all, beyond the race-like nature of the game. It doesn’t have any in-game effect beyond blocking a tile’s ability and end-game points.

The artwork depicts mutated animals, eldritch beasts, and purple workers who are quite literally “possessed”. You would think corruption would have a larger effect on the game, but it’s just underwhelming as a whole, at least thematically speaking.

What I’m Mixed On

The Asymmetry

I’m a massive fan of asymmetry in games, but games that include it have to a walk fine line. I think Expeditions might have worn steel-toed boots instead of ballet shoes for its tightrope walk.

Essentially, asymmetry is bad when your starting bonuses propel you too strongly in a single strategic direction, and some of the mechs do exactly that. For example, Odin’s Wrath allows you to trash map tokens for power, guile, or money. Every Odin’s Wrath player is definitely going to focus on map tokens. The Lumberjack mech makes vanquishing cheaper, any Lumberjack player is going to focus on vanquishing corruption so they don’t squander their own bonus.

Not all mechs fall into that trap. Some of them have powers that are much more open to multiple playstyles, such as Marsh Strider’s ability to move up to 4 tiles instead of 3.

The saving grace of Expeditions asymmetry is the fact that your random mech is also paired with a random leader and their companion. Every leader can solve quests, and every companion can vanquish, but each one also has a unique ability. The combo pairing makes each game at least feel a bit different, even with shoehorned decision-making with Lumber Jack and Odin’s Wrath.

So I’m largely left with mixed feelings. The asymmetry could certainly be better, but it does manage to make you feel different from the other players at the table.

Verdict

Expeditions is a clever game with some seriously brain-burning strategic gameplay. That gameplay is, however, solo-focused, even with other players at the table as intentional interaction is largely nonexistent. This is somewhat funny because unintentionally blocking another player at the start of a game absolutely ruins player counts higher than 2.

The tableau combo building is still a lot of fun, however, for both two players and solo play. I definitely appreciate the many layers of thought that goes into interacting with the game. There is a ton of nuance in maneuvering the action system to get the most out of your cards while keeping the glory race in mind. Expeditions has its flaws and I wish some of its thematic elements dug a bit deeper into the gameplay. But the gameplay is solid, at least at a lower player count, and its mixture of ideas gives it a pretty unique identity.